ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, August 6, 1996 TAG: 9608060092
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BOSTON
TYPE: NEWS OBIT
SOURCE: Associated Press
Ella L. Collins, who raised her half-brother Malcolm X, gave him money for his pilgrimage to Mecca and took over his black Muslim splinter group after his assassination, has died. She was 82.
Collins, who died Saturday, had lived in a nursing home for years after suffering several strokes and diabetes, which cost her both legs. She was buried Monday.
A self-made businesswoman and civil rights activist, Collins played an integral role in Malcolm X's life, raising him after their father died and his mother was committed to a mental hospital, and becoming his mentor.
``She was the first really proud black woman I had ever seen in my life,'' Malcolm X said in ``The Autobiography of Malcolm X'' by Alex Haley. ``No physical move in my life has been more pivotal or profound in its repercussions.''
After Malcolm X was shot to death in February 1965, Collins drove to New York to identify his body. She later took charge of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, the splinter group Malcolm X founded after his 1964 falling out with Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad.
Collins and Malcolm X were children of the Rev. Earl Little, a Baptist minister and organizer for Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, which preached for a return of blacks to Africa.
As a young woman, she moved from Georgia to New York City and took a job as secretary for the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, a former congressman. She moved later to Boston and worked in her mother's grocery and variety store in the Roxbury section, saving enough money to begin operating several rooming houses.
When Little died in Lansing, Mich., in a trolley accident, Malcolm X's mother, Louise, suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to a state mental hospital.
Collins went to Lansing in 1940 and brought Malcolm X home to Boston. In the 1950s, Collins was recruited by Malcolm X into the Nation of Islam.
But she broke away in 1959, became a Sunni Muslim and organized the Sarah A. Little School of Preparatory Arts in Boston, where children were taught Arabic, Swahili, French and Spanish.
Collins' son, Rodnell Collins, said his mother continued to be an adviser to Malcolm X, urging him ``to leave the Nation and go to orthodox Islam, to do something that was more substantial and not continue on the way he was going by putting so much energy into Elijah Muhammad's organization.''
LENGTH: Medium: 54 linesby CNB