Today: Headlines from May 20, 1925

Today 100 Years Ago

Welcome back to our daily time-machine. On this virtual front page we scan the world exactly a century ago—or, in today’s case, just a whisper shy of the date—because the news that would echo loudest actually broke in the early hours of 19 May 1925.

1) A Cry in Omaha: The Birth of Malcolm X

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Shortly after midnight on 19 May 1925, in a modest four-room house at 3448 Pinkney Street, Omaha, Nebraska, Louise Little delivered her fourth child. The baby boy, christened Malcolm Little, arrived into a world already crackling with the racial and political tensions that would later shape his fiery oratory.

His father, Earl Little, was a Baptist preacher and outspoken supporter of Marcus Garvey’s “Back-to-Africa” movement. Just months earlier, Earl had received threats from the local Ku Klux Klan, the hooded riders making ominous midnight visits to the Littles’ doorstep. The family’s relief at a healthy birth was tempered by the unmistakable scent of confrontation in the Great Plains air.

Nobody in Omaha’s daily newspapers paused long on the announcement—one more line in the births column—yet the child’s arrival would, decades later, be recalled as the origin of one of the most influential civil-rights leaders of the 20th century: Malcolm X.

Then & Now

• In 1925, the Littles’ interracial strife foreshadowed the Jim Crow era that would push them northward. In 2025, Omaha’s North 24th Street—once aflame during 1960s unrest—hosts murals of Malcolm X beside bustling multicultural cafés.
• Earl Little’s Garveyite dream of global Black solidarity echoes today in 2025’s diaspora tech forums and Pan-African influencer summits, livestreamed from Accra to Atlanta.
• The baby who would later redefine Black self-defense was delivered by a local midwife. A century on, Nebraska debates maternal-care deserts, with policy makers citing statistics Malcolm X himself might have thundered from a podium.

That single birth notice reminds us that some of history’s loudest revolutions begin in utter silence. As you scroll through headlines in 2025, keep an eye on the small print—one of those winter-born infants may rewrite the next hundred years.