📍72 Dale Street, Roxbury, Boston, MA 02119, USA
1941 – 1946“I was born Malcolm Little in Omaha. My father, a preacher for Marcus Garvey's movement, was lost when I was six, and our family was broken apart in Michigan, where my mother was taken into a state hospital and we children were sent to foster homes. I was a bright student, but when a teacher told me that being a lawyer was no realistic goal for a Black boy, something in me closed. In 1941, when I was fifteen, my older half-sister Ella brought me to Boston to live in the house she had just bought at 72 Dale Street, in Roxbury. Ella was strong, proud and enterprising, and her home was the first secure place I had known in years. She wanted me to mix with Roxbury's respectable Black middle class on the Hill, but I was drawn down to the livelier streets nearby. I shined shoes at the Roseland Ballroom, where the great swing bands played, wore a zoot suit, had my hair conked and learned the lindy hop. Later I worked on the trains and moved between Boston and Harlem, where I became known as Detroit Red, and drifted into the hustler's life. In 1946 I was arrested in Boston and sent to prison. There, through letters from my brothers and sisters and hours in the prison library, I discovered reading, the Nation of Islam and a new sense of purpose. I left as Malcolm X and became a minister and one of the most powerful voices of Black pride and self-determination. Ella's house remained my family home in Boston, and I returned often. Today it is on the National Register of Historic Places, and archaeologists have studied its grounds for traces of the years I spent there.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today