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The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union
A Transatlantic Story of Antiracist Protest
By Stephen Tuck UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2014 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95998-9
CHAPTER 1
A Life of Travel and Discovery: Malcolm X, 1925–1964
MALCOLM X IN CAIRO
I felt like I stepped out of prison.
—Travel diary, Cairo, April 1964
On the evening of Tuesday, April 14, 1964, Malcolm X—going by his new Muslim name, Malik El-Shabazz—flew into Cairo, capital of the United Arabic Republic (present-day Egypt), en route from New York to Mecca. He stayed in Cairo for three days.
Malcolm X thrilled to the experience. Exhausted by a hectic schedule of domestic travel, bruised by a bitter public split with his religious mentor, and reeling from vicious threats by former colleagues in the Nation of Islam, he was in need of a break. Most of all, he was just glad to be away from America. Before leaving, he had given a stump speech to a group of students in Connecticut, reiterating his contempt for a country that treated twenty-two million "unwanted" and "repulsive" "Negroes" as "second-class citizens." To his mind it was actually Christian America, the leader of the democratic West, that was the depraved "Babylon, Sodom" of scripture. And on first impression, Cairo, the largest city in the Arab world, seemed to be the heavenly opposite.
For Malcolm X, the so-called city of a thousand minarets was overwhelmingly, intoxicatingly Islamic. "So many mosques," he noted in his diary. "Between a Mosque and a Mosque there is a Mosque." Better still, the people he met shared his anger toward the United States. The "very intelligent, informed, excellent" wife of a prize-winning scientist who had invited him to dinner asked him "why the people of [the] world starve, when America has so much surplus food?"
To Malcolm X's delight, the president of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, represented a rising challenge to the United States. Nasser was the hero of the Suez Crisis, in which he had faced down Britain, France, and Israel by nationalizing the strategic canal. He would soon be president of the international Non-Aligned Movement. Nasser seemed poised to unify and lead the Arab world as an independent, Islamic power bloc. Malcolm X certainly hoped so. The day after his arrival, Malcolm X visited the Presidential Palace at Qubba in order to "pay respect and honor to His Excellency, our president and leader of Islam, GAN, whom I greatly admire." In a nod to his own ambition, he signed the visitors' book as "M.E.S, Leader of Islam in USA."
Under Nasser's leadership, Egypt had become a symbol of the potential of postcolonial nations to grow from freedom to power. As a Russian woman pointed out to Malcolm X in a chance meeting, "One African country that rises from colonialism to true economic independence will serve as a 'dangerous' incentive to the others." Impressed by what he saw, Malcolm X was delighted that there were so many other sightseers in Cairo who would spread the message of Egypt's rise around the globe. "No wonder the industrialization (modernization) by Nasser of today's Egypt is so greatly feared by the former Colonial powers," he noted in his diary with pleasure.
Islam, Intellect, Independence, Anti-Americanism, postimperial promise. This was a heady cocktail for a weary black nationalist Muslim visitor from New York. What struck Malcolm X most about Cairo, though, was the absence of racism. In the bustling streets and markets and cafes, he wrote to his sister, there were people of "all complexions, but ... no 'color' problem—one family, yet all shades.... I met thousands of people of different races and colors who treated me as a human being." In an era of bitter fights about minority rights in America, South Africa, and elsewhere, he noted in his journal, Cairo was an "example for [the] world." For Malcolm X, Cairo was at once a place of rest and freedom. At long last, "I felt at home.... I felt like I had stepped out of prison."
Malcolm X knew a lot about prisons, having spent almost seven years behind bars in the United States. His happiness at feeling at home at last was understandable. His family home had been burned down by white supremacists when he was four; he had spent much of his adolescence in foster homes; and just before he flew to Cairo, former colleagues had filed suit to evict his family from their current home. But for Malcolm X, prison and home stood for something more than mere bricks and mortar. American racism was his prison, and a unified, free, black, ideally Muslim global community was the home he dreamed of.
It was these freedom dreams that compelled Malcolm X to travel abroad for much of 1964. Starting in Cairo, he journeyed to the Middle East, to Africa, and at the end of the year, to Europe. "Stepping out of prison" marked a pivotal moment in Malcolm X's life and thought. It reflected his international vision and, as his name change to Malik El-Shabazz signified, his embrace of what he called Old World Islam. But in turn his travels would change his views on race as a concept and his commitment to human rights, such that by the end of the year Malcolm X was eager to speak at a celebrated university that had served as the intellectual hub of the British Empire. At Oxford, taking full advantage of such a prominent platform, he would give the clearest summary of his new position on race, religion, and human rights to date. Coming to Oxford was not the end of his journey. From Oxford, he would travel to several of England's major cities, meeting more black students and immigrants. In the process, his views on racism as a global system, and how that system might be challenged, would further evolve.
