Childhood home of Malcolm X added to historic register

Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin announced Thursday that Malcolm X’s childhood home in Boston has been added to the National Registry of Historic Places, according to The Associated Press.

Galvin, who chairs the state historical commission in charge of asking for the designation, said the house in the Roxbury neighborhood is the only existing building associated with the civil rights leader’s time in Boston. Malcolm X spent most of his teens in the city, living with his half-sister Ella Little-Collins. He later returned to the city and was arrested there on larceny charges, and would join the Nation of Islam during his resulting prison time.

In his autobiography, Malcolm X wrote of his time in the city that “no physical move in my life has been more pivotal or profound in its repercussions.”

Little-Collins’s son Rodnell told the AP the family hopes to open the house for public tours part of the year and turn it into housing for graduate students with a focus on civil rights and Black history. The designation will give the house access to tax incentives that will help the family secure those goals, he said.

“The property also has associations with the development of Roxbury as a streetcar suburb of Boston and later as a prominent black neighborhood, and also holds potential to reveal additional information in the future,” the minutes for the Massachusetts Historical Commission meeting where the house was nominated state.

“Recently, it has been the subject of archaeological investigations by the City of Boston Archaeology Program that found evidence of the late 18^th and early 19^th century farmstead that had been here prior to the construction of this house in 1865,” the minutes added.