REMEMBERING SOWETO: AMERICAN COLLEGE STUDENTS AND INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL JUSTICE, 1976-1988
THESIS
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Masters of Arts in the
Graduate School of The Ohio State University
By
Nicole M. Jackson, B.A.
The Ohio State University 2009
Thesis Committee:
Professor Stephen G. Hall, Adviser
Professor Hasan K. Jeffries
Professor Judy Wu
Approved By
______
Adviser History Graduate Program
ABSTRACT
Historical discussion of American student activism has largely centered on the
1960s and its many triumphs. New Left social movements such as the Free Speech, Civil
Rights and women’s movements all featured student involvement, if not downright leadership. But with the downfall of this decade of social activism, many scholars have hastily decried the end of student social movements. However, if one considers anti- apartheid activism in the late 1970s and 1980s, one sees that campuses had not gone quiet and the affects of the 1960s had drastically changed the ways in which students approached social justice campaigns.
This thesis considers student anti-apartheid work in three paradigms to at once counter the historiographical trend which presumes student inactivity and understand the complexities of student activism in late century. By considering student anti-apartheid work at Howard University, Mills College, Spelman College and the University of
California, Berkeley these chapters begin to discern the diverse group of student who organized around ending apartheid in South Africa and curtailing American complicity of white dominance. These chapters also consider the legacy of the 1960s to connect this period with student unrest in the late 1970s and 1980s. In this thesis, one finds that student activists understood their activism as continuations of New Left social movements and, whenever possible, framed their protests within the realm of Civil
Rights, free speech and Black Powere to prove their points and legitimize their work.
ii VITA
August 24, 1983……………………………… Born – Oakland, California
2005………………………………………….. B.A. History, Saint Mary’s College of California
2006 – present……………………………….. Graduate Teaching Associate, The Ohio State University
FIELDS OF STUDY
20th century African American History, Women’s History, 20th Century U.S. History, African Diaspora (U.S., Africa, Caribbean, and Western Europe), 20th century African History, Social Movements, Student Activism, Blacks in Britain.
iii TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Abstract………………………………………………………………………………….. ii
Vita……………………………………………………………………………………… iii
Chapters
1. Introduction…………………………………………………………………………… 1
2. ‘Divested We Stand, Invested We Fall’: Divestment and Corporate Responsibility on American Campuses, 1977-1986……………………………………. 11
3. ‘It’s Not Nice for Young Ladies to Use the Word Demand’1: The Uses of Gender in Mills College’s Anti-Apartheid Work, 1984-1988…………………………………….. 33
4. ‘What Happens in South Africa Will Affect Us’1: Post-Civil Rights Black Activism and the New Diaspora, 1976-1985……………………………………………………… 54
5. Conclusion………………………………………………………………………….... 75
6. Notes…………………………………………………………………………………. 92
7. Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………. 79
iv CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
In 1948, the Afrikaner Nationalist Party (NP) won the South African, all-white elections primarily on a campaign of racial segregation. Between 1948 and 1979, apartheid, the Afrikaans word meaning “apartness,” consisted of de jure separation of the
races (white, African, Indian, and Coloured), the exploitation of non-white labor mostly
for South African mining industries, and restrictive urbanization for people of color. 1 On
the morning of June 16, 1976, after thirty years of unsuccessful South African anti-
apartheid work, high school students in the South West Township (SOWETO), just
outside of Johannesburg, took to the streets to protest the governments’ implementation
of Afrikaans as a language of instruction in African schools. 2 Embedded in their
demands was a critique of the NPs most oppressive policies, such as the use of passbooks
for Africans and the systematic repression of anti-apartheid organizations like the African
National Congress (ANC). 3 Carrying signs demanding “Down with Afrikaans” and “If
we must do Afrikaans, [Prime Minister] Vorster must do Zulu” students marched
peacefully under police supervision. When a police officer fired a shot into the crowd, the
protest quickly turned to chaos. By the next day, between two hundred and five hundred
students were dead, many of them young African children, and around 1,000 were
injured. 4 In the wake of such devastation, many South African students were jailed or
1 forced into exile in countries ranging from Angola to the United States.5 In response to these events, American college campuses erupted in anti-apartheid protests and a new wave of anti-apartheid activity began in the U.S. For over a decade, they demanded that their colleges and universities work towards apartheid’s downfall.
Scholarly discussions of social activism in the late 1970s and 1980s have suggested that the period was marked by apathy. This trend stems, in part, from its comparison to the 1960s. Philip Altbach has suggested that the violence and mayhem that plagued late 1960s social activism alienated future generations. This has led to the illusion that students in the 1980s identified with the materialism of the Reagan years rather than social justice campaigns; the “Me Generation.” 6 In his introduction to
Freedom’s Web Robert Rhoads offers a discussion of mid-twentieth century student activism that generally conforms to this construction. “[B]y the mid-seventies seemingly overnight a new generation of students had arrived on the American campus scene... and perhaps… had more to worry about than ‘equality and justice for all.’” 7 The “something more” can be best understood as something less, or a more constricted view of equality that precluded the large, leftist projects of the 1960s. However, Rhoads, Altbach and
Cohen assert that anti-apartheid was the one thread of hope in this failed generation.8
While it is important that anti-apartheid stands out, it is problematic to separate it from the social and political forces that motivated students’ efforts and spurred their work for other social justice causes as well. The fight for ethnic studies programs, the denunciation of the Reagan Administration, protests against U.S. involvement in
Nicaragua, and unrest in the Third World were all connected to anti-apartheid work. Even
2 though South Africa engaged student activists in ways that other campaigns did not, does
not divorce the web in which students became socially active. For this reason, this thesis
begins not in the 1980s where most anti-apartheid work is confined, but in the late 1970s.
In this way one can see that anti-apartheid was, in fact, not a blip in the 1980s, to use
Altbach’s terminology.
Academic works have also failed to capture the diversity of student activism in
the 1980s. Anti-apartheid activists mirrored the larger society in racial and gender
diversity and fought for a wide range of goals, all encompassed under the “anti-
apartheid” umbrella. To confine one’s discussions to interracial campuses with a mostly
white male leadership, planning sit-ins for university divestment misses the various
protest tactics and actors who fought for apartheid’s demise and disconnects this late
twentieth century social campaign from its natural mid-century predecessors.
This study illustrates the heterogeneity of the student movement by considering
anti-apartheid activity at Howard University, Mills College, Spelman College, and the
University of California, Berkeley. 9 These institutions suggest the importance of considering the many demographic differences and their effect on student activism. The different ways in which students considered anti-apartheid work at UC Berkeley and
Howard was marked not only by their racial composition but also their geographical locations. Also, while there are little more than five miles separating Berkeley and Mills and they often supported one another, students approached divestment work in a way which suggest that Mills’ protests were often dictated by their status as an all-women’s institution. And as two historically Black institutions, geography and activist history
3 ensured that Howard and Spelman students approached race-work in distinct ways. Also, this selection of public and private; interracial and (largely) monoracial; and single sex and co-educational colleges and universities is meant to illustrate the different forms of post-secondary institutions involved in opposing apartheid. As a whole, these sites help to create a localized picture of anti-apartheid work while also drawing out the variety of meanings that students attached to opposing apartheid nationally.
The current historiography has been little concerned with the race of student activists and dismissive of the importance of gender in anti-apartheid work on American campuses. As a result, “student” in the U.S. anti-apartheid movement has become code for white male, overshadowing the contributions of activists of color and women. As a result they have missed how these factors often directed protest tactics and goals. While divestment campaigns led anti-apartheid work at interracial campuses, protests dominated by African American students often centered on apartheid as a symbol of global Black oppression. These ideological differences could be immense. Tactical choices at each campus also varied widely and serve as an effective way to gauge these ideological bases.
Current discussions of the anti-apartheid movement rarely discuss the contributions of American women, of any race. The fact that men often held leadership positions in campus organizations creates a misleading picture that women were marginal in the movement. When one considers the importance of gender in anti-apartheid work one can see that anti-apartheid activism generally ignored South African women’s fight against white rule. American women often chose to turn this discourse on its head and brought South African women, and themselves, back into a discussion of social protest.
4 This emphasis on heterogeneity, however, is not meant to overshadow the similarities that anti-apartheid activism engendered. From the local to the international student activists critiqued forces of oppression as they related to Southern Africa and the
U.S. From the Reagan Administration’s constructive engagement and continued white oppression at home to Israel’s support of the South African government and Western- fomented civil wars in Mozambique and Angola, American anti-apartheid activists considered these as strands of a larger social cancer. The domestic and international milieu within which student anti-apartheid activism emerged illustrates the importance of all of these realities in shaping U.S. protests. Donald Culverson shows that the anti- apartheid “movement emerged from shifting power configurations in southern Africa, among nongovernmental groups in the United States and abroad, and within international governmental organizations.”10 Culverson situates the U.S. movement within a global arena, not directly located in South Africa or the United States. In this case, there were multiple international bodies to consider: South Africa (and its neighbors), the United
States, and the United Nations as a transnational body. As a result of this complex international group of actors, “mobilization against [apartheid’s] injustices required not only mounting challenges to U.S. government and corporate policy towards South Africa but also uncovering the matrix of domestic linkages to the system of racial inequality.”11
This work relies heavily on public records, primarily college newspapers, which are essential to this study for four reasons. Some suggest that the ebbs and flows of the long anti-apartheid struggle in the U.S. partially hinged on media coverage. Culverson posits that in the 1960s the “absence of continuous media coverage contributed to the
5 sense of South Africa as a distant and remote place,” thus hampering a generation of
South African-focused activists. 12 Not coincidentally then, activists in the 1970s and
1980s understood the importance of harnessing media attention as consistently as possible to counteract this reality. “The belief permeated almost all anti-apartheid efforts that if the public could be made fully aware of what was involved, the ensuing outcry would force the adoption of an anti-apartheid platform.” 13 In this way the use of newspapers allows me to engage directly with an important strategy of protest.
Newspapers also assist in overcoming a unique hurdle in a project of this sort.
Students are not always the most reliable in keeping consistent records, if any. With the exception of Mills College, all of the institutions in this study have no records of student anti-apartheid activity on campus (flyers, organizational archives, etc) outside of newspaper articles. Thus, newspapers are unwitting archives of student activity.
As a media source, newspapers were also sites for the campus-wide dialogue. It is hard to fully understand the complexities of anti-apartheid activity over a decade at one campus, let alone four. With the paucity of sources and the often-skewed agendas of student journalists, by using the newspapers (editorials, features and letters to the editor), this project has attempted to gauge the ever-changing tenor of campus unrest. For these reasons student newspapers, more so than any other, are fertile grounds for understanding the campus environments.
And lastly, these publications provide historical actors with a voice. Due to time constrainst coupled with the IRB requirements and the possible size of the sample needed to make reasonable conclusions, I determined that oral interviews were not feasible for
6 this project, but are a useful tool in examinations of this type. To fill in this gap and give the students agency, the news articles written by students provide an entrée into the campus communities. And while there is not a vast wealth of quotations from students, the few that have survived can and should be utilized.
Sociological discussions have been invaluable to understand twentieth century social movements. Among them, Doug McAdam’s political process model is most relevant. McAdam asserts that individuals’ perception of their ability to access political power and participate in the political arena often leads to social activism. 14 This approach has double utility for this project. First, this thesis will take McAdam’s work a step further by asserting that in international social movements a lack of political power and representation by any oppressed group can generate sustained social activism. Even if one’s own ability to participate in the political process is not jeopardized, one can become mobilized around another’s disenfranchisement. Second, McAdam’s study examines the long Civil Rights movement, thus his work offers the possibility of connecting the Civil Rights movement with the subsequent group of Black anti-apartheid activists. Being fully aware of the lineage of opposition to apartheid from the 1950s to the early 1990s allows one to further examine those international dimensions of the Black
Freedom Struggle. 15
This study is divided into three chapters where each chapter is a connected case study of a different dimension of the student activist population. Thus, one can see that a variety of historiographies must be in dialogue to make this project successful. In part, this work references discussions of mid to late twentieth century student activism, the
7 Civil Rights and Black Power movements, women’s activism, American diplomatic history. Also, African American, women’s, and South African histories are integrated with sociological studies of social movements to begin to provide a fuller view of the
American anti-apartheid movement.
Chapter One, “Divested We Stand, Invested We Fall’: Divestment and Corporate
Responsibility on American Campuses, 1977-1986” documents student anti-apartheid activism at the University of California, Berkeley in the aftermath of Soweto to divestment. This chapter documents the legacies of 1960s/1970s social activism at
Berkeley to understand the ways in which students recall their campus’ history of social protest. The importance of the this memory discounts sociological studies that decry the end of student activism by 1970, by showing that student in the 1980s considered their work to be extensions of earlier periods of student activism. This chapter also discerns the shift from anti-apartheid in general to divestment in particular. By understanding the dominance of divestment, and the pitfalls in such a process, this work helps to explain why some scholars confine American anti-apartheid work between 1984 and 1986.
Chapter Two, “’Young Ladies Shouldn’t Use the Word Demand’: The Uses of
Gender in Mills College Anti-Apartheid Work, 1984-1988,” explores how women students re-centered the dominant anti-apartheid discourse on South African women. In this process, they not only complicated dominant understandings of apartheid and oppressed South Africans, but also legitimized their work as a female-dominated enterprise.
8 Chapter Three, “‘What Happens In South Africa Will Affect Us: Post-Civil
Rights Black Activism and the New Diaspora, 1976-1985,” discusses the way that the memory of Civil Rights underpinned African American anti-apartheid work. By focusing on similar histories of racial oppression, Black students in the U.S. framed apartheid as a legitimate Civil Rights concern for African Americans and the U.S. government. At the same time, students broke down national boundaries to understand the importance of global Black oppression as a Civil Rights concern. Rather than focus on the particularity of the African American or South African situation, these students used South Africa as an the beginning of an examination of the racism that beset Black communities on every continent.
In popular parlance, anti-apartheid had a short shelf life, 1984-1986, and a raison d'être: divestment. Such a view misses that anti-apartheid meant different things in different locations. To say that all anti-apartheid activists worked towards apartheid’s demise misses the diversity of motivations housed under an anti-apartheid banner. In some cases American complicity was the hardest pill to swallow. How could a country extolling democracy support such inequality? And in other cases, apartheid was a painful reminder of an outdated racial order. For these students apartheid was in many ways a catchall; by fighting for apartheid’s demise they could work towards the eventual liberation of all Black people. Janice Love asserts that “Even the label anti-apartheid is somewhat misleading because the movement efforts have almost always focused on white minority rule and racial oppression in all of southern Africa—including the former
Portuguese territories of Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau (West Africa) as well
9 as Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) and Namibia (South West Africa).”16 In this way, the following discussion of student anti-apartheid work is a cross-section of the movement.
There are few leaders but many actors, all of whom felt deeply and passionately about the importance of remembering Soweto by ending apartheid.
10 CHAPTER 2
‘Divested We Stand, Invested We Fall’1: Divestment and Corporate
Responsibility on American Campuses, 1977-1986
On a sunny afternoon in April 1985, two hundred people gathered for a noon rally on the steps of Sproul hall at the University of California, Berkeley. The protest, organized by student coalition group, United People of Color (UPC), featured a plethora of student speakers who demanded that UC Berkeley’s chancellor divest from South
Africa and end its financial support for South African apartheid. As the rally ended, some fifty stragglers could not bring themselves to leave. Believing that they needed to do more to force the university’s hand the crowd resolved to spend the night in front of
Sproul with no clear plans, but one concrete goal: UC divestment.2 This one-night sleep- in organically evolved into forty-three days of continuous activism on the UC Berkeley campus that included sit-ins, sleep-ins, teach-ins, and die-ins at Sproul; protest rallies and marches; class cancellations; faculty and graduate student strikes; and repeated strategic arrests.
The spring sit-in was the longest single anti-apartheid protest in California. It also represents the culmination of eight years of sporadic anti-apartheid campaigns at the institution. The events of this protest illustrate the two most important strands of Berkeley
11 anti-apartheid work: the influence of 1960s protest tactics and divestment. UC Berkeley students placed their activism squarely within the context of 1960s social movements, to which they claimed affinity. Specifically, by calling on the memory of the golden age of student activism and its legacy on their campus and city, Berkeley students framed their anti-apartheid work as intimately connected to their predecessors. As their engagement with divestment developed from the late 1970s to the 1985 sit-in, Berkeley anti-apartheid activists began to focus, almost exclusively, on divestment. This development reflected student’s movement away from a nostalgic engagement with the past to actively voicing their opposition to the resurgence of conservative structures across the nation that supported South African apartheid.
