When Malcolm X Came to Oxford, England: The Subversive Special Relationship

The middle of the twentieth century witnessed far-reaching race protest movements in both the United States and the United Kingdom. This paper will explore many of the hitherto unexplored transatlantic links which connected those movements, and, more importantly, shaped their course and outcome. The neglect of these links is curious. Race historians have rightly drawn attention to transnational links between black American protest and African independence, and between black Britons and the Commonwealth, but in fact – with some significant differences – it was black Americans and black Britons who faced the analogous situations of seeking to force their respective countries to live up to their creeds of liberty and equal opportunity.

The paper will focus in particular on Malcolm X’s visit to Oxford University’s debating union in 1964 – and the effect of that visit on Malcolm X, on British race relations, and on Oxford and its university. On the face of it, the arrival of the “bullets not ballots” firebrand to speak at Oxford might seem little more than an incongruous historical curiosity (complete with a bemused receptionist at an Oxford hotel insisting her American visitor wrote his surname in full). But in fact Malcolm’s visit coincided with a national, Oxford student-led campaign against segregated housing. While in Oxford, Malcolm X forged connections with radical students from the Caribbean and Pakistan. His visit, and return visits to Britain and France clearly shaped his thinking, and rhetoric, about the global struggle for racial inequality.  In turn his growing prominence in Britain hastened the shift to radicalism of black British protesters. More generally, Malcolm’s visit allows a broader consideration of the connections and differences between activists on both sides of the Atlantic, and the consequences – often unintentional – of this transatlantic relationship between activists in Britain and America.