The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union

Your Fight Is Our Fight! -A banner outside the American embassy in London, in solidarity with the March on Washington, 1963

British activists certainly drew connections between themselves and their American counterparts. A lead editorial in March 1963 in the black London weekly the West Indies Observer described racial discrimination in Britain as "Mr James Crow, Esq. "57 In February 1965, Trinidad-born, London-based Michael de Freitas went to hear Malcolm X at the London School of Economics and was captivated. Sharing Malcolm X's rage at white dominance, de Freitas told Jan Carew later that he "decided there and then to set up a Black nationalist movement in Britain. "58 He accompanied Malcolm X to Smethwick, changed his name to Michael X, and created the short-lived Racial Adjustment Action Society (its acronym, RAAS, a Jamaican obscenity).59