Founded in 1868, UC Berkeley is the oldest institution in the University of
California system, which at the time of this study included such campuses as UCLA, UC
Davis and UC Santa Cruz.3 In the 1960s, the Berkeley campus was overrun with student campaigns for participatory democracy, racial and ethnic diversity, support for Civil
Rights and, most famously, free speech. The university’s activist past in many ways made it an ideal site for anti-apartheid activity. At the same time, its affiliation with other UC campuses, allowed students to access local and statewide networks of activists who proved invaluable in sustaining anti-apartheid activity. What one sees at Berkeley then, is the condensation of national trends in the anti-apartheid movement, which allows for a focused examination of the student anti-apartheid movement as a whole.
Sociologist Philip Altbach asserts that apartheid was just the sort of social issue prone to encourage student activism, “issues that have a clear moral content and that may
12 relate to foreign policy.”4 In an early editorial in Berkeley’s student-run newspaper, the
Daily Californian, student editor John Mintz asserted the clear moral issues underlying
his anti-apartheid stance. In Mintz’s view, the University had a responsibility to be aware
of international social inequality and put themselves on the right side of unjust situations.
If the institution did not it was “acting as an accomplice, albeit an unwitting one, to
vicious racism.” 5 Mintz’s sentiments were echoed by student Steve Sachs in a letter to
the editor in the same issue, written in response to a recent revelation of UC investments
in South Africa. Sachs suggested that his classmates should not be surprised as the
“Bakke decision, the Harry Edwards case, and now the UC stock investment practices all
point to an attitude that is undeniably racist in nature.”6 Sachs then clearly underscored the stakes at risk in anti-apartheid work; that anti-apartheid represented an attack not only on South Africa but also on international capitalism and its affects on human rights. “I, for one, am troubled by the fact that I am supporting a big-business practice involving capital gains at the expense of underdeveloped populations… [as] it is that money we pay as students and taxpayers that is being invested in these corporations.”7 Mintz and Sachs’
moral stance at once represented previous generations of student activists while placing
their grievances strictly within their own problems with UC policy at large.
In 1978, the California Supreme Court settled the Regents of University of
California v. Bakke and found that UC Davis Medical Schools’ special admissions
program was unconstitutional, precipitating the dismantling or weakening of countless
affirmative action programs throughout the country. Students who felt that Harry
Edwards, noted African American professor of sociology, was being denied tenure
13 because of his radical politics and race sparked the Edwards case, to which Sachs refers.8
For Mintz and Sachs UC investment practices in South Africa provided yet another example of blatant racism and capitalist aggression. In their minds anti-apartheid work had much in common with other 1960s social movements that fought for the dismantling of racism and U.S. aggression abroad, such as the Civil Rights and anti-war movements.
These connections likely explain the importance of 1960s protest tactics for anti- apartheid work, as they usually featured potentially disruptive, but nonviolent methods of social activism.
On June 2, 1977 at noon, fifty-six people, students and non-students, entered
Sproul Hall, sat on the floor in the lobby and began to clap. Outside, 500 supporters waited with signs encouraging the Sproul sitters. Led by the Berkeley branch of
Campuses United Against Apartheid (CUAA), the group presented a list of demands to
University Chancellor Albert Bowker that included calls for U.S. companies and the UC system to leave South Africa, UC regents to divest its stock from all companies doing business in South Africa and the cancellation of classes to allow students to attend a campus-wide teach-in. When these demands were not immediately met the protest continued. Eight hours after it began, student Regent Daryn Peeples negotiated with UC police to have the group peacefully arrested, escorted outside (where they were met with clapping and cheering from the crowd) and then released. 9
Sit-ins like this were an integral piece, and significant legacy, of 1960s social unrest. When twenty Greensboro A&T students sat down at a lunch counter in
Woolworth’s on February 2, 1960 they reinvigorated the Black Freedom Struggle and
14 helped to bring about almost a decade of civil rights activity. Sit-ins served as a highly dramatic form of civil disobedience against racial discrimination. Thus, in 1977, Berkeley students’ use of the sit-in to peacefully disrupt the campus environment and highlight racial injustice likely reminded many of its Civil Rights origins.
Not unlike the use of the sit-ins, the CUAA’s choice of target was also evocative of the campus’ long history of social justice campaigns. Built in 1941 on Sproul Plaza,
Sproul Hall is located near the juncture of Bancroft and Telegraph avenues, in the busiest part of the campus. Sproul Hall and Sproul Plaza (separated by a steep flight of stairs into
Upper and Lower Sproul) have been favorite spots for social activism on the UC
Berkeley campus for over forty years as it was initially an administrative building. Also,
Sproul Hall is located on Upper Sproul Plaza, separated from Lower Sproul by a wide set of steps that can easily transform into a platform from which a speaker could address a large crowd.
Since the 1920s both students and faculty have used this area to denounce the university and decry global injustices. In the 1930s students advocated for a more racially inclusive campus community. Twenty years later students and faculty revolted against compulsory loyalty oaths for UC employees. And most famously, Upper and Lower
Sproul hosted the Berkeley Free Speech Movement protesters and played witness to
Mario Savio’s most famous speech on December 2, 1964. One day later, Berkeley police arrested 800 protestors. In the 1970s and 1980s students again used Sproul as a base from which to organize and attract supporters. In fact, every anti-apartheid protest at UC
Berkeley involved Sproul Hall or Plaza in some manner, as activists understood Sproul as
15 an integral part of the campus legacy and seat of administrative control.10 It is possible that they also used Sproul to legitimize their work by placing it within the realm of previous social movements with which they wished to claim affinity.
Just three days after the Sproul sit-in, students held a teach-in on apartheid with speakers from the CUAA, Third World Coalition, Zimbabwe African National Union
(ZANU), and Revolutionary Student Brigade. Campus groups held talks and passed out literature about apartheid and UC investments and some faculty disseminated information about South African history and current events. To draw attention to the teach-in, protesters marched from Sproul Hall to California Hall and sent a delegation of seven students to speak with Vice Chancellor Michael Heyman.11 Over the next decade, major protests were almost always coupled with teach-ins.
Teach-ins were popularized in Vietnam protests. One of the first recorded sit-ins was organized by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at the University of
Michigan in March 1965 to protest the Vietnam War. In May of the same year over 2,000 people attended a Vietnam War protest and teach-in at UC Berkeley. At their core, teach- ins attempted to provide a forum for students, faculty and community activists to share information. For anti-apartheid activists teach-ins allowed them to compensate for the chasms in their understandings of African history and American interests in the region.
Students realized that their commitment to ending apartheid was much more developed than their understanding of South African realities. While these events almost always centered on South African investments, they were also a starting point from which students began to engage with (South) African history.12
16 While the teach-in stands out as a legacy, anti-apartheid activists were innovative
with their tactics as well. In the fall of 1977 ten of the students arrested at the June sit-in
faced charges for criminal trespassing. The “Sproul 58,” as the defendants came to be
known, used their trials as makeshift sit-ins, shifting the focus from their actions to the
University’s inaction.13 Every “Sproul 58” trial resulted in either a mistrial or dismissed
charges, even though these should not have been hard cases to prosecute. The Berkeley
District Attorney alleged that “Sproul 58” defendants should be found guilty for
trespassing in Sproul Hall, a private building, because they remained in its lobby after the
building had officially closed at 5pm. And, in fact, the students never denied these
charges. Rather, the defense in all of the Sproul cases centered on their belief that the
University of California system was unjust in indirectly investing money in apartheid
South Africa. Thus, the University’s refusal to reconsider its position forced the students
to take strong action against UC policies. In this way, student placed the blame for their
actions on the University and in every case the juries, and some judges, agreed with their
defense.
But whenever possible students attempted to make the history of Berkeley
activism a reality. Often, this resulted in retrospective articles in the Daily Californian
discussing some important event or individual to Berkeley’s history.14 In other instances,
this involved inviting the heroes of Berkeley’s past to campus. Throughout the 1985
Sproul sit-in, student groups invited many well-known activists to participate in its daily
speaker series. Among the most noteworthy were Alice Walker and Mario Savio.15 A
Berkeley alumnus, Savio was the former leader of the Berkeley’s Free Speech movement.
17 His 1964 speech at Sproul Hall is one of the most famous hallmarks of 1960s social protest, and his return to Sproul, in the midst of yet another sit-in was evocative. Just hours before his speech, Sproul plaza was cleared in a raid and 158 protestors were arrested. After the chaos, 3,500 people returned to hear Savio speak and continue the sit- in, bridging more than just the temporal gap between Berkeley’s heyday of social protest and mid-1980s anti-apartheid work. The use of these protest tactics illustrate that activists consciously used the history of the golden age of student protest to forward their agendas, but, like their use of Sproul Hall and Sproul Plaza, activists could do this unconsciously.
At the end of 1978 as the Sproul 58 protestors returned to their studies, anti- apartheid work shifted temporarily from the campus to Berkeley. Possibly as a result of the Sproul trials, activists began to focus their attention on pressuring the City of
Berkeley to divest. On Wednesday January 17, 1979 a loose coalition of city and university groups, headed by CalPIRG (California Public Interest Group), proposed an initiative for the April Municipal ballot. The Berkeley Responsible Investment Ordinance required the city to divest from South Africa and reinvest in local projects such as alternative energy development and affordable housing.16 The response to this initiative was mixed. Immediately after it was presented the Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC), Berkeley chapter, and the SERJ voted to endorse the ordinance.17
Many local politicians, however, opposed the bill, fearing that the city would lose
$400,000 in interest from South African investments annually.18
But, the bill’s connection of South African disinvestment with local initiatives was a crafty move that garnered considerable support among the populace. If the
18 initiative passed this money was predicted to boost the city’s economy. Needless to say,
CalPIRG was able to obtain the 3,000 signatures required to include the ordinance on the ballot. When it passed in April, the Responsible Investment Ordinance made Berkeley the first city in the country to divest.19
And with the resounding success of the city’s divestment, student activists returned to pressuring their university for an effective anti-apartheid stance. In June the
ASUC voted unanimously to move the employee pension, worth $1 million, from
Equitable Life of New York to U.S. Trust of Boston, because the former operated within
South Africa. The Senate felt that by divesting the employee pension they were taking the first steps toward providing a model of socially responsible investments that they hoped the Regents would follow. Secondly, and most importantly, they were responding to a charge by the Regents that the Senate “should clean up our own yard before we criticize theirs.”20 Rather than bristling at the somewhat hostile nature of this accusation, ASUC senators took this statement as a challenge. Realizing that their pension was as “dirty” as the university retirement plan they decided to “eliminate an embarrassing inconsistency” in their demands.21
The City’s divestment plan and the “Sproul 58” trials are important signifiers of the repercussions of mid-century social transformations. Much of the San Francisco Bay
Area’s attraction lies in its history. Deeply enmeshed in the New Left and Counterculture movements, Berkeley and San Francisco became havens for those who came of age in that environment of social change. Many activists migrated to Berkeley in the 1960s and remained, even after those social movements waned. One can assume that those former
19 activists could have contributed to liberalizing the city’s climate. Thus, the District
Attorney’s inability to find a jury willing to convict the Sproul sitters in 1977 and the relative ease with which the city divested might represent their affect on city politics. It is possible that these actions also represented their support of campus activities.
This bond between campus and city activists was one that matured almost ten years later during the Sproul sit-in. As the sit-in progressed and students became more forceful in their demands, those who rose to support the sitters bridged the campus/city divide. In a daring move, the UC Berkeley Graduate Assembly called for a boycott of classes and work by UC students, faculty and staff to support the protestors. In response, an estimated 100,000 students missed class, some faculty cancelled their courses altogether and others held their lessons in front of Sproul.22 Not to be outdone, one hundred faculty members founded the UC Faculty for Full Divestment and presented
Chancellor Michael Heyman with a letter demanding total divestment. The next day they marched across campus to receive the Chancellor’s answer to their request. The
Association of Graduate Student Employees, the Union of Graduate Teaching and
Research Assistants then published a letter of support in the Daily Californian.23
By the end of April, the community joined the fray. For the next few weeks, UC police were forced to arrest activists as they protested in front of the UC system’s administrative offices at University Hall. Among those detained were student body leaders from four UC campuses (Berkeley, Davis, Santa Cruz and Riverside), Berkeley
City Council members, senior citizens, the entirety of the Berkeley Board of Education, a local writers collective, Native American activists and the disabled.24 These highly
20 publicized arrests not only placed more pressure on the Regents, they also helped to focus local and national attention on campus protests.
Unfortunately, the ASUC’s bold decision to divest its employee pension marks the end of this first phase of anti-apartheid work at Berkeley. At the beginning of the
1979-1980 academic year the campus was quiet of any anti-apartheid disruption. Not even one student’s passionate plea in the Daily Californian urging students to recommit themselves to divestment work could pull the campus out of its lull.25 Instead, UC
Berkeley descended into virtual inactivity for close to five years. The Daily Californian featured sporadic articles about UC investments, South African current events and anti- apartheid speakers on campus, but there was little actual activity until spring 1985.26
There were two distinct phases of UC Berkeley anti-apartheid protest: 1977-1979 and 1985-1986. While there are ideological and organizational differences between the two, one thing that bonds these periods is the use of 1960s protest tactics and engaging with the legacy of that history. Clearly, students understood anti-apartheid to be in league with anti-war and Civil Rights, which explains why these tactics were so important to them. The biggest distinction between late 1970s and mid-1980s centered on the importance of divestment. From 1977-1979 much of the student discourse focused on the atrocities of Soweto. In this context, divestment was clearly an anti-apartheid tactic and not the goal. If pushing the UC system to divest would aid the international anti-apartheid campaign, then divestment was important. But if, in another context, students felt that a teach-in or new course would best serve local and national efforts that was significant as
21 well. Essentially, in this earlier period activists exhibited a level of dynamism that the later period lacked in its almost myopic goal of divestment.
The 1985 sit-in that opened this chapter saw its chief goal as UC divestment from
South Africa. Divestment is a decision to disinvest money from a company for a moral or ethical reason. In this way, anti-apartheid divestment campaigns hinged on the immorality of South African apartheid. Even though divestment is ostensibly a financial decision, for many anti-apartheid activists divestment’s monetary ramifications were peripheral to its appeal. And while divestment was a feature of late 1970s work, only in the mid-1980s did it became a focal point of the movement.
The mid-1980s were in fact a perfect moment for Berkeley students to reignite their anti-apartheid work both domestically and internationally. Social and political repression throughout Southern Africa created an increasingly untenable position. Rising violence in the frontline states over apartheid and South African colonization of Namibia bombarded the international press.27 South Africa’s forceful interference in the politics of its neighbors, especially Angola, had been problematic since the late 1970s and did not seem to be nearing any conclusion. The five-year state of emergency, beginning in 1985, stoked Western fears that Southern Africa generally, and South Africa specifically, was a virtual powder keg. Perpetual violence between anti-apartheid forces and Prime Minister
Botha’s military forces steadily increased the death count and continued to fill South
African detention centers. In all, the country seemed to be unraveling at the seams and protest only further highlighted South African atrocities.28
22 Domestically, the 1980s saw a new wave of conservative politics with the
presidency of Ronald Reagan. Former governor of California, Reagan had long been a
source of tension, especially in Berkeley. Reagan’s unwillingness to support social
welfare programs, his antagonistic relationships with protesters and the violent quelling
of the People’s Park protests in Berkeley in 1969 (where he used the California Highway
Patrol and National Guard) all contributed to a political history not amenable to
supporting anti-apartheid efforts. In 1980 Reagan ran on a presidential platform similar to
that which brought him to the governorship: social conservatism, which again included
an attack on welfare and social dissidents and extensive military spending. The Reagan
Administration rejected economic sanctions against Pretoria and isolating South Africa
from the developing world, in favor of “constructive engagement,” whereby the U.S
purported to use its relationship with South Africa to gradually push the country away
from apartheid.29 In this context, all signs seemed to point towards apartheid’s
maintenance not its downfall.
In response, the UC Divestment Coalition printed an editorial in April 1985
detailing twenty years of U.S. diplomatic response to South Africa and ten years of
student activism against the UC Regents.30 One week later, the UPC, UC Divestment
Coalition and CUAA organized a rally to publicize their campaign for divestment and
unknowingly initiated the protest with which this chapter began. For the next seven
weeks students sat, slept, and protested in the heart of the campus amid sporadic chanting
of “UC Regents you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.”31 Throughout sit-in the sitters incited parallel protests at UC Santa Cruz and UC Davis and received support from
23 neighboring Mills College. In April, May and June activists attended regular Regents’ meetings and special gatherings to discuss the possibility of UC divestment.
Unfortunately, with every new turn the activists were met with rejection from the
University of California Board of Regents.
Part of the reason for this continued rejection was a reflection of their one and only goal; divestment. In the late 1970s, students accompanied their calls for divestment with demands for ethnic studies programs, new courses in (South) African history, or funding for ESL programs. But by 1985 with one goal every rejection was a total rejection of their platform. Another explanation for this stalemate, however, hinged on what some identified as a foundational flaw of divestment campaigns, what would happen after divestment?
