At the detention home, he received favored treatment (as a "mascot" of the white couple who operated the home), and rather than being sent on to reform school, he remained in the home through the eighth grade. Malcolm's defiant behavior toward authority remained a problem, and at thirteen, he was sent to the Michigan State Detention Home, bound for reform school. The other children became wards of the state. Little suffered a severe nervous breakdown and was sent to the state mental hospital. After this, family unity began to dissolve: first Malcolm, who had become a discipline problem, was sent to live with another family in 1937 and later that year, Mrs. Although the Little family was poor, they were self-sufficient until Reverend Little's death in 1931. Most of Malcolm's early life was spent in and about Lansing, Michigan, where the family lived on a farm. His father, Reverend Earl Little, was a Baptist minister and an organizer for Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, a black separatist "back-to-Africa" group of the 1920s. Malcolm was the seventh of his father's nine children - three by a previous marriage - and his mother's fourth child. Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, on he dropped the "slave name" Little and adopted the initial X (representing an unknown) when he became a member of the Nation of Islam.
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