The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union

People were raising money to bring a black student to Oxford, which shows an example of "Oxford consciousness. " People were concerned enough to donate. -Hannan Rose, president in 1964 of the Joint Action Committee against Racial Intolerance, 2013

Abrahams also joined Oxford's new Joint Action Committee against Racial Intolerance ( JACARI). In 1956, two students wrote to the proctors of the university asking permission to form a University of Oxford society that would raise money for a scholarship to be awarded to a black South African student.23 (Oxford had a disciplinary system, dating back to the Middle Ages, whereby a senior proctor and a junior proctor-dons who were elected each year-oversaw the activities of students.) The proctors agreed, giving the idea their "general blessing," but told the students "to think of another name. " The vice chancellor was worried it might otherwise "be regarded by the public as an official University creation. "24 This early hint of tension gave a foretaste of fallings-out between JACARI and the university authorities to come in the run-up to Malcolm X's visit. Still, permission was granted, and JACARI-a name without explicit mention of the university-was born. By 1959, the organization had 2,354 paid members and could justifiably boast of "being the largest university club. "25 Thus, unlike nonwhite students of previous generations, Abrahams entered a university that, seemingly quite suddenly, had a sizable number of students who were animated by, or at least sympathetic to, the cause of racial justice.