Throughout the 1985 sit-in there was very little discussion of the reality that divestment would not, on its own, end apartheid. Thus, the dominance of divestment in anti-apartheid demands seemed to separate local projects from international concerns. For instance, one sees very little support for land redistribution or majority rule at UC
Berkeley. From its inception in South Africa, anti-apartheid was based around the reality that whites controlled blacks through their control of the most fertile land in the country and systemic disenfranchisement of non-whites. Students also seemed completely disconnected from the international sanctions debate. Many anti-apartheid activists globally bristled at Reagan’s rejection of the United Nations economic and arms sanctions campaigns, but this hardly registered at Berkeley.
24 Their focus on divestment also fueled the opposition who wondered how divestment would solve South Africa’s problems of racial inequality and help black
South Africans. Throughout the 1985 sit-in the Regents refused to commit to divestment, ostensibly because they did not believe that divestment would cause undue harm to
Africans. A popular criticism was that divestment ignored the social and economic realities of South African life. Apartheid was structured to subordinate black South
Africans and many feared that divestment would hurt those at the bottom rung of South
African society, Africans. If factories were to close, it would be Africans who would have to weather the inability to find new jobs and possible deportation to the homelands.
If divestment were a strategy to improve the lives of black South Africans, it would have to be in the long run, because its immediate effects would be yet another potentially devastating blow to African realities.
In other cases, the Regents refused divestment as financially impractical and throughout the spring of 1985 they expressed this concern by making very conservative decisions. As part of the Board’s function involved keeping the UC system profitable, many felt that total divestment would subvert that process. In response, after a special forum on April 24, some Regents (including UC Berkeley chancellor Michael Heyman) expressed their willingness to commit to partial or selective investment, to which many students seemed amenable.32 But at the May Regents meeting, the first since the beginning of the sit-in, the Board of Regents treasurer issued a moratorium on new investments in companies operating in South Africa, but refused any version of divestment, angering many.33 And in June the Regents echoed this decision, agreeing to
25 review each new investment on a case-by-case basis using the Sullivan Principles as a guideline, but refusing to commit to total divestment.34
The June decision was the penultimate resolution in the Berkeley anti-apartheid movement. While not what students wanted, the Regents use of the Sullivan Principles illustrates both a concession to and a rejection of divestment. In 1977, the Reverend Leon
Sullivan, a Baptist minister and the first African American member of the General
Motors Board of Directors, created the Sullivan Principles to facilitate reform in South
Africa. Originally the six principles stated that American companies should promote integration in all areas of the workplace; provide equal and fair employment policies, equal pay for employees doing comparable work regardless of race; create programs to train black workers for better paying positions, increase the representation of nonwhites in managerial positions and improve the living conditions of nonwhites outside of the workplace.35
In theory, institutions that supported the Sullivan Principles attempted to use them as an anti-apartheid tactic. By supporting the Principles, the UC system committed to only invest in signatory companies and use shareholder resolutions to push companies in their portfolio into becoming Sullivan Principles signatories (or stop doing business in
South Africa altogether). If a company refused, the UC system would then have to sell their stock in said company. Thus, supporting the Sullivan Principles hinged on the belief that divestment was a financial risk and losing the strategic importance of American presence in South Africa was counterproductive. Only by maintaining American companies in the region could the U.S. help bring about apartheid’s end. In essence, the
26 Principles and the Board of Regents subscribed to the Reagan administration’s definition, and use, of constructive engagement.
However, the 1985 decision was well behind the tide. Events in the early 1980s destabilized the ground upon which the Sullivan Principles were based and eroded their prominent position as an alternative to divestment. Generally, the Principles’ scope and enforcement left its proponents in a powerless position for a variety of reasons. First, they only affected American companies, but they could not require those same standards of companies from other nations. Thus, even if every American company adopted and enforced the Sullivan Principles there was no reasonable expectation that British, French or South African companies would do the same. Many also began to realize that simply becoming a Sullivan signatory in no way obligated a company to enforce its policies, especially as every one of the Principles was in direct violation of South African laws.
And lastly, there was no penalty for companies that did not sign onto the Principles and no reward for those that did. There were no sanctions for companies that did not improve racial conditions in the workplace or country and companies that did work for racial equality could face government reprisals. For all of these reasons, students never fully accepted the Sullivan Principles as an affective anti-apartheid measure and critiqued
University support of them. At Berkeley, and across the nation, divestment was considered the only way out for Americans; nothing else would solve the problem.
And even without the faltering of the Principles, as Joan Hoseman, a Mills
College student asserted, “It is our opinion that the situation can’t get much worse, but more importantly, what is the point in waiting for an already deplorable situation to get
27 substantially worse? We say act now. If our only available non violent tactic in helping the apartheid situation is to totally divest, then what are we waiting for?”36 Hoseman ascribed to the belief that there would be no easy victories. One could not fundamentally alter the South African way of life without casualties. But most importantly students were willing to refute the claim that black South Africans would be further hurt by divestment because the alternative, inaction, was impossible to bear.37
Unfortunately, Berkeley anti-apartheid activists understood the June meeting as the end of their particular fight. Angry protestors marched through downtown San
Francisco where police arrested fifty-six for rioting. Divestment advocates were especially aggravated as the Regents’ vote was part of a double blow when the State
Assembly voted against a five-year divestment plan.38 Many had hoped that if the state divested it would force the University to follow suit, but when both measures were abruptly defeated, UC Berkeley anti-apartheid activism faltered. As the 1984-1985 school year came to an end, overt anti-apartheid activism disappeared. Much like the 1980-1985 period, the Daily Californian featured sporadic articles attempting to incite activism with little result.
While it is likely that some student groups maintained a relationship with the
Board of Regents to push for divestment this goal was not achieved until spring 1985. In a surprise move, the Board of Regents finally decided to divest over $3 billion from companies operating in South Africa at the end of the 1985-1986 academic year. While there was little actual activism at this point, the Regents’ decision indicated the definite end of UC Berkeley anti-apartheid work.39 But, the Regents’ decision did not happen in a
28 vacuum. The first half of 1986 saw many colleges and universities that had previously
avoided divestment finally gave in to student demands.
Also, in October 1986, Congress overrode a veto by President Reagan and passed
the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act. The Act supported the end of American
diplomatic relations with Pretoria, outlined U.S. financial withdrawal from the country,
supported arms sanctions against the South African government, limited technological
exports and mineral imports, ended loans from the U.S. to South Africa, enforced labor
equality in American firms in South Africa and outlined American aid to apartheid
victims.40 Many believed that the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act would change the
tide against the South African government. Its timing could not have been better to raise
activist hopes. The Act coincided with similar packages passed in Great Britain and the
Commonwealth states, the EEC, and Japan.41 But, the passage of the Act actually marked
the end of the U.S. student anti-apartheid campaign. As formal apartheid did not actually
end until 1993, at least, the premature nature of the demise of anti-apartheid work is
conspicuous. One can locate the early end of anti-apartheid work in the focus on
divestment and critiques of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act.
As early as 1988, scholar Thomas Redden criticized the Act, asserting that what
comes most forcefully from the language is an anti-African National Congress platform,
rather than an anti-apartheid stance.42 U.S. governmental forces practiced decades long opposition to any punitive measures “to win conservative acquiescence” which
“established parameters for future U.S. relations with certain South African opposition groups” like the ANC.43 In this way, the Act more clearly denounces “necklacing” than it
29 does racial inequality and ascribes all violence in the mid-1980s to ANC supporters and other anti-apartheid forces.44 It seems clear that “criticism leveled at the ANC for its affiliation with communists stems from a Cold War, zero-sum perspective that reflects
U.S. fears, not an understanding of South African history” which unfortunately colored the Act against the ANC’s historical efforts at peaceful change and a multiracial democracy.45
While the Comprehensive Anti-apartheid Act is not necessarily divestment law, it seems that many believed that the ultimate goal had been achieved. Across the country, student divestment campaigns waned after 1986. Some groups, like at Berkeley, achieved their goals and faded from the spotlight, represented by the gradual disappearance of apartheid from the pages of the Daily Californian. Whereas mid-decade, the newspaper featured a story about southern Africa everyday, it did not cover Nelson Mandela’s release from prison (1990) or the first democratic elections in South African history
(1993). With this turn of events, one is left to wonder how students defined combating apartheid and understood their goals.
Divestment campaigns became the anti-apartheid movement in the United States.
It does not seem clear if Berkeley students ever clearly articulated the relationship between divestment and other anti-apartheid measures. If divestment was the immediate goal one has to ask how other goals, such as racial equality and democratic rule, would benefit from divestment. Donald Culverson suggests that “human rights and racial equality remained lofty ideals, but officials clearly believed that corporate capital was the most effective mechanism for promoting change in South Africa.”46 Administrators often
30 used this critique to oppose divestment. In many ways those who opposed it landed upon
a serious problem with campus divestment campaigns; it focused almost exclusively on
economics, to the detriment of other social forces affecting black South African life.
Even though economic inequality created or exacerbated other social hierarchies, there
were other forms of social inequality deeply embedded with South African society and
culture that divestment would never even rattle.47 While ending racial oppression in
South Africa was always the goal and divestment but one tactic, it is divestment that can
be identified as the major theme of American anti-apartheid work.
The inability of Berkeley students to sustain any anti-apartheid work after 1986
such as blood, food or clothing drives; campaigns for sanctions; or a speaker series
featuring exiled South Africans highlights just how clearly divestment dominated the
agenda. While in the late 1970s divestment rallies were organized alongside clothing
drives or movie events featuring South African films, by 1985 there was only divestment.
Even if there were other agendas, the Daily Californian contains no record of such work;
divestment is all that has survived.
The sum of anti-apartheid work at UC Berkeley illustrates the dynamism of the
student movement. While some scholars have argued that the 1980s was “an anticlimax”
compared to the 1960s, this chapter has attempted to illustrate that this was furthest from
the truth.48 What distinguishes student activism of the late 1970s and 1980s is not how it is different from the 1960s, but the ways in which it is similar. For Berkeley’s anti- apartheid activism, American support of South African repression was akin to its’ invasion of Vietnam. This chapter begins the larger project of this thesis that while the
31 1960s social movements might have died they did not fade away. And this critique of divestment campaigns can be taken in stride with those of SDS or The Weather
Underground. The constriction of goals does not discount the importance of their work.
But divestment was not the only tactic. Its predominance in popular American history gives the allusion that students approached divestment and anti-apartheid in a similar manner. Befitting its long history of student unrest, activism at UC Berkeley was dramatic and forceful. This scale was echoed at other institutions of comparable size and prominence like Columbia University. But just under five miles away, students at Mills
College in Oakland were waging a war that rarely paralleled Berkeley’s efforts. A small liberal arts women’s college, Mills students fought a much more understated battle for divestment that forced them to shift the larger anti-apartheid discourse away from men and towards South African woman. In fact, at other institutions divestment campaigns at
Berkeley were a foreign occurrence. In scale and intent, students at Historically Black
Colleges and Universities refused to allow themselves to ascribe to the importance of divestment and located a variety of social ills in South African society of which Berkeley students seemed unaware.
32 CHAPTER 3
‘It’s Not Nice for Young Ladies to Use the Word Demand’1: The Uses of Gender in Mills
College’s Anti-Apartheid Work, 1984-1988
As UC Berkeley anti-apartheid activism died, two miles away Mills College entered the last phase of its divestment campaign. On the night of January 29, 1987 rain poured on a group of young women slumbering in tents and makeshift wood dwellings, soaking the ground and poorly constructed buildings. The women shivered with inadequate cover as their sleep was interrupted at regular intervals when the bell tower chimed.2 The next morning as the sun rose over this aptly named shantytown an effigy of a Black man hung from a tree and swayed lifelessly in the wind, staring accusatorily at the College’s administrative building. Around mid-morning, the women crawled from their cover to join a group of students, mostly members of the Mills Student Coalition for
Divestment (MSCD), set to march on the campus.
Beginning at the Oval, in the center of campus, the group roamed across the grounds and interrupted a luncheon at the faculty lounge for prospective students. There, the group boldly commandeered the stage to hold an impromptu teach-in where they urged the students to consider the College’s investment portfolio before joining the Mills community. As one student shared, “I’m really glad I came to Mills… but Mills needs to be concerned with other people in the world, not just ourselves.”3 After being asked to
33 leave, the band of protestors made their way to the Tea Shop, a campus eatery, where
they came upon a conference for Bay Area Adoption Services. Continuing their entreaties
to the public, the women pleaded with conference attendees to flood the school with
letters urging that the College “take our name off the list of people who are contributing
to the murder and oppression of our sisters and brothers in Africa.”4 After a hearty round
of applause, the protestors marched back to central campus where they regaled students
with anti-apartheid songs, receiving more applause and encouragement in return.
This MSCD march was meant as a condemnation of Mills College’s refusal to
divest its investment portfolio from companies doing business in South Africa and the
South African government’s brutal repression of its African population. This particular
shantytown was built in solidarity with the erection of shantytowns outside of Cape
Town, South Africa to protest racial discrimination. Through these localized endeavors,
Mills’ activists participated in the burgeoning national movement to end apartheid.
Domestically, this protest was indicative of the tenor of the U.S. student anti-apartheid
discourse throughout the 1980s as students focused on persuading local entities to divest
their financial holdings from South Africa.5 However, underlying Mills’ activism was the introduction of women into the U.S. anti-apartheid movement as well as the utilization of dominant gender proscriptions as a protest strategy, tactics that were absent in other campus campaigns.
Women were important leaders and participants in the South African anti- apartheid movement and in the last thirty years scholars have begun documenting their involvement. There are, however, no scholarly discussions of women in the U.S or
34 international anti-apartheid movements.6 To begin to remedy this omission this chapter will document anti-apartheid activism at Mills, which flourished between 1984 and 1988.
This discussion focuses on the gendered nature of activist tactics, which on the surface resembled those used on other campuses but were enacted in a gender specific manner at
Mills.
Founded in 1852 in Benicia, California as a liberal arts women’s institution, Mills
College moved to Oakland, California in 1871. Nestled at the base of the Oakland hills
Mills stands just at the barrier between the poor and marginally less poor working class sections of East Oakland. Mills was the first women’s college west of the Rockies. It was modeled on the Seven Sister colleges of the East Coast (including Barnard, Bryn Mawr,
Smith, Mt. Holyoke and Vassar). Like other women’s colleges, Mills was founded with the purpose of expanding women’s social, intellectual, political and economic possibilities.
In the late nineteenth century, women’s colleges became particularly fertile grounds for women to expand their intellectual faculties and explore new social realities.
Early graduates of women’s colleges were distinctive in their tendency to engage in social activism, including the founding of settlement houses at the turn of the twentieth century and volunteer work throughout the Great Depression.7 In fact, until the 1920s many graduates of women’s colleges avoided marriage and children in favor of professional development.8 In the post-World War II period graduates of women’s colleges were noted for their professional achievements compared to women from coeducational campuses.9 Mills anti-apartheid activists followed these previous
35 generations of women’s college students with less but, nonetheless significant, social activism.
By all accounts Mills was not a particularly socially active campus in the 1960s and early 1970s, especially in comparison to its most famous neighbor, UC Berkeley. The campus showed sporadic involvement in political activity and social protests throughout this period and seems to have come late to developing its own anti-apartheid platform.
Barring some minor protest activities in the late 1970s, it was not until the mid-1980s that
Mills showed consistent agitation related to apartheid in its calls for the campus to divest.
Students at Mills responded to the same domestic and international events that spurred activism at Berkeley. The intensification of violent conflict in Southern African countries and ineffectual, if not downright conciliatory, American foreign policy stoked the fires of student outrage. In this context, the Black Women’s Collective (BWC),
International Relations Club (IRC), and International Student Association organized a panel discussion, “South Africa: Critical Perspectives on the new Constitution and U.S.
Business Policies in South Africa” on November 13, 1984.
Panel participants included Julian Kunnie from the People in Support of Azania,
Walter Turner, head of UC Berkeley’s African Resource Center, and William Gould,
Stanford law professor.10 The panel concluded that U.S. citizen’s aid South Africans by applying pressure on the Reagan Administration, support Southern African liberation movements (financially and morally) and fight for divestment.11 While not solely attributable to this one panel, campus anti-apartheid activism, especially divestment campaigns, surged for the rest of the academic year.
36 In February 1985, twenty students and faculty gathered to plan their campaigns for the rest of the year.12 They decided to draft petitions for “a multi-representational committee to investigate the Sullivan Principles/divestment issue,” present two films on
South Africa co-sponsored by the BWC and IRC and gather again on February 26 to hear a discussion on the Sullivan Principles and divestment.13 While records are sketchy, it seems likely that this group eventually evolved into the Mills Student Coalition for
Divestment (MSCD), Mills’ first fully-fledged anti-apartheid organization.
