The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union

During Michaelmas [autumn] term of 1956, my landlady on Aston Street, just off the Iffley Road-the redoubtable Mrs Pike-explained to me that, while she had no prejudice against black students, she was prevented from taking any because of the extra costs caused by their skin colour rubbing off on the sheets. -Revan Tranter, Pembroke College student, February 18, 2014

One month after the World Methodist Conference wrapped up, Jamaican student Stuart Hall arrived in Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship to read English at Merton College. Like so many before him, Hall found his ideas of race and nation transformed by his time at the university, which he called the "summit of knowledge. " In his own telling, Hall "came from this peculiar colored middle-class in Jamaica which was oriented toward Britain. Most of my life had been spent thinking that the apogee of scholarly work and education was to get a scholarship and go to England to be finished off, and then come back, as it were, civilized. "81 However, "Three months at Oxford persuaded me that. I'm not English and I never will be. "82 Most of his friends were other "Third World students," and their "principal political concerns were with colonial questions. "83 Hall later chuckled at the irony of Rhodes's legacy: "The whole idea of the Rhodes scholarship was to gather together in Oxford and to give a superior education to the white sons of the empire. But of course gradually, you know, the colour of the Rhodes scholars got browner and browner. "84