Explore "The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union" by Stephen Tuck on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to see realised. But, My Lord, if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die. -Nelson Mandela, statement at Rivonia Trial, April 20, 1964
The students elected Abrahams to the presidency of the Oxford Union on Friday, June 12, 1964. That same day in South Africa, Judge Quartus de Wet sentenced Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki, and six other African National Congress (ANC) leaders to spend the rest of their lives in prison. Mandela's appearance in Pretoria's Supreme Court may have been more than five thousand miles away, but the tremors from the trial would shake Oxford's dreaming spires.