The MSCD held its first official meeting on April 16, 1985 and immediately traveled to support the sit-in at UC Berkeley detailed in the preceding chapter.14
Throughout the spring of 1985, the group organized a teach-in (April 28), passed out leaflets in front of the Tea Shop, posted flyers and wrote stories for Mills’ student newspaper, the Mills Stream, detailing their activities. The group was inexplicably quiet in 1986 but reemerged in early 1987 when, on February 26, MSCD member Melissa
Wallace delivered a speech to the Board of Trustees opposing their reluctance to divest.15
In October, the group submitted a letter to the Board of Trustees signed by over 200 students “urging total divestment.”16 From 1985-1988, the MSCD presence at Mills was profound. The group quickly became the vehicle through which the Administration, president Mary Metz and the Board of Trustees, communicated. Although active for roughly three academic years, the MSCD essentially dominated all anti-apartheid work at
Mills, and in order to understand the campus’ anti-apartheid activism, the MSCD must be the starting point.
37 The MSCD differed from earlier anti-apartheid organizations at Mills in several
ways. Most importantly, the group was the first on the campus to organize specifically
around divestment. Previous organizations such as the Anti-Apathy Alliance (active in
the 1978-1979 academic year), Black Women’s Collective, and International Relations
Club included anti-apartheid as just one of many concerns. They were unable, or possibly
unwilling, to make anti-apartheid their core issue. For this reason, it is likely that
previous groups were unable to sustain pressure on the administration; although the BWC
and IRC supported many MSCD efforts, at least by co-sponsoring their events.
Secondly, unlike other groups the MSCD used the Stream to disseminate its message to the community, possibly because at least one of its members, Katy Hickman, was a journalist for the newspaper. Throughout the 1985-86 school year, Hickman provided the link between the Stream and the MSCD, writing numerous articles about the group’s intentions, upcoming events and providing general propaganda to the larger student body. The Stream effectively connected the MSCD to parts of the student
population who might not have been willing to participate in protest activities, such as
commuter or non-traditional students. As a result, if one was on campus the latest MSCD
platform or event was always available in the Stream. The MSCD seems to have relied upon the Stream to do what they could not.17
And lastly, the MSCD used outside forces to exert pressure on the Mills
administration. Notably, the MSCD mounted a letter-writing campaign to San Francisco
Mayor Dianne Feinstein, an anti-apartheid supporter, who then included a discussion of
apartheid during her speech at Mills’ 1985 commencement. Hickman also invited Alice
38 Walker and the president of the ASUC to give talks at rallies. The MSCD’s most inventive efforts, however, involved the Oakland City Council.
On March 6, 1987 City Councilman Carter Gilmore gave a speech at an MSCD- sponsored rally.18 On March 24, Gilmore submitted a request to the Oakland City
Council urging Mills College to divest. He also sent a letter to President Metz directing the College to work with the MSCD to begin immediate and total divestment.19 While the resolution was never passed, as it was abandoned by the end of the year, it brought a local spotlight to the campus. Local newspapers joined the Stream in carefully monitoring anti- apartheid rallies and panels at Mills while waiting for the Trustees to finally capitulate to student demands. But the road to Mills’ total divestment was complicated and winding.
The Administration’s immediate response to growing anti-apartheid activism resulted in educational events about conditions in South Africa and informational sessions on divestment. In March, the College brought Bishop Desmond Tutu’s daughter,
Naomi Tutu-Seavers to campus for a speech entitled, “The Responsibility of Being
Human, where she encouraged the campus to support the South African struggle. In
October 1986 U.C. Berkeley Professor of Political Science, Robert Price, and Stanford
Senior Fellow Peter J. Duignan gave presentations on the Reagan Administration’s South
African policy at the second Mills College Colloquia. The two discussed their work on sanctions and the possibility of peace in South Africa.20 Also in October, sensitive to faculty unrest, the College offered a “South Africa-free” retirement plan as an alternative to the TIAA-CREF option.21
39 The College supported all of these events while refusing to commit to total
divestment, which at the very least illustrates the tension between the College’s official
stance against divestment and individuals who might have supported it. Like other
institutions, the Mills Administration struggled with divestment as the right choice
financially and morally as a means of ending apartheid. In 1978, the Board of Trustees
passed the “Resolution Adopting Statement of Investment Responsibility,” which on the
surface gave the impression of precluding all divestment possibilities.22
However, a closer look at their actions demonstrates a more nuanced debate on
these issues. The College participated in partial divestment from the late 1970s to
the1980s. An editorial in the Stream reported that the College divested some $12 million
worth of stock from companies and banks in South Africa in 1978 and 1979. And in
1984, Mills partially divested $1 million.23 However, by early 1985 the College still maintained investments of between three and four million dollars invested in companies operating in South Africa. It seems the Trustees could not find a way to fully commit to divestment as a strategy, for possibly financial and moral reasons.
In an attempt to clarify the College’s position, in February 1985, President Metz told the Mills community that while she could not commit Mills to total divestment, apartheid was indeed a moral issue on which the College felt compelled to make a stand.
Metz also said that whatever the Board’s decision, she wanted the college to actually contribute to change in South Africa.24 Here Metz references a common anti-divestment
stance as she questioned the efficacy of the strategy. Metz’s search for a method that
would “contribute” to real change in South Africa implies that divesting funds from
40 companies operating in South Africa was not adequate to achieve this goal. Subsequently, the Trustees decided to subscribe to the Sullivan Principles and shareholder resolutions.
Although they did say that they were willing to eventually divest if no change occurred, but declined to assign a date for reconsideration.25
Unfortunately for Mills activists, by 1987 the school still had roughly $8 million that student activists wanted divested.26 But rather than reconsidering their decision
Mills’ trustee Warren Hellman sent a statement to the Stream, asserting the Board’s stance against divestment. In the letter, Hellman even went so far as to call divestment
“the quick and easy way out” and a “symbolic gesture.”27 In this way Hellman and the
Board reaffirmed their previous decision to support companies that subscribed to the
Sullivan Principles and the use of shareholder resolutions. But, whereas in 1985 some believed that the Principles were still a viable option, by 1987 many believed that faith in this strategy was misplaced. Thus, by early spring 1987, the Administration began to slowly change its stance towards student agitators.28
In lieu of divestment, in March President Metz organized the South African
Action Committee (SAAC) as a direct response to MSCD demands. The group of students, faculty, staff, and at least one Trustee, was responsible for arranging and fundraising to create two, four-year scholarships for Black South African students to study at Mills. They also organized a course on South Africa for the fall 1987, eventually taught by UC Berkeley’s Robert M Price. President Metz also hoped that the SAAC would recommend further initiatives to the College “so that Mills can have a positive
41 influence in establishing and protecting human rights and in improving the conditions of people who are oppressed.”29
In May the College again reiterated its 1985 decision to use shareholder resolutions but for the first time the Board enacted a three year timetable to revisit the issue. If apartheid was not “substantially dismantled,” or companies not fully disengaged by 1990, the College would “reconsider its investment policy” and head towards total divestment.30 After delaying the decision from the spring to the fall, the Board of
Trustees finally decided, on August 17, 1990 to totally divest its portfolio from South
Africa. This Trustee resolution mandated that Mills “cease making any new investments in equities of companies with direct involvement in South Africa, and to sell such currently held investments as soon as market conditions warrant,” although the College had until December 31, 1991 to complete these actions.31 While not the sweeping endorsement of divestment that students hoped for, this decision did validate many of the students’ efforts over the past five years. As the Board’s secretary, Betsey Van Patten, asserted, the trustees listened to students’ demands and paid close attention to their protests, and their views “certainly helped direct [the Board’s] vote.”32
While Mills was late on the spectrum of schools to divest, they were in step with other campuses. Mills women used their close proximity to UC Berkeley to access a wider network of young people who shared their ideals. In supporting UC Berkeley’s
1985 sit-in, they knowingly joined other UC schools, northern California institutions and campuses across the country that saw Berkeley student’s efforts as representative of their work.33 There were also instances where students symbolically fraternized with an even
42 larger network of anti-apartheid activists. In January 1985, the Stream published an article on the rising campus unrest around apartheid, at Berkeley, Brown, Oberlin, the
University of Texas and the University of Maryland.34 And, when Mt. Holyoke, a women’s college in Massachusetts, divested in November 1985 the Stream covered the story on its front page, showing affinity with another women’s college on a similar path.35 Through these stories the very local fight at Mills was connected to larger anti- apartheid struggles in the U.S., if only just to see that there were others who felt the same way and were engaged in significant agitation on this issue.
On one level, these networks allowed Mills to engage with certain protest tactics that may not have been effective on their own campus. For instance, while the MSCD sponsored a number of South Africa teach-ins and built shantytowns in 1986, 1987 and
1988, there are only two recorded instances of student sit-ins (both in 1989). Sit-ins were a popular protest tactic for student activists mid-century to the 1980s and Mills women only participated in them at the very end of their fight, and possibly as a last ditch effort.
If one contrasts this with MSCD members willingness to participate in the UC Berkeley sit-in in 1985, where at least two members were arrested, it might have been that students realized that sit-ins were less effective on their own campus and, as a result, shied away from this form of dramatic public action.
It seems clear then that these women were cognizant of the ways in which their activism was perceived and the social milieu, on and off campus, in which they operated.
This recognition seems to have moved Mills’ activists, consciously and unconsciously, towards those methods most effective for their social location. What one sees at Mills
43 College then, especially with the MSCD, was the cultivation of strong lines of communication between students and the administration, where activists were ever conscious to not antagonize or disrespect authority figures.
In a 1987 letter to the Board of Trustees, MSCD member Melissa Wallace, wrote:
“We, the members of the Mills community… feel that the Board of Trustees, as caretakers of Mills’ moral and financial stability, should be responsive to the welfare of the students and the college.”36 Attached to this letter they included a list of “requests” that they wanted the Board to meet. The use of the word requests seems to go against the grain of most student activism as activists tended to make “demands” of their administrations. This, at least, was the predominant theme at UC Berkeley. While it is difficult to ascertain exactly why the Coalition framed their argument in this way, by calling the Trustees “caretakers” who should be concerned with students’ “welfare,” the use of dominant gender roles underpins this letter. It is possible that students framed this discussion to best appeal to the Trustees as both authority figures but as respectful women making a sensible and morally correct argument.
This language is in stark contrast to that used with their sympathizers. For instance, MSCD member, Pat Gillenwater, signed her letter to Councilmember Gilmore
“Yours in a struggle for a free South Africa.”37 This line speaks to the militant, even radical, way in which activists viewed their cause. Also, considering that the letter to the trustees and this letter to Councilman Gilmore are roughly concurrent, one must wonder if these activists were cognizant about the impact of their choice of words and how they conveyed their message to different audiences.
44 As a general rule, the rhetoric used by Mills anti-apartheid activists was almost identical to that used on other campuses, but when looking at this exceptional conversation between the MSCD and the Board of Trustees, one sees a site where Mills began to diverge. Students altered their language for at least two reasons. First, entrusted with maintaining the school’s financial viability, among other things, the Board was rarely willing to give in to demands they believed could be deleterious to the College.
Realizing, that the Board was the last word on divestment and taking into account the small size of the institution, students were unwilling to make such powerful enemies.
Secondly, and possibly most importantly, students used language that played into perceived gender roles as a way to appeal to the Board and not seem too aggressive or offensive. By doing this they were able to make their cause more palatable to Board members who were not necessarily supportive of their activities.38
This is the only letter from the MSCD to the Board of Trustees to use this sort of language and the paucity of sources does not allow one to extrapolate too much from this exchange. But this sort of language is interesting in that it may speak to some facets of young women’s activism on campus (around apartheid) that might be useful for further research. In Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the
1960s, Amy Swerdlow discusses how women used their roles as mothers and domestic caretakers to take strong stances against nuclear warfare, militarism and the Vietnam
War.39 These women defied their largely white middle class backgrounds to turn gender norms into positions of power. Swerdlow asserts that Second Wave feminist activists generally discounted this brand of women’s political mobilization as counterproductive,
45 or essentialist. However, Swerdlow suggests that for this generation of women these were radical positions that should not be so easily discounted. If women at Mills or other
(women’s) colleges used similar understandings of women’s passivity as positions from which to argue against racism one could begin to reconsider this divide between pre-
Second Wave maternal activism and the Second Wave’s discussion of gender oppression and anti-essentialism, thereby expand understandings of recent women’s social justice campaigns.
But even more important than this possible feminist activism, Mills women successfully re-centered their campus anti-apartheid activism on the realities of South
African women. Scholars initially perceived the 1980s as a period of student apathy and, for young women especially, this perceived drop in social justice was directly connected to previous gains in women’s rights. Sara Evans discusses the decrease in women’s activism in the 1980s as an “isolation of young feminists,” who came of age benefiting from the progress of the previous generation but without the support systems to guide them towards the continued struggle.40 While anti-apartheid activism at Mills was only minimally framed within a feminist context, there was still an understanding of the need for women’s liberation (in this case in the South African context) and the intimate connection between gender and racial oppressions. Therefore, it is important to understand the reality that the divestment debate at Mills College was an overwhelmingly gendered process. Women were the main protagonists on campus and, as a result, looked to and for South African women with whom they could relate. The anti-apartheid
46 discourse centered, almost exclusively, on South African women, which was not the case
at any other institution in this study.
M. Bahati Kuumba has shown that anti-apartheid activism in South Africa has
been understood in the literature as a male-dominated arena. This has been true even
though women were involved in many campaigns focused specifically around their lives
as women and those not organized around issues of gender.41 Because the South African movement was understood in a way that minimized women’s involvement, it is clear that this understanding was replicated in the U.S. movement.
Men were the public heroes of the South African struggle through figures such as
Nelson Mandela, Bishop Desmond Tutu and Steve Biko. This male focus rendered invisible those women, largely unnamed at the time, who also fought against white tyranny such as Winnie Mandela, Miriam Makeba, and members of the Federation of
South African Women (FSAW). The movement’s framing reinforced the invisibility of
South African women.42 As a result, women involved in U.S. anti-apartheid activism,
were considered to be ‘illegitimate” anti-apartheid activists, which at the very least
precluded discussions of women’s lives in particular.43
Mills students focus on South African women provided a distinctly gendered
representation of anti-apartheid. The names of women who spoke at Mills were
noticeably absent from events on other local campuses, where most South African
speakers tended to be exiled men. A lot of variables influenced this reality, most
poignantly was the fact that before the 1980s more men than women were forced into
exile because they were considered a greater threat to South African stability. Because
47 men were exiled (and jailed) in larger numbers, the exile position was understood as a
masculine space.44 This was especially true when exiles were connected to armed
struggle in the frontline states. Then, as exiles spoke to sympathetic groups in the U.S.,
this supported a construction of South African life, which made women invisible.45
Countering this model, Mills students offered a distinctly gendered representation
of apartheid. In 1980 the Stream published an article that documented the life of a South
African student at Mills. The woman, who decided to remain nameless because “it sounds like it’s only me, and it’s not, it’s everyone in South Africa,” told her story to fellow student and journalist, Andreae Downs.46 In the article, Downs recounts her
classmates’ childhood, her life in Botswana after she left South Africa, and her fear of
returning to southern Africa upon completion of her degree. It is interesting to note that
Downs and the unnamed woman never used the word exile. This is true even though the
woman and her family left South Africa because of political repression, she was involved
with South African opposition in southern Africa and did not consider, in this story, the
possibility of returning to South Africa when she received her degree. The fact that this
woman is never called an exile may speak to the gendered definition that the term carried.
This unnamed woman’s story could easily be the only South African women
featured in this study were it not for other women’s colleges who also profiled South
African expatriates. In 1988 the Simmons College newspaper, The Simmons News,
featured the story of Sonja Burgers, a South African student, as a way to highlight the
campus’ anti-apartheid activism. Burgers’ story is interesting not only because she urged
students to support divestment but also because she linked the racism in South Africa
48 with the racism that she experienced during her time in Boston.47
At Spelman College, the Spelman Spotlight featured an interview between the
Spotlight’s political editor, Margaret Lee, and South African student Lendi Yeni. This article documented her memories of South Africa, experiences in the U.S. and, what she perceived to be instances of color discrimination within black communities in South
Africa and the U.S.48 These articles follow a familiar anti-apartheid trend on campuses.
By interviewing South African students, activists gave voice to the amorphous
“oppressed South African masses.” These women’s names, when given, could represent all South African women. While only a small number of American activists were seemingly concerned with the ways in which apartheid affected black South African women, through these stories they became the central actors in the fight against apartheid.
