Why Did Malcolm X Go To Oxford?

Why Did Malcolm X Go To Oxford?
UNITED KINGDOM - DECEMBER 05: MALCOLM X (left), leader of the Organization of Afro-American Unity and member of the BLACK MUSLIMS, is pictured with Eric ABRAHAMS, President of the Oxford Union, after a Press Conference in Oxford, England. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)
UNITED KINGDOM - DECEMBER 05: MALCOLM X (left), leader of the Organization of Afro-American Unity and member of the BLACK MUSLIMS, is pictured with Eric ABRAHAMS, President of the Oxford Union, after a Press Conference in Oxford, England. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)

“It wasn’t Columbus that discovered [the earth] was round,” Malcolm X provocatively once said. That fact, he claimed, had been worked out long before by the brilliant black scholars of Timbuktu, Mali—that revered center of learning at the gateway of the Sahara Desert—and it was only when white Europeans were “exposed to the science and learning that existed in the universities on the African continent,” Malcolm said, that they learned the real shape of our planet.

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