75 years later, Malcolm X's pardon request resurfaced in Massachusetts. What should the state do with it?

Boston Globe

8 hours ago

Malcolm X pardon file.
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Nearly 75 years later, the pardon file for the future civil rights leader surfaced amid a routine renovation of a state government building. The documents provide a snapshot of the budding activist during a formative time. By the time of the report, he had converted to Islam in prison and begun advocating about racial issues.
The discovery of the documents also provides an opportunity, according to the Governor's Council member whose staff found them, for the state to take a small step to acknowledge a historic wrong.
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Terrence Kennedy, the council member and a longtime defense attorney, said Governor Maura Healey's office should grant the pardon request posthumously for Malcolm X. The sentencing, Kennedy said, was unduly severe.
'It was excessive, and I cant believe that race wasn't a factor,' he told the Globe.
Healey's office did not comment.
Members of Malcolm X's family, who still live in Roxbury, said the documents bring an interesting opportunity for a teaching moment.
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'It was an exorbitantly harsh punishment,' said Malcolm X's grandnephew Arjun Collins. Still, a pardon just for pardon's sake would feel like an empty gesture, he said: 'Too little, too late.'
But there's a way of doing this right, he said. The state could use this as an occasion to take a broader look at mass incarceration rather than just one man. Examine how Black people were by the criminal justice system treated before, and how disparities remain.
'In the end, words don't mean anything,' Collins said. 'Only action means something.'
Malcolm X speaks to reporters in Washington, D.C., May 16, 1963.
Uncredited/Associated Press
Malcolm X's pardon request, filed Dec. 4, 1950, contains a small amount of biographical information in what appears to be his own hand. He wrote his name as Malcolm X. Little, adding that he was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on May 19, 1925. The file also contains reports created by state bureaucrats detailing Malcolm X's personal and criminal histories to analyze whether he should be granted a pardon.
He grew up in Michigan until his teenage years when, in 1940, he came to live with his half-sister Ella Collins
in Roxbury. He started taking odd jobs, according to reports and his autobiography: a busboy, a shoe shiner, and a soda jerk. He also began doing drugs and gambling.
In 1945, according to the pardon file, he began burglarizing homes, a step up from the petty crimes he had been picked up for previously.
The pardon board wrote that the 20-year-old Malcolm X, along with with two other men and three women, 'made a practice of driving around, spotting darkened houses that looked like good prospects to rifle, breaking in, and carrying off house furnishings, jewelry, and clothing.'
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The reports in the pardon file lists breaks in Belmont, Milton, Arlington, Brookline, Newton, and Walpole, from November 1945 to January 1946, when he was arrested and admitted to the break-ins.
He was arraigned in Quincy District Court that Jan. 16. Over the next several months
he was sentenced in three different counties,
in effect resulting in a sentence of eight to 10 years in prison. He appealed some of the sentences, the report says, and was denied.
Malcolm X filed his sparse pardon request in December 1950. It doesn't appear to make much of an argument, other than citing his half-sister, Ella Collins, as someone who would vouch for him. Another piece of paper lists the name of a political science professor in Texas, but the purpose of that paper isn't clear.
Pardon-board staff compiled a report of his personal and criminal history. The report, which is part of the file, says he would be eligible for parole a few months later, in June 1951, though his sentence could run through February 1956.
That report ended with a recommendation that the governor deny his request. The application passed through the district attorney's and attorney general's offices. They, too, recommended denial.
'The members of the board have reviewed all the facts in connection with this case, but can find no extenuating circumstances which would warrant executive clemency,' the board wrote in a letter to Dever, the governor, on Jan. 30, 1951.
The pardon file does not have any documentation of the governor's decision, though it's clear in retrospect that Malcolm X was not pardoned because he was paroled out in August 1952.
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Over the 14 years after his release, Malcolm X's public persona would rise meteorically as the civil rights movement gained steam. He worked to found the Nation of Islam's No. 11 Mosque in Roxbury, and rose through the ranks of the Black nationalist organization.
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But after he split with Elijah Muhammad, the Nation's leader, he was assassinated in 1965 at age 39. Three men who were members of the group were charged and convicted, though two of the men have won motions to have their convictions vacated in recent years.
The firebrand activist gained fame with a more militant approach to the push for civil rights than his contemporary the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Sixty years after his death, Boston hasn't forgotten the man who lived here, who stole here, who found a purpose here, who preached here. A large street cutting through the middle of Roxbury bears his name, and so does the park near the Dale Street home where he and his sister lived. That home has been
The fact that someone in Kennedy's office bothered to recognize the old document and potentially do something with it, Rodnell Collins said, means that people are interested in learning from the past and continuing to seek ways to improve.
'This is what my family and uncle were about,' Rodnell Collins said, clad in a florescent yellow work vest as he labored on the house. 'Teaching, and learning.'
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Sean Cotter can be reached at