Alongside the endlessly reproduced screen printed visages of Che Guvera and Chairman Mao, there are few figures to emerge from the forement of 1960s liberation politics as iconic as Malcolm X.
A man whose star briefly burnt very brightly before it was snuffed out.
Far more than the famous photographs, the quotes and his eternally popular and inspiring “Autobiography“, Malcolm X was a complex figure. Far from unproblematic, yet a ceaseless and highly effective organiser in the cause of advancing Black and other communities of colour’s rights and challenging white supremacy.
It seems almost like a dream, but this figure, indelibly associated with the Civil Rights Movement in the USA, 1960s radicalism and the struggle of oppressed people, spent time during his final weeks in the English Midlands.
After his final break with the Nation of Islam in 1964, Malcolm X came to visit the United Kingdom. At the time Britain, which had seen an influx of African Caribbean and South Asian migrants in the fifteen or so years prior to Malcolm X’s visit, was grappling with the implications of becoming a formally multi-ethnic society.
For hundreds of years Britain had colonised and exploited lands inhabited by people of colour across the world. Now sizable numbers of those people were asserting their right to live and work freely in the UK, despite facing hostility and a changing legal environment which made migration increasingly difficult to undertake through official channels. The end result in 1965 and 1968 were the tepid Race Relations Acts, the first attempts to outlaw discrimination on the grounds of race in the United Kingdom.
It was into this situation that Malcolm X and his oratorical and organising gifts stepped.
He spent much of his visit in London, as well as visiting Manchester. However, he was also invited to address the Guild of Students at the University of Birmingham. Students and others packed out the main debating hall to hear him speak on 12th February 1965.
After the event his hosts took him for a meal at the Bangladeshi owned Chamon curry house in Selly Oak. There are photographs of him enjoying a meal, including a kebab starter, with them there.
Today the Chamon, like many of the once plentiful curry houses in the Bournbrook area of Selly Oak, is long gone. Its premises are now occupied by the Rooster House chicken shop and Jamaican restaurant. However, if you approach it from the north, and look at the side of the building adjacent to the Recording Rooms student accommodation you can still see a faded green and white painted “ghost sign” advertising the former restaurant.
Malcom X was not just in Birmingham to hobnob with students. Rather he was on a mission.
In Smethwick, due west of central Birmingham, sandwiched between Bearwood, Oldbury, West Bromwich and Handsworth, the place where Birmingham blends into the Black Country, tensions were running high.
The area had been an early site of settlement by migrant workers from South Asia and the Caribbean. They were drawn by the promise of work in west Birmingham and the Black Country’s foundries, factories and to service jobs in the publicly owned transport and health care industries.
Many of the white residents of Smethwick were prejudiced against people of colour. On Marshall Street around ten minutes walk from the heart of Smethwick, white residents tried to stop people of colour from living there entirely. Their petitioning led to a completely sympathetic Smethwick County Borough Council agreeing to purchase empty houses so as to enforce a “colour bar” on the road. A little slice of the southeastern United States or Apartheid era South Africa transported to the Birmingham Black Country borderlands. Shameful and disgraceful in equal measure.
Ultimately after vigorious campaigning by the Indian Worker’s Associate and other grassroots groups, national government was forced to step in and block Smethwick County Borough’s plans.
The area and the hostility of its white population to incomers of colour, had received national attention in 1964 due to horrendous anti-immigrant campaigning of Peter Griffiths who won the seat at the 1964 General Election. A Conservative, Griffiths won the seat through the use of inflammatory and intimidating rhetoric that was objectively racist. In doing so he won a seat which had been Labour for a generation in a year when Labour nationally performed quite well, forming the government.
It was into this environment that Malcom X stroed one morning in February 1965. He went to Marshall Street to stand up for Black and other people of colour, asserting his right and their right to be there and freely live their lives.
The visit passed largely without incident, but it has left us with the story of Malcolm X’s visit to Smethwick and a battery of photographs of him standing amongst the terraced houses posing next to a sign for Marshall Street. An incredibly politically charged move at the time, which has now become an iconic image in the struggle for racial justice on both sides of the Atlantic. He also visited a Smethwick pub with no colour bar during his visit and had a drink there.
Malcolm X was assassinated on the 21st February 1965 just days after his return to the USA. This makes his defiant visit to the West Midlands just over a week earlier amongst his final political acts. Today this action is commemorated in Smethwick, which is now one of the most racially diverse parts of the Black Country and West Midlands county more widely. Malcom X’s visit having come at a crucial moment in the story of how this came to be.