In this sense, Malcolm X's trip to Cairo, under a new name and following his departure from the Nation of Islam, was the beginning of the rest of his life—albeit a life that would last barely a year more. But his enjoyment of travel, eagerness to learn, keenness of observation, and willingness to have his views challenged were nothing new. Indeed, from his childhood Malcolm X's life had been a story of travel and learning, as he sought to break out of prison and create a new home. It was a life that would unerringly lead him, through many twists and turns, from a poor black community in the mid-western United States to the Union debating chamber at the University of Oxford.
LEARNING
When he opened the Harlem bookshop in the morning, the store owner discovered Malcolm, reading. He had been reading the whole night.
—A. Peter Bailey, Malcolm X's publicist, September 21, 2013
Born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, on May 19, 1925, Malcolm X seemed destined from the very start for a life of travel and to be a black nationalist with a global vision. Not only was Malcolm heir to an international lineage, learning about the glories of Africa from his parents, but he also suffered a childhood in which he was forced to move frequently—first to leave his home, and then his family.
Malcolm's mother, Louise, a fair-skinned, well-educated Grenadian, and his father, Earl, a rough-hewn carpenter and occasional preacher from Georgia, had met in Montreal, Canada, while working for the black nationalist and pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey and his United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) at the end of World War I. By that time, the charismatic Jamaican was taking the United States by storm. Garvey's call for race pride, economic self-sufficiency, and international black brotherhood was a product of the so-called New Negro zeitgeist of the World War I years. That zeitgeist was born of an era that saw black soldiers fight in a war overseas, black men fight against white mobs at home, and black men and women move into bustling black urban communities across the United States. It was also an era that witnessed a much-heralded cultural and artistic renaissance in Harlem and other black communities. The New Negroes, wrote the Jamaican-born, Harlem-based poet Claude McKay in 1919, at the end of his famous poem "If We Must Die," would face the worst that white supremacy had to throw at them and live "like men."
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Garvey was the man of that moment. At least, he certainly thought so. "We meet," Garvey declared in August 1920 at the founding mass meeting of his International Convention of Negroes in Harlem, "not as cringing sycophants, but as men and women standing erect and demanding our rights." Some called Garvey a "Negro Moses," a messianic image that he was only too pleased to promote with a showman's flair for the grand gesture and an appeal to divine support. We should view God "through our own spectacles," he told supporters. His 1924 convention canonized the Virgin Mary as a Black Madonna and Jesus Christ as a "Black Man of Sorrows." There was nothing sorrowful about Garvey at his peak, though. His conventions in Harlem claimed thousands of delegates, and his military-style parades, in which he wore a dress uniform complete with a red and gold silk sash across his chest and a helmet with extravagant plumage on top, were cheered by many more. Garvey's audacious plan to build the Black Star Line, a transatlantic steamship corporation, attracted some thirty thousand stockholders. And his outspoken belligerence attracted the attention of the federal government's fledgling Bureau of Information, which judged him "the cause of the greater portion of the negro agitation in this country." Four decades later the bureau's successor, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), would say similar things about another popular pan-Africanist spokesman with a flair for publicity who invoked divine support: Malcolm X.
As it turned out, Garvey was the proverbial comet who lit up the sky before crashing to earth. He was quick to make enemies, his shipping company collapsed, and in 1922 the Justice Department arrested him for mail fraud. He would be deported in 1927 and die, penniless and isolated, in London in 1940.
But for a few exhilarating, fleeting years, anything seemed possible. In 1920, to much fanfare and with no little hubris, the UNIA's first International Convention of Negroes issued a global Declaration of Rights—the "Magna Carta of the Negroes of the World"—and elected Garvey as the provisional president of Africa. Recalling the "hungry days" of 1921, one follower later remembered: "When Garvey rode by in his plumed hat, I got an emotional lift, which swept me above the poverty and prejudice by which my life was limited." The UNIA expanded fast. Soon it would boast hundreds of branches in the United States and abroad, in West Africa, southern Africa, and the Caribbean. When Malcolm X later claimed in his inscription in Nasser's guestbook to be the leader of Islam in America, he was displaying some of Garvey's chutzpah.
Louise and Earl Little eagerly volunteered for Garvey's campaign. Soon after their wedding in 1919, they agreed to leave Montreal to establish a UNIA chapter in the American mid-west, some thousand miles away. Traveling was a feature of African American life during the World War I era as hundreds of thousands of people left the rural south in search of work and freedom. But 1919 gave warning of the perils awaiting African American travelers and agitators, even in, or perhaps especially in, the heady era of the New Negro. There were eighty-three lynchings of black men that year, the most in a decade, and at least twenty-five antiblack race riots, in which hundreds were killed and thousands injured. African Americans called the summer of Louise and Earl's marriage a "red summer" on account of the blood that flowed. In the south, the so-called Jim Crow era of legally enforced segregation and disfranchisement, backed up by a white supremacist policing and prison system, seemed entrenched. But migrants did not find much of a better life in the northern and western states—not when white unions kept black workers from decent jobs, white gangs kept black families from buying homes in white neighborhoods, and some "sundown" towns refused to allow black migrants to stay after dark.
