Stephen Tuck - The night Malcolm X spoke at the Oxford Union : a transatlantic story of antiracist protest

This year, the American public is commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Beatles British Invasion, broadcast on CBSs Ed Sullivan Show, which delightfully electrified the spirit of a heart-heavy nation, still in shock and mourning over the assassination of John F. Kennedy. But 1964 also witnessed the reverse transatlantic journey of a man once known as Malcolm Littlebetter known as Malcolm Xin a revolutionary and more substantive performance at the legendary Oxford Union, an Oxbridge staple that has been showcasing another form of entertainment since long before Ed Sullivan hit the air. In fact, the Union, now in its 190th year, has hosted figures as diverse as Gladstone and the Dalai Lama, with Einstein, Churchill, Reagan, and Tutu in between. On the night of December 3, 1964, Malcolm X arrived to debate the topic of extremism in the defense of liberty, in a world swirling with social struggle in the United States, a nascent war in Vietnam, and the awkward birth of independence in postcolonial Africa. His performance is as iconic as any in the Oxonian pantheon of great debates, and now, thanks to Stephen Tuck, we can revisit that stage and see, hear, and grasp the words exchanged on that historic evening.

These days in our country, we lament that political debates are all too often the pitiful middle course between the hype and spin that precedes and follows each sides carefully crafted talking points. But back then, in the black-and-white days before instant news, social media, 24/7 cable news, and worldwide Internet coverage, speakers on their feet could riff, improvise, and develop positions in the thrust and parry of spontaneous, at times raucous, discourse. Malcolm X was a genius of this medium, and the Oxford Union represented the pinnacle of the tradition dating back to its founding in 1829, when slavery was still legal in the British Empire and expanding ever more deeply in Malcolm Xs native United States. Fifteen years after his landmark debate performance, I was humbled to receive a doctorate degree from Oxfords rival, the University of Cambridge, but I always marveled at this venerable tradition down the road. There is no other marketplace for ideas like it in the world.

In an ironic twist, Malcolm X was invited to the Union to defend the position that former U.S. presidential candidate Barry Goldwater had staked out in his acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican National Conventionan event that, to many, marked the dawn of the conservative movement in America: I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. But Malcolm surely knew Senator Goldwater had not said anything new in those quickly famous lines, and so he didnt waste any time referring to him during his debate. The truth is, Malcolms signature sentiment by any means necessary hearkened back to the African American abolitionist movements earliest phase during the founding days of the Oxford Union, none more famously than David Walkers 1829 Appeal... to the Coloured People of the World United States, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, in which he urged slaves to rise up against their masters and resist efforts to uproot African Americans from their American homeland. Malcolm X followed in that tradition (interestingly, both men had spent time living in Boston), but for him, the stakes were not about resisting emigration but forging an international alliance among those on the fragile side of the transition from Jim Crow and colonialism to equal rights and independence. As he spoke, the Civil Rights Movement in America was about to make a most dramatic turn toward voting rights in Selma, Alabama, and Malcolm was working out what lay beyond the bridge.

Looking at the video of his performance, one sees mainly white faces in the audience, a tuxedo here and there against wood-paneled chambers. But in this rich volume, Stephen Tuck shows us that Oxford was anything but insulated from the gales of change in 1964 and that, as out of place as he might have appeared to some within the frame, Malcolm X stood tall as an honored, respected guest, invited by the Unions second West Indian student president, Eric Anthony Abrahams. Abrahams, a twenty-four-year-old Rhodes Scholar, went on to become the first black television reporter at the BBC before assuming various leadership roles in the Jamaican government.

As unique a moment as it was, however, Malcolm Xs debate performance flowed out of a much longer Anglo-American narrative of slavery to freedom, reaching back to the eighteenth-century black British abolitionist author and lecturer Olaudah Equiano and the American-born abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Douglass in particular successfully leveraged the distance between England and the New World to indict American slavery for twenty eventful months between 1845 and 1847. There, inside the kings realm, Douglass delivered more than three hundred antislavery speeches across England, Ireland, and Scotland. Like Malcolm X, Douglass had cast off his slave masters name, both out of protest and in an attempt to establish a certain protective anonymity to mask his identity as a fugitive slave.