Malcolm X’s Boston Home Unheralded

His name graces colleges, libraries and parks from the nation’s capital to the West Coast, but his only surviving childhood home has never received recognition.

No plaque distinguishes the house where black nationalist Malcolm X lived in the early 1940s, a time when he ran around as a petty criminal until an arrest put him in jail and on the path to civil rights activism.

The residence is just blocks from a brick row house that carries a landmark designation as the home where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lived as a Boston University graduate student during the 1950s.

But even Malcolm X’s admirers are divided over whether 72 Dale St. in the city’s largely minority Roxbury section deserves the same distinction.

Some say Malcolm X would have objected to the honor.

“We should honor him by emulating his courage, his dignity, his capacity to change,” said Manning Marable, history professor and director of African American Studies at Columbia University.

Others disagree.

“He’s an historic figure in the world, so why would he not be an historic figure in Boston?” said Elma Lewis, founder of the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts and the National Center of Afro-American Artists.

People on both sides of the debate agree, however, that Malcolm X’s transformation from street kid to hustler to prisoner to civil rights leader still serves as an inspiration worldwide more than 35 years after his assassination.

“The reason Malcolm resonates so deeply with the African American community is that here’s an example of someone who was the worst of us who became the best of us,” Marable said.

Malcolm Little came to Boston from Detroit to live with his half-sister, Ella. He was an eighth-grader, big for his age, who soon dropped out of school to take a job as a shoeshine boy in the Roseland Ballroom.

Eventually he adopted the life of a hepcat, straightening his hair, wearing zoot suits and becoming a petty criminal.

He moved to Harlem and became “Detroit Red,” a hustler, drug dealer and pimp, then returned to Boston in 1945 and formed his own burglary ring. He was arrested and sentenced to seven years in jail.

In prison he studied Islam, becoming the leading voice for black nationalism in America after leaving prison in 1953. He stayed briefly at the Dale Street house again before embarking on his new career.

Ultimately he moved beyond the politics of separatism and embraced a more inclusive vision like the one advocated by King. Many believe that was why he was killed in 1965 at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem.

In the ensuing 35 years, no one had asked the city to designate the house on Dale Street as a landmark.

“To come before the Landmark Commission you have to have a petition signed by 10 residents,” said Jacque Goddard, spokeswoman for Mayor Thomas Menino. “No one ever in the history of the city has done that.”