Racism and Tolkien.

[Faramir Jones]

Tolkien, a few years after LotR appeared, made a public denunciation of apartheid in South Africa on 5th June 1959, during his Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford.

He spoke of his South African birth, and that he did 'not claim to be the most learned of those', who have come from South Africa.

But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White. (J. R. R. Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997), p. 238)