The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union

More and more I have come to realize that racism is a world problem. -Martin Luther King Jr., at a meeting with British activists in London, December 1964

If Malcolm X, who already had a global vision of black politics, was influenced by his time in England, it is little surprise that his fellow African American travelers to Britain were similarly stimulated by their experiences there. None more so than Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whose speech at St. Paul's Cathedral in London followed Malcolm X's debate in Oxford by just three days. In his early years of leadership, King did not share Malcolm X's pan-African outlook or his contempt for American ideals. When King famously declared, "I have a dream," it was "a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. " Although in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 he spoke of world peace and placed the American civil rights movement in a global context-one of his first mentions of international affairs37-even then he only referred to the "black brothers of Africa and brown and yellow brothers in Asia, South America, and the Caribbean. " Black Europeans did not get a mention. According to King's speechwriter Clarence Jones, the subject never came up.38