The Littles moved to the town of Omaha, Nebraska, in 1921. This was hardly an auspicious place or time to launch a militant black nationalist movement. That year the Ku Klux Klan was reborn in the state as part of a national revival of the hooded hate organization. Within two years, Klan membership had reached forty-five thousand in the Cornhusker State. The outspoken Earl soon became a marked man. When Louise became pregnant with Malcolm late in 1924, no doubt she feared the child—her fourth—would witness a run-in with the Klan in his or her first years. In fact, the first confrontation came before Malcolm was even born. One night that winter, a posse turned up at the Littles' home demanding to see Earl. Louise stepped onto the porch and explained that Earl was away (he was in fact off preaching) and insisted that they leave. They did so, but only after smashing all the windows and warning Earl not to cause any more trouble.
The Littles were not intimidated, but Omaha's black community was. Unable to establish a UNIA branch, the Littles moved away. The pattern of protest and reprisals followed them, so they moved across the midwest, all the while drilling their children in the promise of black nationalism. They eventually settled on the outskirts of Lansing, Michigan. In 1929, their home was burned down. Two years later, Earl was killed in a supposed streetcar accident. The family was convinced that he had been murdered by white supremacists. Worn down by poverty, intimidation, and an unwanted pregnancy, Louise had a breakdown in 1939 and was committed to the state asylum. Her eight children were split up and sent to foster homes. Malcolm was thirteen years old.
Angry at the persecution his family had endured, ashamed of his mother's illness, increasingly alienated from his peers, and presumably traumatized by the violence he had witnessed, Malcolm spent his teenage years on the move, shifting between foster homes in Michigan. Although he was popular with classmates, he soon learned of the most powerful of all interracial taboos: sex across the color line. While he "wasn't supposed to dance with any white girls," he later recalled that some white friends urged him to get intimate with white girls; breaking the interracial taboo would give the boys the "hammer over the girls' heads" and allow them to blackmail the girls into having intimate relations with them. He also learned of the suffocating restrictions for African Americans in terms of education and opportunities. Although he was academically gifted, one teacher told him to become a carpenter, since Malcolm's dream of becoming a lawyer was "no realistic goal for a nigger."
In 1940, in an attempt to escape the racism he was fast becoming aware of, Malcolm went to Boston to visit his half-sister Ella, his father's eldest daughter from his first marriage. Staying with Ella meant living with someone who was proud and free. Malcolm was entranced. Ella "wasn't just black," he later wrote, "but like our father, she was jet black." The way she sat, moved, talked—did everything—bespoke someone who did and got exactly what she wanted. "I had never been so impressed with anybody." Malcolm wanted to find out more. And so, the following year, he moved to Boston.
HOME TO HARLEM
I have already traveled through twenty-three different states.
—Letter from Malcolm Little to Zolma Holman of Jackson, Michigan, November 18, 1941
Moving to Boston was also the way to seek out a better, black world. When first catching the bus to Boston, Malcolm later recalled, "If someone had hung a sign, 'HICK,' around my neck, I couldn't have looked much more obvious." In Boston, he took a job working as a dishwasher on the railway, giving him a chance to travel along the East Coast and to visit some of the northeast's bigger black communities. None, however, was bigger, or more intoxicating, than Harlem. Malcolm had long hoped to visit what had become the capital of black America, having heard stories from his father of Garvey's parades and the boxer Joe Louis's victories there. Malcolm's first impressions fulfilled his lofty expectations. "New York was heaven to me. And Harlem was Seventh Heaven!"
Malcolm explored and embraced Harlem with the enthusiasm of a first-time tourist. "I was mesmerized," he wrote later. Harlem was like some "technicolor bazaar." Every layover night in Harlem, "I ran and explored new places." He was thrilled to walk the streets of a bustling black city community, one that, following street fights between white and black soldiers, was "officially off limits to white servicemen." And he was excited to visit the various dance and music halls, such as Small's Paradise. "No Negro place of business had ever impressed me so much." In Harlem's nightspots he saw "such famous stars as Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Dinah Washington." As he would in his travels abroad, Malcolm sought out, and took great pride in meeting, influential figures—which for a young man in Harlem meant anyone with access to the famous musical stars. As Malcolm noted with no little satisfaction, "My friends now included musicians like Duke Ellington's great drummer, Sonny Greer, and that great personality with the violin, Ray Nance. He's the one ... [with] that wild 'scat' style: 'Blip-blip-de-blop-de-blam-blam.'"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union by Stephen Tuck. Copyright © 2014 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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