South African women also came to campus as guest speakers and helped to put faces to their (often) nameless compatriots. In 1987 and 1989 the daughters of two of the most famous South Africans spoke at Mills – Naomi Tutu-Seavers, the second daughter of Nobel Peace Prize winner Bishop Desmond Tutu, and Maki Mandela, eldest daughter of future president of South Africa and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Nelson Mandela. Tutu-
Seavers’ lecture was part of her national efforts to raise funds for the Bishop Tutu
Refugee Fund. In this talk, like others she gave around the country, Tutu-Seavers supported divestment and urged the students to take a proactive stance against apartheid.
She also echoed students’ critiques of anti-divestment stressing her belief that action was necessary to change the situation in South Africa, not rhetoric.49
49 Maki Mandela, on the other hand, took a decidedly different approach.
Throughout her speech, and the question-and-answer session that followed, Mandela urged students to see the connections between racism against blacks in South Africa and
African Americans. As one student summarized, “The problem is that people in America find it easy to look all the way across the world instead of looking at glaring problems in their own backyard.”50 Possibly as a result, some students felt that she was not overtly supportive of divestment campaigns. Needless to say, many students did not leave this speech feeling at ease; they were challenged.51
Mills women also inventively used the missions of women’s colleges as battlegrounds for their anti-apartheid work. The requests presented to the Trustees in
1987, conspicuously included the permanent renaming of the Oval to the “Winnie
Mandela Oval,” an honorary degree to Mrs. Mandela and tuition waivers to two “Black
South African” students for the next academic year.52 This list was an interesting twist on well-touted anti-apartheid tactics. Many anti-apartheid groups, both on and off campuses, petitioned to change the names of various public spaces to commemorate South African heroes. In 1985 students at Berkeley and the University of Iowa renamed campus buildings after Steve Biko, murdered South African student leader and founder of the
Black Consciousness Movement (BCM). Still, it was rare to see a petition in a woman’s name. While Winnie Mandela was recognizable as Nelson Mandela’s wife, she was also an ardent and much-repressed activist in her own right. Thus, what Mills students were asking for here was within the confines of their campus mission, to name a public place after an important woman, and within the strictures of anti-apartheid tactics. However in
50 making this request they expanded those boundaries.53
The petition for two scholarships was also tactically important. Most scholarship
requests were not specific as to the sex of the scholarship recipients and in this way black
men and women received educations in the U.S. But Mills women did not need to specify
because the institution was not co-educational, they knew they would always receive
female students. The MSCD’s request for scholarships was an attempt to expand their
institution’s mission, by suggesting that American women’s colleges were bound to
protect women’s educational opportunities globally. Although one should be clear that
while Mills women were involved in a discussion of South African women there is little
evidence that it was a conscious act. It seems plausible that their location at a women’s
college directed activists’ efforts, not necessarily their own beliefs on gender equality or
feminism.
This is not to say that some students were not involved in a discussion of gender.
For instance, when the MSCD built a shantytown in January 1987, Pat Gillenwater,
Coalition leader, asserted that their demonstration was a feminist action. Gillenwater
implored more women to become socially active and viewed her anti-apartheid work as
an appropriate outlet to do so.54 In 1988, Edie Eichert, a student at Simmons College in
Boston eloquently connected anti-apartheid activism at women’s colleges with feminist
endeavors. “If not for the racial discrimination of South Africa’s political system of
apartheid, at least for the harassment and degradation that befalls women in that system,
Simmons must divest.”55 Eichert went on to recount Winnie Mandela’s latest detention and her disgust at Simmons’ hypocrisy in seeking to educate women while turning a
51 blind eye to South African women’s ordeals. While declarations like Gillenwater and
Eichert’s were exceptions, one can see the roots of their anti-apartheid ideas lay in feminist activism.
As demonstrated at UC Berkeley, it was entirely possible to understand apartheid with no attention to its gendered realities or to only focus on its male heroes. Anti- apartheid work at Mills destabilized this trend. They were willing to be versatile in their methods, enacting a female centered project on campus and supporting a male centered project beyond its boundaries. For this reason, Mills anti-apartheid work was concerned with divestment and women’s liberation. While many might have considered the domestic women’s movement over, or at least fractured, in South Africa there was the possibility of rekindling the call for gender equality. At the same time, students at Mills and other institutions fully understood that anti-apartheid was the combination of a variety of social justice campaigns: anti-racism; social, economic and political equality; and, to Mills’ women’s credit, women’s liberation.
But similar to the complaints leveled against the women’s movement in the 1980s one must wonder about women of color. Mills was a predominantly white campus and while there is very little visual documentation of the MSCD, it is fair to say that the organization was at least interracial, and possibly mostly white. This is interesting only because one of the first student groups to organize around apartheid was the Black
Women’s Collective in 1979. Again, without knowing the identity of these students one must wonder were there people who were members of the MSCD and the BWC? If such women existed, how did they feel about the work of each organization? While the BWC
52 supported the MSCD, would they have handled anti-apartheid work differently?
Essentially there are unanswered questions at the end of these two chapters: How did
African Americans feel about apartheid? While one can assume that Black students were involved at Berkeley and Mills, did they understand the issue of anti-apartheid differently from their white counterparts? This is an issue that can be explored more fully by turning to an examination of anti-apartheid activism among African Americans at historically
Black institutions.
53 CHAPTER 4
‘What Happens in South Africa Will Affect Us’1: Post-Civil Rights Black Activism and
the New Diaspora, 1976-1985
The importance of divestment at UC Berkeley and Mills mirrors the tenor of campus anti-apartheid work nationally. Popular memory remembers this period because of the dominance of divestment, which tends to overshadow the varied ways in which students organized their anti-apartheid activism. The other largest trend in anti-apartheid work centered on apartheid’s similarities to American racism.
In April 1978 UC Berkeley’s Students for Economic and Racial Justice (SERJ) organized a teach-in at the University of California, Berkeley. Among the featured speakers was Erica Huggins, Black Panther Party member. In her speech, Huggins asserted that she was “saddened” that white students organized “a movement that should be full of black students.”2 In her parting comment, Huggins urged Black students and
faculty to “come together in support of our people.”3 Afterwards, African American
students concurred they should be more involved in anti-apartheid work, but as a
minority group whose numbers were steadily decreasing at UC Berkeley, it was difficult
to combat the general lack of political awareness on campus.4 It was hard enough, they
said, to sustain the attacks leveled against them, let alone take on international concerns.5
54 Still, Black students agreed with Huggins that anti-apartheid activism inherently required the input of African Americans; who better to understand racial oppression than Black people in the United States?
Huggins denunciation of Black apathy, however, was not an accurate picture of
African American anti-apartheid activism at UC Berkeley. Black students immediately conceded to Huggins’ observations even though there were Black members of the SERJ, the Black Law Student Association (BLSA) was involved in the rally at which she spoke and the Pan African Student Board sponsored three events in the upcoming month to support the Zimbabwe Medical Fund, commemorate African liberations and honor
Malcolm X.6 Because white students tended to dominate student anti-apartheid work and students of color often preferred to operate separately from whites, it has been easy to overlook Black student activism at interracial campuses. To counter this perception, it is vital to examine African American students’ contributions in sites where they dominated social protest.7
This chapter explores student anti-apartheid work at Howard University and
Spelman College to outline the intellectual progression of African American anti- apartheid thought, from the local to the global. At these institutions, African American students attempted to change the anti-apartheid discourse by centering South African racial politics within a familiar Civil Rights paradigm. The Civil Rights and Black Power movements permanently changed the way that African Americans viewed social activism in the U.S. and provided a model for domestic Black activism. For this reason, students used the memory of Civil Rights to legitimize their anti-apartheid work. Howard and
55 Spelman students also considered black South African liberation, and their support of it, as a continuation of Civil Rights struggles and tied apartheid to a host of issues that beset the African American community in the 1980s. As a result of this process, students developed a critique of global Black oppression that allowed them to create international
Black identities centered within the African Diaspora and universal experiences of racial inequality.8
This analysis of Black activism reveals two trends in African American anti- apartheid work. First, African Americans framed anti-apartheid activism as a continuation of the American Civil Rights Movement. Secondly, they used South African apartheid as an entrée into a discussion of global racism against people of African descent. While both trends were readily apparent at Howard and Spelman, each institution favored the predominance of one trend over the other, likely based on their own history of social activism. In other words, because of Atlanta’s strong involvement in the Civil Rights movement and Spelman’s lack of strong campus-based activism,
Spelman students participated in anti-apartheid activism that focused almost exclusively on its links with civil rights. And as a reflection of its long history of connections with the larger Black world, Howard students framed their anti-apartheid work within the context of international racial inequality.
Spelman College, was established in 1881 as the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary with eleven pupils determined to learn to read the Bible and write. In 1884, the institution became the Spelman Seminary, named after John D. Rockefeller’s wife Laura Spelman.
In 1924, the college received its official charter and, throughout the twentieth century,
56 graduated a number of famous women and social activists such as Alberta Williams King and Christine King Farris (Martin Luther King Jr.’s mother and sister respectively),
Bernice Johnson Reagan, Pearl Cleage, Marian Wright Edelman, Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Alice Walker. While a relatively small campus, in 1929, Spelman joined Atlanta
University and Morehouse College to form the Atlanta University Center (AUC).9
As a generally elitist institution, Spelman’s unofficial mission involved the creation of a cadre of intelligent, well-connected women. In some ways Spelman operates similar to a sorority and, the bonds of sisterhood formed there help advance its graduates professionally, especially in the world of business. Spelman students rarely used overt social activism (protest marches, sit-ins, etc) as a method to effect means of change.
Rather, many alumna were involved in formal politics or charitable foundations, using their money and influence as tools for progress. In light of this history of social activism, or lack thereof, anti-apartheid work at Spelman is particularly anomalous.
The earliest anti-apartheid work recorded at Spelman began off campus with the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1978, the
NAACP Political Action Committee Chairwoman, Karen P. Moore, published an article in the Spelman Spotlight, alerting students to Vanderbilt University’s Davis Cup tennis tournament, which featured an all-white South African team. In this article, Moore amplified the need to boycott the Davis Cup for two reasons. First, while Vanderbilt issued public statements opposing apartheid, they continued to invest in thirty-one corporations with economic ties to South Africa. Second, by allowing South Africa’s racially segregated team to participate in the tournament they benefited “from the quality
57 of integrated competition within the United States.”10 By “hosting the Davis Cup…
Vanderbilt’s actions [could] only be interpreted as an act of alliance [with South
Africa].”11 Through her article, which served both as an informative piece and call to action, Moore deftly indicted the South African government, Vanderbilt University and the U.S. government as perpetrators of racial oppression.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s, Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) continued this trend in 1985.12 In September, the SCLC’s women’s organization was shocked to discover that Winn Dixie grocery stores in Miami and Atlanta stocked cans of peaches and pears grown in South Africa. In response they organized a boycott of the chain store and solicited support from all of the AUC schools. And in November, campus charters of the Young Democrats and SCLC initiated the Atlanta University Center
Students Against Apartheid (AUCSAA), to garner support for the boycott. In a bold move from the local to the international the SCLC connected the sale of these fruits of apartheid to support for white South African discrimination and continued racism against
African Americans. Reverend Joseph Lowery (co-founder of the SCLC) commented that
“This insulting display of insensitivity reflects racial policies that are unjust and inequitable. We must demand equitable reinvestment from those businesses that enjoy our patronage.”13
In Reverend Lowery’s estimation, it was important to link Winn Dixie’s willingness to sell South African goods with its refusal to promote Black workers even though its stores were located in African American communities and received much of their revenue from Black customers. As he stated, Winn Dixie’s policies were a
58 “lingering stench from the Old South.’”14 In this way activists suggested that what lay at the heart of anti-apartheid work was racial discrimination against Black people. Those unaccomplished goals of the 1960s (African American social equality, an Africa governed by Africans and independent from colonial forces, etc.) were at stake in the
1980s. These isolated protests by the NAACP and SCLC were at once continuations of
Dr. King’s anti-apartheid work in the 1960s and a part of a larger web of activism in
Atlanta.
Contrary to popular understandings of Martin Luther King Jr.’s activism as focused solely on the domestic struggle, King engaged in an extensive critique of South
African apartheid. In 1962, Dr. King joined Chief Albert J. Luthuli in castigating South
African racism, warning of possible violence in the future as a result of repression and outlining measures to show disapproval.15 The “Appeal for Action Against Apartheid” urged groups to hold meetings, demonstrate on December 10 (Human Rights Day), encourage their governments to support sanctions and stop buying and trading South
African products and stocks. Dr. King’s anti-apartheid work centered on what he saw as similarities of racial inequality in the two countries.16 In 1965, Dr. King acknowledged the complex relationship between African Americans and Africa:
In this period when the American Negro is giving moral leadership and inspiration to his own nation he must find the resources to aid his suffering brothers in his ancestral homeland. Nor is this aid a one-way street. The civil rights movement in the United States had derived immense inspiration from the successful struggles of those Africans who have attained freedom in their own nations.17
As E.S. Reddy asserts, Dr. King “always saw the civil rights movement in the
United States in its broader context… For him, there was not only the bond between
59 Black Americans in Africa, but an additional spiritual connexion [sic]” which formed a
relationship between non-violent resistance in the U.S. and satyagraha, developed by
Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa.18 But Dr. King’s work did not die with his
assassination in April 1968.
After his death, Coretta Scott King, Dr. King’s wife, further refined her husband’s
anti-apartheid platform. Mrs. King used the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent
Social Change (established in 1969) as a base from which to encourage (African)
American anti-apartheid activism. In 1982 the United Nation’s Special Committee
Against Apartheid (UNSCAA) participated in a celebration of Dr. King’s anti-apartheid
work to commemorate his fifty-third birthday.19 Mrs. King later offered the King Center
as a meeting place for the UNSCAA. In 1986, she awarded the Martin Luther King Jr.
Nonviolent Peace Prize to Bishop Desmond Tutu and held numerous conferences that
focused on the struggle in South Africa.20 Mrs. King’s work amplified the use of
nonviolent methods to fight for apartheid’s end as a way to continue her husband’s legacy
of peaceful protest and illustrate the continuing relevance of his message.
Spelman students also possessed another direct link to anti-apartheid work
through King ally, Andrew Young. In 1977 President Jimmy Carter appointed Young as
the first African American Ambassador to the UN. In this position Young’s travels to
Africa and his strong denunciation of apartheid served as a rallying cry for American
anti-apartheid activism in the late 1970s. The Daily Californian devoted considerable
coverage to Young’s views on apartheid that coincided with early anti-apartheid work at
Berkeley.21 And in 1981 and 1985, Young was elected as the mayor of Atlanta and
60 continued his social justice work in that position. Most notably, in the spring of 1986,
Young visited the Spelman Board of Trustees meeting encouraging the campus’
divestment.22
Part of the impetus for these former Civil Rights organizations and activists’ anti-
apartheid work was their belief in similar histories of racial oppression. Many Black
activists believed that the fight to end apartheid by black South Africans was similar to
Black Americans’ Civil Rights struggle. One of the best expressions of this affinity was
through comparing Civil Rights and anti-apartheid leaders; the most popular example
was the comparison of Dr. King and Bishop Tutu. Thomas Borstelmann posits that
“Archbishop Tutu’s charismatic nonviolence and his winning of the Nobel Peace Prize
reminded many Americans of Martin Luther King, Jr., a nobel laureate two decades
before.”23 As inspirational figures of Black liberation and Christianity, Tutu and King
came to symbolize two sides of the same coin. Like Dr. King, Bishop Tutu used non-
violent political tactics in the Christian tradition to end racial injustice. Both religious
men preached social integration and reconciliation and were often compared to their more
radical counterparts.24
In fact, fully aware of these similarities, Bishop Tutu attempted, when addressing
Black American audiences, to make connections between black South African and
African American realities. During a speech at Howard, Bishop Tutu implored African
Americans ‘to get your act together’ and lobby against U.S. support of the white
minority-ruled government of South Africa.”25 Just as “‘One march did not end segregation’ in this country… more steps must be taken to end apartheid.’”26 And while
61 visiting Spelman in 1986, Bishop Tutu participated in a week long celebration Dr. King’s life to accompany his scheduled speech to the campus.
Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) leader Steve Biko was yet another figure who lent himself to fruitful comparisons to the African American context. At every campus in this study student activists screened Cry Freedom (1987) starring Denzel
Washington, which depicted the life and death of Biko.27 While Biko did not figure prominently in anti-apartheid protests at Spelman, at Howard students were affected by
Biko’s death and dedicated a considerable amount of space in their student newspaper, the Hilltop, to inform students of his life, message and legacy.
