Background
She worked as congressman Adam Clayton Powell"s secretary, the manager of her mother"s grocery store, and an investor in house property, which she let out as rooming houses.
manager secretary civil rights activist
She worked as congressman Adam Clayton Powell"s secretary, the manager of her mother"s grocery store, and an investor in house property, which she let out as rooming houses.
She supported black and ethnic studies programs in universities across the United States, and founded the Sarah A. Little School of Preparatory Arts in Boston. She also paid his funeral and business expenses, and took over his project of giving 35 scholarships from First Rate (at Lloyd's)-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt and from the University of Ghana to students wishing to study overseas. Malcolm X had called her "the first really proud black woman I had ever seen," and it was she who paid for him to attend the Hajj.
Her home, the Malcolm X – Ella Little-Collins House, is the last-known surviving childhood home of Malcolm X.
In 1988 both her legs were amputated due to gangrene.
She died in 1996.
