Ella Collins was born in 1914 in Butler, Georgia. Along with her younger half brother, Malcolm X, she joined the Nation of Islam in the 1950s. Malcolm would describe his first meeting with his sister as meeting “the first really proud black woman he had ever seen”. As part of the Nation of Islam, she helped to start its first masjid in Boston, as well as the day care attached to the masjid. She eventually left the Nation of Islam and converted to Sunni Islam but throughout her entire life she supported black and ethnic studies programs across the United States. She paid for her brother to make Haji and upon his death, she took over his Organization of Afro-American Unity, which included a program that gave 35 scholarships from the Al-Azhar Univeristy in Cairo, Egypt. She passed away in 1996 after having both legs amputated as a result of gangrene but her legacy lives on in the Ella Collins Institute at the Islamic Society of Boston. The mission of the Institute is to establish a vibrant community to Muslims with modern scholarship and a health understanding of cultural context.