On November 8, 1977 Howard’s undergraduate and graduate student associations,
Organization of Afrikan Students (OAS) and others held a memorial to remember Biko.28
During the service Dr. James Garrett, assistant professor of Political Science, compared
Biko’s assassination to Dr. King’s. Garrett asserted that Biko’s murder was no different than that perpetrated on Dr. King and Patrice Lumumba. These statements allowed
Garrett to situate Biko as the most recent casualty in a long line of Black activists assassinated by racist white regimes. While an interesting comparison, Biko’s life’s work around the importance of Black solidarity and the mystery surrounding his death seem more comparable, in the U.S. context, to that of Malcolm X, but one can not find fault with Dr. Garrett’s general message. In all, regardless of whom activists chose to compare
South African leaders, what is important is the affinity between these movements for racial equality and justice in both countries. And it is likely that, for a generation raised in the aftermath of Dr. King and Malcolm X’s assassinations, the ability to interact with
62 South African leaders so amenable to comparisons in their own history could have been motivating. These connections were made in an attempt to make concrete what was mostly ephemeral: the feeling that black people in the U.S. and South Africa were connected.
African American anti-apartheid work was based on the idea that the apartheid struggle was Civil Rights in another context and Blacks in the U.S. had an obligation to fight for black civil rights abroad and at home. By making these connections students attempted to justify their anti-apartheid work. In some ways they attempted to live the popular memory of Civil Rights as a way to legitimize their activism, which often involved holding protests on the anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination.
In April 1985 Spelman and Howard students organized anti-apartheid events to commemorate Dr. King’s life and highlight the importance of his message on the seventeenth anniversary of his death. At the AUC, students conducted a candlelight vigil on the steps of the Woodruff library commemorating the 1960 Sharpeville protest.
Sponsored by the Coalition of Concerned Students Against Apartheid, the group lit a torch at the King Memorial’s eternal flame and carried it to the AUC.29 At Howard, the
Howard University Student Association (HUSA) and Pan-African Revolutionary
Socialist Party organized a protest to accompany a three-day conference, entitled “World
Dialogue Among Students of African Descent.”30 The conference also featured a candlelight vigil in Dr. King’s honor designed to “elevate the level of consciousness throughout the campus and community about what is going on in South Africa.”31
63 Accentuating similarities between Civil Rights and anti-apartheid allowed African
American activists to make connections with South African oppression, which provided a solid base from which to organize anti-apartheid work. Culverson argues that by 1960 there was “little else” in the U.S. experience better designed to prepare American
“citizens to understand and respond more fully to the apartheid issue” than similar histories of racial oppression.32 And by casting apartheid within the frame of Civil
Rights, students were able to make anti-apartheid a palatable mission for African
American activists; black oppression was black oppression regardless of where those black people suffered. Culverson asserts that this connection helped to legitimize anti- apartheid work. “By energizing constituencies predisposed toward extending civil rights principles abroad, opposition to apartheid acquired an honorary exemption from the Cold
War categorical treatment of African policy concerns. The domestic ramifications of apartheid temporarily granted it the status of a moral issue.”33
Even though Spelman women exhibited an unprecedented interest in Atlanta’s anti-apartheid projects, one does not see a repetition of the gendered project at Mills. In some ways Spelman women passively participated in a gendered discussion of anti- apartheid because as a women’s College their South African classmates were women, as at Mills. However, unlike Mills, they did not focus their attention on the gendered atrocities of the apartheid regime and guest speakers were not exclusively women.
Rather, because students focused on racial oppression, gender was not a significant component of their protests. It may be that Mills was an exceptional campus and their gendered approach to women’s anti-apartheid activism was an anomaly. Or, one might
64 find that at another historically Black women’s college, students provided an intersectional analysis of apartheid. Unfortunately, without a larger sample of campuses this all remains conjecture.
But in the end, AUC activists’ work linked domestic and international struggles.
This linkage had many implications for African American anti-apartheid activism. First, it provided a link to a Black activist past that helped to legitimize anti-apartheid work in both Cold War and U.S. contexts. Second, it allowed activists to garner even more evidence for a critique of the post-Civil Rights/decolonial world. And third, by framing international events in the context of the Civil Rights movement they advocated for a resurgence of African American activism (at home and abroad). It is to the latter two projects that this chapter now turns.
Inherent in the desire to connect the Civil Rights and anti-apartheid movements was an endorsement of a continuation/resurgence of (global) Black activism. On April 1,
1978 Akbar Muhammad Ahmad, representing the African People’s Party of Atlanta cried, “They said they crushed the Black liberation movement in 1968, but we are here today to say that the movement is still alive in 1978.”34 To extend the Civil Rights movement by adding anti-apartheid suggests that full emancipation and equality for people of African descent was not achieved in the previous decades through the Civil
Rights/Black Power movements or African decolonization; there was still work to be done. Ahmed’s statement also blurred the line between a Black America and a black
South Africa, suggesting that for people of African descent, none could be free while
65 others remained subjugated. It also deconstructed those national borders dividing the
Black Diaspora to focus on similarities.
Ahmad’s statement called into question popular understandings of the demise of
1960s Black protest as the end of African American grievances. This was due to the fact that in the late 1970s and 1980s Black people faced distinct problems of racial, political, social and economic inequality globally, of which apartheid was just one part. Thus the anti-apartheid project at Howard hinged on continuing problems of racial oppression in the post-Civil Rights, post-colonial world.
Howard University was founded in 1867 as a result of a Congressional charter approved by President Andrew Johnson to provide educational opportunities to the children of freed slaves. Howard’s history has been one of commitment not only to
African Americans but also the larger Black world, as the University has produced a number of prominent Black graduates including, Nnamdi Azikiwe, first President of the
Republic of Nigeria, Mary Ann Shad Cary, James Farmer, E. Franklin Frazier, Zora
Neale Hurston, Cheddi Jagan, first President of Guyana, Kwame Ture (Stokely
Carmichael), and Andrew Young. From its position in the heart of Washington, D.C.,
Howard’s students have taken particular interest in attempting to affect change in the nation’s Capitol to improve the condition of people of African descent globally. The close proximity of the institution to the Capitol and the presence of so many foreign delegates also helps explain the different agenda at Howard, as opposed to Spelman. It is not a stretch to connect Howard’s internationalist history with their particular brand of global understanding of anti-apartheid expressed there.
66 The earliest anti-apartheid work at Howard centered on making connections
between racism at home and racism abroad. In 1976, Victor Azinge, an African student
studying at Howard, took offense to a fellow student’s assertion that colonization in
Southern Africa “was an African problem and not a Black American problem.”35 Azinge
posited that, “a line has been drawn between Africans and Black Americans,” which
obscured the historical connections between Black Americans and the African
continent.36 White oppression in South Africa was not so different from white oppression
in the U.S. and Azinge urged Black Americans not to forget that reality.
In a 1988 editorial in the Spelman Spotlight, “The Struggle Continues,” students
Jill Bryant and Jiea Rutland argued that the post-Civil Rights world “has put a damper on
our struggle and it has forced us to be satisfied with our situation at home… and has
allowed us to turn [on] our brothers and sisters in South Africa.”37 In this way the students bridged the gap between the domestic and the international. Culverson posits that “[u]nlike domestic issues, apartheid was not amenable to direct observation. The multiplication of sites for contesting apartheid gave groups the opportunity to create powerful interpretive linkages between local experience and racial inequality in South
Africa.”38 Activists could argue that, like Jim Crow and American racism, apartheid was
“a political cancer eroding American ideals of justice and fairness.”39 And similar to the
ways in which African American activists pounced on the hypocrisy of Constitutional
ideals and racial discrimination throughout American history, anti-apartheid activists
located the inconsistency in American democratic practice during the Cold War, with
67 U.S. inactivity against white minority rule in Africa and its failure to support Black progress at home.
There were many problems confronting the Black community in the 1970s and
1980s. Black leaders were angered at the rising poverty of re-segregated American cities as a result of white flight to the suburbs; the rising number of impoverished schools in
Black communities; and the backlash against affirmative action programs in the wake of the Bakke decision to name a few. But many African American complaints, like the larger national anti-apartheid debate, centered on the American presidency. Presidents Carter and Reagan both incited ire for supporting or exacerbating problems in the Black community, however, Reagan attracted particularly strong criticism nationally.
Reagan’s attacks on national welfare spending, a holdover from his governorship, struck many as an unwarranted attack against the Black community. The archetype of the
“welfare queen,” popularized in Reagan’s 1984 presidential campaign, blamed Black women for ineffective welfare programs that seemed to bleed money because (Black) women stayed on state aid for years at a time. Regan made these assertions contrary to all available data, which pointed out that the average welfare recipient was not urban Black women, but white women in rural areas. It would be an understatement to say that few viewed Reagan as a president interested in Black issues.40
The policy of “constructive engagement” did little to persuade people that Reagan could possibly support Black self-determination. Many viewed the policy as conciliatory to the Afrikaner regime and an example of Western support for white dominance in
Southern Africa. For African Americans however, constructive engagement was yet
68 another example of governmental racism. Like the attacks against affirmative action
programs in the U.S. many believed that Reagan’s foreign policy sought to promote the
prominence of white dominance in Africa, severely weakened by decolonial successes in
the previous two decades. In this manner, African American anti-apartheid activists
understood their anti-apartheid work as a double-edged sword critiquing white
dominance domestically and internationally.
In every issue of the Hilltop, Howard’s campus newspaper, the editors presented a section called “Campus Speakout.” Two questions were presented to a number of students concerning the university, issues facing Black America, or international current events and the answers were printed. Questions about South Africa were featured in the
“Speakout” three times between 1976 and 1977. This first question, “Do you think blacks in this country should be concerned with the liberation struggle in South Africa?
Why?” received a range of responses but most students echoed the sentiments of
Y’vonne Hobbs: “Most definitely! We can never separate the fact that what happens in
South Africa will affect us, whether directly or indirectly. To remain unconcerned is to remain ignorant.”41 The second question asked students to critique U.S. commitment to human rights and the relationship between Africans, people of African descent and the
U.S. government. When asked, “Do you think the Carter administration’s push for international Human Rights is a sincere effort?” students did not hesitate to lambast the lackluster effort for reforms in domestic human rights for African Americans as a sign of insincerity abroad. One student stated plainly “that Carter is basically trying to play the role of a superhuman rightist. He didn’t ever consider the black human rights in Georgia,
69 so why should he change now.”42 And when asked about connections between anti- apartheid and Civil Rights, one student stated that, “the root cause for both instances are and were white racist attitudes against Black people.”43 As these students suggest, there was a zero-sum understanding of racism. African American activists believed that people of African descent were bound to support all fights against the racist domination of Black people.
This was illustrated clearly in how Black students used the renaming of African countries as sites to illustrate their support for Black liberation struggles. Students often called South Africa, Azania and used the postcolonial names of other Southern African countries: Namibia (South West Africa) and Botswana (Rhodesia). By using postcolonial names, they illustrated where their affiliations lay in these disputes and their support for the end of white colonial rule (or pericolonial in the case of Namibia) and African self- determination. Also, by using the names chosen by African revolutionary parties the students respected the right of an oppressed people to name themselves and their struggle.44
In many ways, Howard and Spelman students followed the example of the first
American anti-apartheid activists in the 1950s. Led by a small cadre of elite male intellectuals, organizations like the American Committee on Africa (ACOA), Council on
African Affairs (CAA) and NAACP combined supporting decolonization with protests against domestic racial discrimination.45 These activists believed that their connections with Africa, and the rest of the Black world, were not simply historical but experiential.
Similar histories of white oppression bound African Americans to struggles in the
70 African Diaspora and allowed Black activists in the U.S. to see their struggle for racial equality as one piece of the global struggle for the same.46 Therefore, late 1970s-mid
1980s anti-apartheid work by Black students was not as anomalous as it seems, and may have had a longer history in the American context than divestment.
But it was not only African American activists who made these connections. At the first major protest at UC Berkeley in 1977, students presented a list of demands to
University of California chancellor Albert Bowker. Only half of those requests concerned
South Africa while the others were based squarely within the domestic grievances of racial minorities in the United States. These demands called for an official rejection of the Bakke decision, University support for the Chicano Studies Library, increased funding for ESL teachers, and the rejection of the Parducci proposal, which activists felt discriminated against minorities by emphasizing SAT scores in university admissions.47
Some students criticized the SERJ for diluting their anti-apartheid stance with these other issues, however they were directly in line with the Howard and Spelman anti-apartheid activists.
The sum of these projects blurred the lines between the domestic and the international and allowed African American students to create new diasporic identities through their anti-apartheid work, distinct from earlier Pan-African identities.48 While earlier movements focused almost exclusively on the continent and the Caribbean, with the rise of more heavily populated and visible Black communities in Europe in the post-
World War II period, students in the 1980s were just as likely to focus on Black communities in Europe and North America as the African continent.49 In this way,
71 students did not require, or even advocate for, a “return” to Africa as they dealt with the reality that Black people could be found elsewhere in the world. These students chose to focus on those connections between Africa and the various people around the world who could trace some part of their ancestry to one of its countries.50
In February 1982, Spelman Spotlight editors showcased this position on their front page. In an ad for Black History Month, the editors placed an etching of Africa, with sketches of Black people in a variety of clothing and hairstyles inside, below the phrase
“We’re All Africans!... So Celebrate! ”51 On the surface, this ad runs completely counter to the above discussion of diasporic identities. However, a closer reading of the tenor of
African American anti-apartheid activism allows one to see the breakdown of national, and even continental, boundaries between Black communities. The Spelman editors espoused an ancestral connection with Africa that was meant to bind people of African descent with their “brothers” and “sisters” elsewhere. As Karen Moore asserted in 1978, the futures of global Black communities were bound to one another precisely because of their connection to Africa; where one prospered, they all did. “Our protest is not for black
South Africans exclusively, but for all blacks worldwide. The fight against segregation is our own, so let us now build and become a part of active forces to defeat it… If we don’t do it… it won’t get done.”52
These issues also developed on the pages of the Hilltop. In the late 1970s the newspaper featured a section called “Third World News Focus”, containing an analysis of African current events. Over the nine years in this study, this section went through a number of reincarnations. In 1978, the section was renamed “The African World” and
72 featured a graphic of the African Continent, the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin
America. In 1979 it was renamed again to “Third World Briefs,” becoming simply the
“World” section in 1981, the “International” section in 1982 and “Elsewhere” in 1985. In all of these incarnations, this section focused almost exclusively on those world events that directly affected people of African descent. And even though there was a heavy emphasis on the African continent, this section frequently featured articles about current events from the U.S., Latin America and Western Europe.53
In 1965, Dr. King said that “The fact that black men govern states, are building democratic institutions, sit in world tribunals, and participate in global decision-making gives every Negro a needed sense of dignity.”54 Dr. King clearly states the importance of diasporic identities for people of African descent, especially youth, in the 1980s. Often disaffected with the limited social progress since legal Civil Rights triumphs, young
African Americans looked towards their counterparts in other countries to help explain their situation. Overwhelmingly, activists concluded that their problems in the U.S. were directly related to the problems that people who looked like them faced all over the world. It was not enough that African Americans ostensibly had the same citizenship rights as white Americans, that Ghana was independent, or that Black British subjects could become British citizens, the denigration of Africa and Black people globally impeded true racial equality and Black liberation.
Much of the current scholarship of American anti-apartheid activism overlooks what was plain for activists at Howard and Spelman, that the South African government discriminated against the majority of its population simply because they were not white.
73 Policies to separate and oppress black citizens, and keep them from accessing citizenship rights, was fodder for African American activists who all too clearly remembered
(personally and collectively) when American history was just as oppressive. And while these Black students were firmly entrenched in a post-Civil Rights world, they asserted that they still needed a civil rights struggle, which runs decidedly counter to popular and scholarly discussions. Rather than considering the demise of Civil Rights as the end of an era, this chapter has attempted to show that the end of Civil Rights was the beginning of a new phase of the long Black Freedom Struggle.
But the mid-1980s was undoubtedly the end of American anti-apartheid activism.
American anti-apartheid work was based on the similarities between South African and
American racial systems. The relative legislative victory of the 1986 Comprehensive
Anti-Apartheid Act and the growing support in Western countries for United Nations sanctions certainly signaled the eventual end of apartheid. But by then, American campuses had gone quiet.
74 CHAPTER 5
Conclusion
American anti-apartheid activism in the United States was much more complex than the current record indicates. Students across the country assigned a variety of meanings to apartheid’s end and in all of its variations their worked hinged on the connection between 1960s social movements and 1970s/1980s realities. That the former was a period of possibility was a universal belief. That the latter had not lived up to its promise in a variety of ways was an incentive for social activism. Thus, “[m]obilization against apartheid cannot be separated… from transformations experienced in the United
States throughout the 1960s and 1970s that profoundly shaped which groups got organized and how they did so.”1
In his 1986 tour of the U.S., Bishop Tutu thanked all of the institutions in this
study for being a counter to Western forces that supported apartheid. While the South
African fight was still almost a decade from its end, by 1988 anti-apartheid work on
American campuses had ended. On February 11, 1990 Nelson Mandela was released
from Robben Island prison after twenty-seven years of incarceration. Long estranged the
domestic struggle, Mandela’s return was a beacon of hope that apartheid’s end was near.
