‘The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union’
by Stephen Tuck
Review by Christopher Phelps
Financial Times
A vivid reconstruction of the black revolutionary’s visit to Oxford
On December 3 1964, the black revolutionary Malcolm X graced the Oxford Union’s end-of-term debate in support of the proposition, “Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice.” It was a sly pairing of motion and advocate. Not only did the media routinely dismiss Malcolm X as an extremist but the phrase had first been uttered by Barry Goldwater, that year’s ultraconservative Republican nominee for the American presidency, who maintained that a federal guarantee of civil rights in public accommodation would be an unconstitutional constraint on the liberty of business owners to serve whomever they pleased.
Somehow Oxford’s students did not vote to declare extremism a virtue. Nevertheless, the clear rhetorical victor was Malcolm X. “Extremism” was a word, he maintained, used to stigmatise bold proponents of freedom and equality such as the Congo’s recently assassinated leader Patrice Lumumba. His closing passage quoted Shakespeare, with Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy cast as a rebuke of moderation and a call “to take up arms against the sea of troubles”.
The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union is a vivid reconstruction of this moment by Stephen Tuck, a professor of history at the University of Oxford. In the late 19th-century era of Cecil Rhodes, the university had prided itself on its ability to turn the brightest imperial subjects from India, the West Indies and Africa into “brown Englishmen”. Instead, English racism and academic condescension made many of them nationalists who returned home to lead resistance movements.
By the 1960s, even as anti-colonial independence swept over Africa, Asia and Latin America, immigrant students of color at Oxford faced severe difficulty in securing housing. It was against this backdrop that Eric Anthony Abrams, a Jamaican law student and president of the Oxford Union, would invite Malcolm X to speak.
Out of institutional loyalty, perhaps, Tuck is prone to overstate the significance of the debate in Malcolm X’s thought; most of what he said at the Oxford Union was not new and long before this appearance he was critical of Britain’s role in world affairs. Tuck handles Malcolm X’s Muslim faith deftly but his emergent socialism, developed on visits to such African nations as Ghana, is barely mentioned.
Prior biographies by Manning Marable and George Breitman, therefore, remain indispensable. But Tuck is unrivalled in his ability to parse details such as Malcolm X’s refusal to wear a bow tie to dinner (he associated the accessory with the Nation of Islam, from which he had recently broken).
The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union is both a lucid portrait of Malcolm X at the height of his powers and a piercing exploration of the history of race in Britain — one that speaks every bit as much to our present-day circumstances as to the radicalism of 50 years ago.
The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union, by Stephen Tuck, University of California Press, RRP£14.95/$23.95, 288 pages.
Christopher Phelps is associate professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham.
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| Malcolm X at the Oxford University in early December 1964. |
Review by Christopher Phelps
Financial Times
A vivid reconstruction of the black revolutionary’s visit to Oxford
On December 3 1964, the black revolutionary Malcolm X graced the Oxford Union’s end-of-term debate in support of the proposition, “Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice.” It was a sly pairing of motion and advocate. Not only did the media routinely dismiss Malcolm X as an extremist but the phrase had first been uttered by Barry Goldwater, that year’s ultraconservative Republican nominee for the American presidency, who maintained that a federal guarantee of civil rights in public accommodation would be an unconstitutional constraint on the liberty of business owners to serve whomever they pleased.
Somehow Oxford’s students did not vote to declare extremism a virtue. Nevertheless, the clear rhetorical victor was Malcolm X. “Extremism” was a word, he maintained, used to stigmatise bold proponents of freedom and equality such as the Congo’s recently assassinated leader Patrice Lumumba. His closing passage quoted Shakespeare, with Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy cast as a rebuke of moderation and a call “to take up arms against the sea of troubles”.
The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union is a vivid reconstruction of this moment by Stephen Tuck, a professor of history at the University of Oxford. In the late 19th-century era of Cecil Rhodes, the university had prided itself on its ability to turn the brightest imperial subjects from India, the West Indies and Africa into “brown Englishmen”. Instead, English racism and academic condescension made many of them nationalists who returned home to lead resistance movements.
By the 1960s, even as anti-colonial independence swept over Africa, Asia and Latin America, immigrant students of color at Oxford faced severe difficulty in securing housing. It was against this backdrop that Eric Anthony Abrams, a Jamaican law student and president of the Oxford Union, would invite Malcolm X to speak.
Out of institutional loyalty, perhaps, Tuck is prone to overstate the significance of the debate in Malcolm X’s thought; most of what he said at the Oxford Union was not new and long before this appearance he was critical of Britain’s role in world affairs. Tuck handles Malcolm X’s Muslim faith deftly but his emergent socialism, developed on visits to such African nations as Ghana, is barely mentioned.
Prior biographies by Manning Marable and George Breitman, therefore, remain indispensable. But Tuck is unrivalled in his ability to parse details such as Malcolm X’s refusal to wear a bow tie to dinner (he associated the accessory with the Nation of Islam, from which he had recently broken).
The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union is both a lucid portrait of Malcolm X at the height of his powers and a piercing exploration of the history of race in Britain — one that speaks every bit as much to our present-day circumstances as to the radicalism of 50 years ago.
The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union, by Stephen Tuck, University of California Press, RRP£14.95/$23.95, 288 pages.
Christopher Phelps is associate professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham.
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