Malcolm X's Visit to Oxford University: U.S. Civil Rights, Black Britain, and the Special Relationship on Race

Abstract

ON DECEMBER 3, 1964, A MOST unlikely figure was invited to speak at the University of Oxford Union’s end-of-term “Queen and Country” debate: Mr. Malcolm X. The Oxford Union (as distinct from the university’s representative student union) was the most prestigious student debating organization in the United Kingdom, regularly welcoming heads of state and stars of screen.1 It was also the student arm of the British establishment—the training ground for the politically ambitious offspring of Britain’s better classes. Malcolm X, by contrast, personified revolution and danger. As The Sun, the most widely read British tabloid, explained to readers in a large-font caption under a photograph of Malcolm X: “He wants a separate Negro state in which coloured people could live undisturbed. And many Americans believe he would use violence to get it.”2 Certainly the FBI did. Its file on Malcolm X, opened in 1953, expanded by the week as he toured Africa during the second half of 1964, giving a series of belligerent speeches and meeting with the leaders of newly independent nations to seek their support in calling for the UN to intervene in U.S. race relations.3 The peculiarity of his presence at the Oxford Union was not lost on Malcolm X. Indeed, his entire trip to Oxford was a study in contrasts. He was met at the rail station by the Union secretary, Henry Brownrigg, who found himself tongue-tied in the presence of a black revolutionary. In an awkward silence, Brownrigg took him to Oxford’s preeminent hotel, the Randolph, a Victorian Gothic building with a quaint old-fashioned ambience. But Malcolm X seemed to interpret the choice of a hotel somewhat in need of internal refurbishment as a racist insult, a view reinforced by the receptionist’s insistence that he sign his surname in full in the hotel guest book.4 The motion that he was to support in the debate, “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue,” was a quotation from, of all people, Barry Goldwater, the outspoken conservative Republican nom-