Over the next three years, the NP (begrudgingly) participated in negotiations with the
75 ANC. And in 1994 the country held its first “all-races” elections in its history. But long before Mandela’s release U.S. campuses had largely abandoned their coverage of South
African current affairs. The premature demise of American student anti-apartheid work means that these campuses missed these triumphs at apartheid’s twilight and did not survive to critique the problems of the “New South Africa.”2
I consider this work to be a beginning for myriad new scholarship. As the 1970s and 1980s gradually become legitimate fodder for historical research, anti-apartheid will be connected to a host of changes in the U.S. at the end of the Cold War, such as the development of post-1960s social activism, the rise of social conservatism, and possible patterns of U.S. foreign relations with the African continent and Third World (through formal political avenues and otherwise).
All of these projects hinge on understanding how to situate social movements of the 1970s and 1980s within the existing historiography, especially in considering how mid-twentieth century developments altered the trajectory of the country. For instance, much of the African American historiography is concerned, rightly so, with the Civil
Rights movement and Black Power. This thesis seeks to begin to extend that discussion.
Now that almost half a century has passed since the beginning of the formal Civil Rights movement, new projects must begin to understand the ways in which this period changed
African American history.
As a whole, this thesis has sought to provide a segue into discussions of student activism in the 1970s and 1980s. While considering the student newspapers it is clear that anti-apartheid was not the only social justice campaign around which students organized.
76 Internationally, American intervention in Nicaragua, the Iran-Contra affair, and rising
American interference in the Middle East all caused students to question the tenor of
American foreign policy. Domestically, the fight against co-education at many women’s colleges, for ethnic studies programs, anger over rising police violence in Black communities, the campaign for Martin Luther King Day as a national holiday, and the fervor of Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign in 1984 were just a few of the issues that these anti-apartheid activists supported as well. In fact, many of the lapses in campus anti-apartheid activism at each of these institutions can be explained by renewed concern for one of these issues rather than a general lack of social justice work. One of the larger goals of this project is to deny the particularity of anti-apartheid activism and see it in the context of the variety of late twentieth century social justice campaigns.
What is most striking about this period is that there was ever a student anti- apartheid movement of which to speak. If one considers that every year, the graduating class could mean that leaders in the student movement left the campus, it is a wonder that the start of a new academic year did not require an element of re-invention. This project has faced the general problem of recreating student protest, as activists are not well known for documenting their work. Caught up in the fervor of their activism, records of student groups, their membership and activities were consistently hard to come by. This paucity of sources has meant that student contributions to the anti-apartheid movement has been either overlooked or simplified and this project seeks to be the first step in correcting this problem.
It would be a mistake to consider student anti-apartheid activism as an aberration. Often
77 in the process of telling a simple story, one misses what actually makes the story most interesting. The longevity and complexity of student unrest refuses a simple and constricted story of the American “anti-apartheid/divestment movement” in the 1980s.
This project is in many ways a revisionist history. The earliest studies of late 1970s and
1980s social movements focused narrowly on the differences of this period from the
1960s, thereby missing the similarities. But, most importantly, these studies (unwittingly) deny that mid-century social movements changed the country. New Left triumphs made it impossible for their (activist) descendants to sit idly by as black South Africans suffered and died at the hands of a racist Afrikaner regime. Anti-apartheid work was as much a product of American history as South African history. Thus, these normal American students operated in a web that went far beyond Atlanta, Berkeley, Oakland or
Washington, D.C.
78 Notes
1 Bill O’Brien, “Divestment and Mills College,” East Bay Express (June 5, 1987): 16.
1 Yvonne Hobbes, “Campus Speakout,” The Hilltop (October 15, 1976): 12.
Introduction
1 Coloured is a “racial” term identifying the descendants of the interracial unions between Dutch colonists and African women.
2 Afrikaans is the language of the descendants of 17th century Dutch immigrants to modern day South Africa, known by the 20th century as Afrikaners. The Afrikaans Medium Decree of 1974 mandated that all education be conducted in English and Afrikaans. Like most apartheid laws, implementation of the 1974 mandate happened haphazardly and took five years to affect Soweto directly. Soweto school students only protested against Afrikaans because it was solely used in South Africa and could further marginalize them in the world community. It was also considered the language of the oppressor.
3 In the South African context black meant all non-white people (African, Indian, and Coloured). As such, African will be used to denote those descendants of the original inhabitants of Southern Africa.
4 The actual number of students killed is still unknown. Because of the apartheid government’s tactics of misinformation, the number of dead was initially quite conservative. At this point, between 200-500 is the accepted figure.
5 For a succinct and compelling description of the events leading to and following the Soweto uprisings and the protest itself see Harry Mashabela, A People on the Boil: Reflections on June 16, 1976 (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2006).
6 Philip G. Altbach and Robert Cohen, “American Student Activism: The Post-Sixties Transformation.” The Journal of Higher Education, 61, no. 1 (Jan.-Feb., 1990), 34.
7 Robert A. Rhoads, Freedom’s Web: Student Activism in an Age of Cultural Diversity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 5.
8 Altbach, “Introduction to the Transaction Edition” in Student Politics in America: A Historical Analysis (New Brunswick, New Jersey & London: Transaction Publishers, 1997), xiii. Altbach and Cohen also make this assertion in “American Student Activism: The Post-Sixties Transformation.”
9 Most of the primary research was conducted at these institutions with some additional work at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts and Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia.
10 Donald Culverson, Contesting Apartheid: US Activism, 1960-1987 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), 17.
79
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid, 50.
13 Stephen Metz, “The Anti-Apartheid Movement and the Populist Instinct in American Politics,” Political Science Quarterly 101, no. 3 (1986), 385.
14 Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
15 This work owes a heavy debt to Donald Culverson’s Contesting Apartheid, which also utilizes McAdam’s political process model to understand American anti-apartheid. Specifically, Culverson uses the political process model to illustrate the ways in which expanding political spaces provided each generation of anti-apartheid activists with new ways to oppose apartheid not previously available.
16 Janice Love, The U.S. Anti-Apartheid Movement: Local Activism in Global Politics (New York: Praeger, 1985), 2.
Chapter 1
1 Donna Gamber, Editorial “Divested we stand, invested we fall,” Simmons News (February 9, 1989): 8.
2 The United People of Color was a blanket organization at UC Berkeley purported to represent “Third World” groups on campus. Michael Shapiro, “Demonstrators continue the sleep-in: The administration voices demands, threatens arrests,” Daily Californian (April 12, 1985): 1.
3 At the time of this study the University of California system consisted of ten schools, Berkeley, Hastings Law School, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Davis, Riverside, San Diego, Irvine and Santa Cruz. Per a condition of its 1878 founding and incorporation into the UC system Hastings is the only school not governed by and receives no funding from the UC Regents. Thus the Hastings administration would have had little say over the Regents’ financial decisions. For this reason, when discussing divestment in the UC system, this paper will only refer to the nine schools under the Regents’ financial sway.
4 Altbach, “Introduction,” in Student Politics, xiv.
5 John Mintz, editor, “Unwittingly, UC is buttressing apartheid,” Daily Californian (March 23, 1977): 5.
6 Steve Sachs, “Letter to the Icebox,” Daily Californian (March 23, 1977): 5.
7 Ibid.
8 Ann Gibbons, “Cops arrest 56 at Sproul sit-in,” the Daily Californian (June 3, 1977): 32.
9 Gibbons, 1.
10 http://berkeley.edu/about/hist/activism.shtml
11 Ruthie Thompson, “Apartheid teach-in draws 650,” Daily Californian (June 6, 1977): 16. The protestors again presented a list of demands, this time shortened to the withdrawal of UC funds from corporations doing business in South Africa and administrative commitment to fight the Bakke decision.
80
12 At some institutions teach-ins eventually led to demands for new courses (usually in history and political science, but always). As a testament to the effectiveness of the teach-in, South Africa-related courses were offered with more frequency in the 1970s at UC Berkeley. And in every institution in this study, anti- apartheid teach-ins resulted in new course offerings. In fact, at some smaller institutions teach-ins often proved to be catalysts for expanding course offerings to include African history, politics and American foreign relations with Africa and the beginnings of African/African American studies departments. At other institutions however, this was not universally true. In some instances programs such African Studies, Ethnic Studies or International Area Studies produced a committed cadre of anti-apartheid activists. At such campuses, like the University of Wisconsin and Stanford University, anti-apartheid work often began much earlier than the period of this study. Culverson, Contesting Apartheid, 31 & 47 & Stephanie Grant, “New History Course To Be Offered Next Semester,” Spelman Spotlight (October 19, 1984): 4.
13 Jon Taylor, “Trial begins for ten of Sproul 58,” Daily Californian (September 15-16, 1977): 40. The students were tried in groups of ten and eleven because they were arrested as a group and, according to their attorney Luke Ellis; they wanted to be tried that way. All of the 58 people who eventually went on trial were members of the CUAA, which was a statewide organization.
14 “Campus shocked the nation: The ‘6o’s – UC Berkeley’s decade of protest,” Daily Californian (March 7, 1979): 3, 10, 11 & “As Radicalism took hold: Apocalypse then: the end of the violent ‘60’s,” (March 8, 1979): 1, 4, 6.
15 Michael Shapiro, “Demonstrators continue the sleep-in: The administration voices demands, threatens arrests,” Daily Californian (April 12,1985): 5 & “Sproul cleared in dawn raid; sit-in resumes,” (April 17, 1985): 1.
16 Tom Abate, “City told to divest itself of holdings that relate to S. Africa,” Daily Californian (January 18, 1979): 16.
17 Arnie Thompson, “ASUC urges Berkeley to divest,” Daily Californian (January 26, 1979): 3 & 4.
18 Michael Stern, “Divestment would cost city $400,000 annually,” Daily Californian (February 27, 1979): 1.
19 Todd Oppenheimer, “City to restructure investment policy: Apartheid shunned,” Daily Californian (February 19, 1980): 4. In addition to divesting city funds and supporting community initiatives, the ordinance also mandated that state officials create a nine-member investment committee to further define the city’s investment policies.
20 Les Suzukamo, “Unanimous Senate vote: ASUC divests pension plan,” Daily Californian (June 6, 1979): 1.
21 Ibid. This senate vote also established a reinvestment advisory committee to advise on new investments, especially those that would allow for reinvesting in the local community.
22 “Students faculty honor boycott of UC classes,” Daily Californian (April 22, 1985): 3. In a notable exception, the Department of Music turned a dance seminar into an impromptu performance in the Sproul Plaza dedicated to Southern African liberation. As the boycott of classes came just before spring break, student reporters were wary of estimating the numbers who actually cut class to leave early and those who skipped class in solidarity with the sitters, but 100,000 is the number that they quote so I use it here aware of their hesitation.
81
23 Eileen Nakashima, “Faculty participate in divestment movement,” Daily Californian (April 23, 1985): 1 & Editorial “Day of Action,” Daily Californian (April 23, 1985): 4.
24 “City officials arrested in apartheid action,” Daily Californian (May 2, 1985): 1, “Six arrested at University Hall protest,” (May 10, 1985): 1 & “38 faculty, 4 others arrested in protests,” (April 29, 1985): 1. “Twelfth day: both sides hang tough: Tensions continue to rise on Sproul,” Daily Californian (April 22, 1985): 5. There were other instances of supported that stretched beyond the local area as well. UC Santa Cruz students began a companion protest and the Alexandra Stephens, “Protestors at Santa Cruz: ‘focused up,’” Daily Californian (April 22, 1985): 1.
25 Daniel Letwin, “Now is time to revive issue of investment in S. Africa,” Daily Californian (October 9, 1980): 5 & 23.
26 Between 1980 and 1985 there was some anti-apartheid work. The Board of Regents used shareholder resolutions on a small handful of occasions with little effect and debated divestment at Board meetings virtually every year. However, every time articles in the Daily Californian speculated about a nearing approval for divestment the Board disappointed, which enraged some but provoked little response. There was very little student activity on campus. Besides a 100-person march in December of 1984, which proceeded similarly to the 1977 Sproul sit-in, there were few new developments. This does not mean that student activists were silent. Students were engaged in other protests against American intervention in the Nicaraguan Revolution, support of the Contras, fighting the University for its ethnic studies program, and raising the number of students of color on campus.
27 Frontline states refers to South Africa’s neighbors who served as the first level of attack against apartheid, housed many exiled South African activists and the African National Congress’ armed forces, uMkhonto weSizwe, and fought their own wars against South African dominance in the region.
28 Elsewhere, the Nicaraguan Revolution supported fears that the American government was supporting undemocratic forces in its blind anti-communist rhetoric. The American-funded Contra war and the country’s history with minority rule and violent repression by the government (against which the Revolutionary government positioned itself) did little to sway fears that the U.S. government did not have democracy in mind when it came to foreign policy.
29 Constructive engagement involved ongoing conversations and cooperation with the minority regime. [Reagan] emphasized gradual evolution toward democracy, which could only be realized with white South African assistance. The belief that majority rule would necessarily entail bloodshed and disorder lay embedded in this notion.” Culverson, Contesting, 84. There was also a belief inherent in this policy that by keeping American money in South Africa, the U.S. could contribute to the modernizations of South African racial systems. If American firms remained in southern Africa, the country would eventually evolve past racial segregation. Ironically enough, these people took for granted the fact that racism was not a stop to modern “progress,” proven by America’s own history.
30 The UC Divestment Coalition, “Why UC should divest,” Daily Californian (April 4, 1985): 4.
31 “Students faculty honor boycott of UC classes,” Daily Californian (April 22, 1985): 3.
32 George Olsen, “Chancellor Favors Selective Divestment,” & Melinda Smolin, “High-level concerns and S. Africa protests clash,” Daily Californian (April 24, 1985): 1.
33 Melinda Smolin and Craig Anderson, “Regents halt South African investments: Blockade attempted when regents didn’t vote to divest results in twelve arrests,” Daily Californian (May 20, 1985): 1.
82
34 Chris Krueger and Craig Anderson, “UC regents reject full divestment plan Watered-down plans calls for review of companies with South African ties,” Daily Californian (June 24, 1985): 1.
35 http://www.thesullivanfoundation.org/gsp/principles/gsp/default.asp In 1984, Rev. Sullivan added the proviso that companies should also work to eliminate racist, discriminatory laws. All American company operating in South Africa were contacted to become a signatory of the Sullivan Principles and, if they agreed, they would be contacted every year, through a survey, to track their success in instituting change.
36 Jacqueline Noble and Valaria Edwards, “Divest Now,” Mills Stream (February 20, 1987): 2.
37 Ibid. There were also scores of South African activists who supported divestment and international sanctions and spurred students’ resolve.
38 “State Department: ‘No’ to divestment,” Daily Californian (March 28, 1985): 5.
39 I am locating 1986 as the end of anti-apartheid work for a variety of reasons including the achievement of divestment and a decrease in anti-apartheid articles in the Daily Californian. The latter is actually more significant than the former as there was no coverage of the release of Nelson Mandela (1990), negotiations between the ANC and NP (beginning in 1991) or the first democratic elections (1994), important markers of the actual end of South African apartheid.
40 Culverson, Contesting, 84.
41 Ibid, 134.
42 Thomas J. Redden, Jr., “The US Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986: Anti-Apartheid or Anti- African National Congress?” African Affairs 87, no. 349 (October, 1988), 595-605.
43 Ibid, 595. Redden posits that conservative forces within the Congress focused on the ANC relationship with the Communist Party to discredit their leaders and forced the United States to once again ally itself with conservative forces within South Africa who advocated racist apartheid policies in this case the IFP. In this way the Act also took the focus away from self-determination, instead concerned U.S. policies with the “ANC’s perceived threat to United States national security.”
44 Ibid.
45 Metz, “The Anti-Apartheid Movement and the Populist Instinct in American Politics,” 601.
46 Culverson, Contesting Apartheid, 84.
47 In the next chapter’s discussion of anti-apartheid at HBCUs, one will see that divestment was never the principal concern of African American college students and in many ways this allowed them to criticize not just American financial entanglement with apartheid but also other countries’ complicity in supporting it, especially Israel.
48 Altbach, “Introduction” in Student Politics, xvi.
Chapter 2
1 Bill O’Brien, “Divestment and Mills College,” East Bay Express (June 5, 1987): 16.
2 Denise Foret, “‘Shanties’ a protest for divestment,” Mills College Weekly (January 30, 1987): 1& 8. 83
3 Denise Foret, “Protestors march for divestment,” Mills Stream (February 6, 1987): 1.
4 Ibid.
5 Culverson’s Contesting Apartheid: U.S. Activism, 1960-1987 and Janice Love’s The U.S. Anti-Apartheid Movement: Local Activism in Global Politics remain the most complete discussions of anti-apartheid activism in the U.S to date. While neither scholar deals specifically with students, both authors address the importance of anti-apartheid to student activists.
