by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

On a piano in Sylvia Langdon’s home on Coursol in Little Burgundy sits a curious old black-and-white wedding photo.

Sylvia’s connection to the picture comes through her grandfather Edgerton. One day in 1918, Edgerton invited his orphaned niece Louise Norton to live in his home at St. James and Canning.

According to one of the most famous autobiographies of the last century, Louise “looked like a white woman. Her father was white. She had straight black hair, and her accent did not sound like a Negro’s. Of this white father of hers, I know nothing except her shame about it. I remember hearing her say she was glad that she had never seen him.… I learned to hate every drop of that white rapist’s blood that is in me.”

Louise left the gentle winds and soft sands of hilly Grenada, where the smell of nutmeg wafts through the sky, only to come to the darkest corner of our city in full industrial bloom.

She found that her new home at Uncle Edgerton’s carried one of the darkest hearts in the city. “He was a mean, mean man,” according to his granddaughter Sylvia.

Montreal at the time openly shunned black immigrants. For example, in 1924, newspapers matter-of-factly reported a speech by one Dr. J. W. Gregory of Glasgow University suggesting that Canada “should in no circumstances allow inferior people to come” and that “people of the white race and people of the coloured races should never mix.”

In the midst of this oppressive atmosphere, local blacks found hope in a new movement called the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), launched by Marcus Garvey in Jamaica. Garvey had presided over the launching of the Montreal branch in 1919, just a few months after the New York branch opened. It’s believed that Louise met Earl Little of Reynolds, Georgia, at an earlier black empowerment meeting in 1918. Little, a father of three, was a big, dark-skinned Baptist involved with the UNIA.

Earl, 29 and Louise, 22, married here in May 10, 1919, thus beginning a stormy, brutal and historical union. “An educated woman, I suppose, can’t resist the temptation to correct an uneducated man. Every now and then, when she put those smooth words on him, he would grab her,” her famous son would later write.

The two left Montreal for Philadelphia, then Omaha and finally Lansing, Michigan, and had seven children along the way. One of those children, Malcolm, came out light-skinned and red-haired. “Thinking about it now, I feel definitely that just as my father favoured me for being lighter than the other children, my mother gave me more hell for the same reason.”

The union born in Montreal soon descended into tragedy. Earl went to court to defend the family’s right to live in a white neighbourhood in Lansing and, soon after, the house was burned down and Earl was mysteriously found dead, run over by a streetcar. Louise was committed to a mental institution in 1939.

The children were sent to foster homes, and Malcolm Little eventually became an academic and athletic star before running into troubles of his own. But rather than wallow in failure, Malcolm Little became the great black civil rights leader Malcolm X.

Perhaps by coincidence, Malcolm wasn’t the only great black leader with connections to mean old Edgerton’s house. Edgerton’s son—and Sylvia’s father—Henry, who despised his old man, went on to serve in the Air Force and led the local UNIA for decades, until his death in 1997.

It took a long time to convince our black-empowerment leader that his cousin was one of the great figures of the past century. “When Malcolm died, we kept trying to convince Henry of this but he wouldn’t believe us,” says Sylvia. Eventually Henry spoke of his cousin with pride.

As for the photo on her piano, Sylvia says it’s from the wedding of Malcolm’s brother Wilfred, at which Henry was the best man. Malcolm might be one of the smiling faces, but she can’t tell for sure.

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