The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union

Debating was a weekly event there at the Norfolk Prison Colony. My reading had my mind like steam under pressure. Some way, I had to start telling the white man about himself to his face. I decided I could do this by putting my name down to debate. -Malcolm X, Autobiography

During a visit from his brother Reginald, who had recently joined the Nation of Islam, prisoner Malcolm learned of the religious movement, and he soon struck up a correspondence with its leader, Elijah Muhammad. The Nation of Islam had started during the Great Depression as one of many religious sects that particularly appealed to confused or impoverished Americans (both white and black Americans, though in this case black). The Nation's early theology was somewhat confused and impoverished too. As far as Malcolm Little understood it, Allah had created the first human beings, who were black. But an evil scientist, Yacub, had bred white people on the Island of Patmos. This devil race had then lived as savages in European caves for two thousand years, before Moses civilized them. Allah then sanctioned white domination for six thousand years, as punishment and to cleanse the black race through suffering, until a mighty representative should lead black people to restored spiritual purity, and then to freedom and dominion. That mighty man was Wallace Fard, who founded the Nation in Detroit in the 1930s. Fard disappeared almost as quickly as he appeared, leaving a successor, Elijah Muhammad, whom Malcolm came to know and serve and, for a time, adore.