6 There is a growing historiography of South African women’s activism including Jaclyn Cock’s Maids and Madams: Domestic Workers under Apartheid, Belinda Bozzoli with Mmantho Nkotsoe’s Women of Phokeng: Consciousness, Life Strategy, and Migrancy in South Africa, 1900-1983 and Cherryl Walker’s Women and Resistance in South Africa.
7 Irene Harworth, Mindy Maline and Elizabeth DeBra, Women’s Colleges in the United States: History Issues, and Challenges (Washington, D.C: National Institute on Postsecondary Education, Libraries, and Lifelong Learning, U.S. Department of Education, June 1997), 12-13.
8 According to Harwarth, et al, the generation of graduates, roughly from 1920-World War II, re-committed themselves to marriage, children and domesticity. Ibid, 13.
9 Ibid, 14.
10 Professor Gould was the subject of an article just weeks prior to the forum as he was denied a research visa to South African, Yvette Olsen, “Forum Speaker Denied South Africa Visa,” Mills Stream (November 12, 1985): 1 & 4. Julian Kunnie is currently the Director and Professor in the Department of African Studies at The University of Africana Studies. Kunnie has published Is Apartheid Really Dead: Pan- Africanist Working Class Cultural Critical Perspectives and Models of Black Theology: Issues in Class, Culture, and Gender.
11 Yvette Olsen, “Forum Speakers Demand Majority Rule in South Africa,” Mills College Weekly (November 19, 1984): 2.
12 “Students and Faculty Gather to Plan Anti-Apartheid Strategy,” Mills Stream (February 18, 1985): 1.
13 Ibid, 5.
14 Katy Hickman, “Protesters Call for Divestment: Mills Students Arrested for Anti-Apartheid Protest.” Mills Stream (April 22, 1985): 1. Many Mills students were involved in supporting this strike. Two students, Melissa Shore and Joan Hoseman, and members of the MSCD were arrested while others passed out literature to the protesters. The articles’ author also seems to have been a member of the MSCD.
15 Melissa Wallace, “Against Divestiture—A Rebuttal,” February 26, 1987. MCSC, File Folder: South Africa-Divestment-Trustees & President.
16 MSCD, “Letter to the Mills College Board of Trustees,” February 7, 1987. MCSC, File Folder: South Africa-Divestment-Trustees & President.
17 While there were obviously other groups that organized around apartheid, only the MSCD left an account of their work, without which it might be impossible to recount Mills’ anti-apartheid activity.
84
18 Pat Gillenwater, “Letter to Carter Gillmore,” March 10, 1987. MCSC, File Folder: South Africa- Divestment-Oakland City Council & Mills College, 1. As an interesting side note Councilman Gilmore asked the MSCD to draft the resolution and presented it, verbatim, to the City Council.
19 This request did not necessarily emerge in a vacuum as the City of Oakland passed Ordinance No. 10611 on July 23, 1985, which divested all city funds from companies doing business in South Africa and the State of California divested in 1986.
20 Jennifer Lee, “Colloquium concerns S. Africa: ‘Experts say sanctions and boycotts will not bring peace,” Mills Weekly (November 7, 1986): 1. Price and Duignan argued that the protest tactics popular in the international anti-apartheid movement would not be successful in achieving peaceful majority rule in South Africa.
21 Possibly not as a coincidence to the growing importance of divestment at Mills, in November 1986, the college debate team tackled the issue of divestment as preparation for their first intercollegiate tournament. Marianna Talbot, “Debate team wrestles divestment issue,” Mills College Weekly (November 7, 1986): 1.
22 Mills College Board of Trustees, “Statement of Investment Responsibility.” Reprinted in Yip Sau Ching “Apartheid: Pres. White Responds,” Mills Stream (September 27, 1979): 1.
23 Editorial, “Questioning Priorities,” Mills Stream (February 11, 1985): 2.
24 Yvette Olsen, “Mills Investment in South Africa Discussed: Metz Calls for Anti-Apartheid Action but Disagrees with Students’ Strategies,” Mills Stream (February 4, 1985): 1.
25 “Mills College students protest for divestment,” Oakland Tribune (January 23, 1987): 5.
26 Ibid.
27 Warren Hellman, “Hellman Statement for Press Conference, March 4, 1987. MCSC, File: Folder: South Africa-Divestment-Trustees & President.
28 MSCD. Letter to the Board, 7 February 1987. MCSC, File: Folder: South Africa-Divestment-Trustees & President.
29 Mary Metz, “Memo re: the Formation of a South African Action Committee,” March 23, 1987. MCSC, File Folder: South Africa-Divestment-Trustees & President. It is interesting to note that the SAAC never took a stance on divestment. It is difficult to know whether this was because of their close affiliation with the College, but even when individual members of the SAAC supported divestment, as a group they rarely offered new solutions to this debate.
30 Lindsay Beaven, News Release “Mills College Adopt Disengagement Stance with Companies Doing Business in South Africa,” May 19, 1987. MCSC, File Folder: South Africa-Divestment-Trustees & President.
31 Julie Bourland, “Trustees Vote for South African Divestment,” Mills College Weekly (September 14, 1990): 1.
32 Ibid.
33 Katy Hickman, “Protesters Call for Divestment,” Mills Stream (April 22, 1985): 1.
85
34 “Calls for Divestment Gains Momentum: Nationwide Campus Anti-Apartheid Movement Stirs,” Mills Stream, (January 28, 1985): 1 & 4.
35 It is likely that the occasion of Mt. Holyoke’s divestment was especially significant for Mills because it was another women’s college, one of the Seven Sisters and Susan Mills, founder of Mills College, was a graduate of Mt. Holyoke. Sara Rosenblum, “Mt. Holyoke to divest,” Mills Stream (November 25, 1985): 1 & 3.
36 Wallace, Letter, 3.
37 “Letter to Carter Gilmore,” March 10, 1987. MCSC, File Folder: South Africa-Divestment-Oakland City Council & Mills College, 1.
38 At this stage it is impossible to know if this occurred elsewhere. The other women’s colleges considered, Simmons and Spelman, unfortunately do not have recorded correspondence between students and faculty. Thus, if other women used traditional women’s roles to incite activism that will have to be the subject of another work.
39 Amy Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
40 Sara Evans, Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century’s End (New York: The Free Press, 2003), 189.
41 See M. Bahati Kuumba “You’ve Struck a Rock” and Gender and Social Movements. This chasm has, not coincidentally, been the standpoint from which scholars of women in the South African anti-apartheid movement have discussed women in the anti-apartheid movement.
42 Einwohner et al discuss the ways in which social movements can be framed to legitimize certain actors. I argue here that the South African anti-apartheid movement was framed in a way that legitimized male actors in both South Africa and the U.S. Because opposition heroes were men, women were peripheral. Women in South Africa were understood as the mothers and wives of heroes and martyrs which created a movement where those in South Africa who needed to be liberated were men, who would then steer South Africa towards democracy and equality. Rachel L. Einwohner, Jocelyn A. Holland and Toska Olson, “Engendering Social Movements: Cultural Images and Movement Dynamics,” Gender and Society 14, no. 5 (October 2000), 681.
43 In this section gender is operating in two distinct but connected ways. First, there will be a discussion of the possibility in Mills’ women’s use of gender roles to make their message palatable is a discussion of the ways in which the South African struggle was understood as a male domain whereby men were dominant actors, this then makes women invisible. A response to this construction was to insert South African women into the picture. Later gender will be discussed as the way Mills activists used ideas of femininity as a strategy to achieve their goals.
44 This trend in the exile status does begin to change after Soweto, as school-age children of both sexes are involved in radical protest and exiled, although this does not seem to have changed the masculine construction of the exile.
45 There were a number of exiled women who also spoke to sympathetic crowds. They were much fewer in number and never spoke at Mills specifically. Although I would argue that when these exiled women did speak even if they offered similar stories to those espoused by their male counterparts, as women, they destabilized the masculine construction of exile. 86
46 Andreae Downs, “South Africa: One Woman’s Story,” Mills Stream (October 30, 1980): 1.
47 Tina Ham, “S. African student at Simmons,” Simmons News (November 3, 1988): 3.
48 Editorial, “Foreign Nationals On Spelman’s Campus,” Spelman Spotlight (February/March 1976): 8. Her name is alternatively spelled Lendi in the article. At Howard, The Hilltop profiled a graduate student, Twiggs Xiphu, who was seeking political asylum in the U.S. because he feared for his safety upon his return to South Africa.
49 Helen Kang, “Naomi Tutu-Seavers at Mills,” Mills Weekly (March 6, 1987): 1.
50 Lisa Kremer, “Mandela Speaks Out In Filled Concert Hall,” Mills Weekly (April 7, 1989): 3.
51 Ibid.
52 Melissa Wallace. “Letter to The Mills College Board of Trustees,” February 7, 1987. MCSC, File Folder: South Africa-Divestment- Trustees & President, 2.
53 One exception to this overall trend involved petitions to rename public places in the names of both Nelson and Winnie Mandela. William Mintner, Gail Hovey and Charles, Cobb Jr. No Easy Victories: African Liberation and American Activists Over a Half Century, 1950-2000 (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, Inc., 2008), 38.
54 Denise Foret, “‘Shanties’ a protest for divestment.” Mills College Weekly (January 30, 1987): 8.
55 Edie Eichert, Letter to the Editor, “Simmons Must Divest,” Simmons News (May 5, 1988): 11.
Chapter 3
1 Yvonne Hobbes, “Campus Speakout,” The Hilltop (October 15, 1976): 12.
2 Jennifer Brandlon, “Speakers call on students to demand S. Africa divestment,” Daily Californian (April 27, 1978): 20.
3 Ibid.
4 Peter Rombold, “Blacks lack campus unity,” Daily Californian (May 3, 1978): 1.
5 Ibid, 32.
6 Ibid.
7 HBCUs provided a unique space from which African Americans have offered sophisticated critiques of racial discrimination.i In the mid-twentieth century, HBCUs were breeding grounds for Black student activism. V.P. Franklin discusses the important role that students played in supporting Civil Rights efforts and bringing the era of social activism onto the campus in the 1960s. Using Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana as an example, Franklin asserts that early Civil Rights work in the 1950s catapulted many students into careers of social protest and, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Black students supported Civil Rights activities, agitated for revised curricula to represent the experiences of racial minorities in the U.S. and protested the Vietnam War. It was in fact four North Carolina A&T students who sat in at a local Woolworth’s lunch counter on February 1, 1960 and reignited the Black Freedom Struggle. This reciprocal 87 relationship between the Black community and historically Black campuses continued well past the demise of the formal Civil Rights movement. At Spelman and Howard, Black students generally followed, and were supported by, off-campus leaders in the Black community into anti-apartheid work, which may begin to explain why the Civil Rights and Black Power movements were important rhetorical starting points for African American anti-apartheid work.
8 This chapter's usage of the "African Diaspora" posits that 1980s international Black activism is very similar to, and a result of, early twentieth-century Pan-Africanism and mid-century Black nationalist/Black Power movements. Like their predecessors, diasporic identities connected African American equality in the U.S. with African decolonization and Black self-determination. Invoking the Diaspora espoused a symbiotic relationship between the African continent and its Diaspora, whereby evidence of racial discrimination in one country was symptomatic of the same in another.
9 Other institutions joined the AUC over the years such as Morris Brown and Clark Colleges in 1957, the Interdenominational Theological Union in 1959, and the Morehouse School of Medicine in 1983.
10 Karen P. Moore, “NAACP: Protests Davis Cup Tourney,” Spelman Spotlight (March 1978): 4.
11 Ibid.
12 There was a four year gap in anti-apartheid work covered in the Spotlight (1978-1982). It is unclear if this stemmed from a pause in anti-apartheid work or is a reflection of the Spotlight’s sometimes spotty publication history. In some years it was a monthly publication, in others it published every 2-3 weeks, while in other years there might have only been one or two editions per semester.
13 Marie Roberts, “SCLC Boycotts Winn Dixie Grocery Stores,” Spelman Spotlight (November 1985): 1 & 12.
14 Ibid.
15 Chief Albert J. Luthuli & the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Appeal For Action Against Apartheid,” http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/solidarity/mlking01.html.
16 Martin Luther King, Jr. “Speech in London in December 1964,” http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/solidarity/mlking01.html.
17 King, “Let My People Go,” http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/solidarity/mlking01.html. Dr. King first expressed this position in a speech in 1964, “Speech in London in December 1964,” http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/solidarity/mlking01.html.
18 E.S. Reddy, “The Revered Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on Apartheid in South Africa: Three Statements,” http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/solidarity/mlking01.html.
19 Lewis Baldwin, Toward the Beloved Community: Martin Luther King Jr. and South Africa (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 1995), 116.
20 Ibid, 113.
21 Young to visit South Africa,” Daily California (May 16, 1977): 2 & “Young Speaks Out in South Africa,” Daily California (May 23, 1977): 11;
88
22 Black Family Album 1984-1986, 4.
23 Borstelmann, Color Line, 262.
24 This division was most stark for Bishop Tutu who, by the 1980s, expressed his hope for nonviolent change in South Africa but did not condemn groups such as the ANC for turning to violence as the NP had refused to respond to nonviolent protest for the previous almost forty years.
25 Henry Boyd Hall, “Special convocation: Tutu speaks on apartheid,” Hilltop (November 9, 1984): 1.
26 Ibid, 6.
27 These screenings were usually accompanied by discussions of campus-based anti-apartheid work and, interestingly, whether to view the film as a realistic depiction or anti-apartheid propaganda.
28 Ibid.
29 Sydney Perkins, “Students Commemorate Massacre By AUC Vigil Against Apartheid,” Spelman Spotlight (April 1985): 1.
30 Metz, “Populist Instinct,” 391. & Kelch, “A joining effort: Forum focuses on South Africa,” Hilltop (April 5, 1985): 4.
31 Ibid.
32 Culverson, Contesting Apartheid, 50.
33 Ibid, 134.
34 Kevin Simms, “Student Organization Seeks To Revive Liberation Movement,” Hilltop (April 7, 1978): 1.
35 Victor Azinge, Letter to the Editor “We are all One People,” Hilltop (October 1, 1976): 4.
36 Ibid.
37 Jill Bryant & Jiea Rutland, “The Struggle Continues,” Spelman Spotlight (February 1988): 6.
38 Culverson, Contesting Apartheid, 100.
39 Ibid, 140.
40 For in depth discussions of the “welfare queen” stereotype see David Zucchino’s The Myth of the Welfare Queen; Anna Marie Smith’s Welfare Reform and Sexual Regulation, Vivyan C. Adair “Branded with Infamy: Inscriptions of Poverty and Class in the United States,” Signs, 27, no. 2 (Winter 2002), 451- 471; and “Dethroning the Welfare Queen: The Rhetoric of Reform,” Harvard Law Review, 107, no. 8 (June 1994), 2013-1030. For Regan see Paul Pierson’s Dismantling the Welfare State?: Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment and Richard s. Conley, ed. Reassessing the Reagan Presidency.
41 At least one student was ambivalent about how that might affect domestic struggles. Norman G. Keith asserted that while he supported South African liberation he believed that “our primary concerns should be…with the struggle for blacks in the… United States.” Campus Speakout, Hilltop (October 15, 1976): 12.
89
42 Campus Speakout, Hilltop (March 18, 1977): 12.
43 Campus Speakout, Hilltop (October 28, 1977): 12.
44 This is not to say that interracial anti-apartheid groups did not also sympathize with the South African struggle, it is simply a discussion of method. For whatever reason Azania was not in popular use outside of majority Black groups. This can be explained in part in stated goals. It may have been that groups concerned with the divestment of American corporations in South Africa aimed their efforts at majority white institutions and the South African state, in which case Azania would not have been useful. But Black students focused their efforts on the oppressed masses because they were black and showed their intent thusly. This would then provide another reason for the “interpretive linkages” that combined domestic and international racism.
45 Of this group, the NAACP is the only organization not originally founded to oppose apartheid.
46 Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
47 Ann Gibbons, “Cops arrest 56 at Sproul sit-in,” Daily Californian (June 3, 1977): 32.
48 Ula Taylor argues that Amy Jacques Garvey “viewed Africa and the Diaspora as a dialectical equation: if Africans on the continent were exploited, then their condition reflected on their ‘family’ scattered throughout the far corners of the globe.” This seems to be an accurate depiction of previous generations of Pan-African scholars in the U.S. and Caribbean. Taylor, The Veiled Garvey: The Life & Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 236.
49 Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic is a thorough examination of this reality although this author takes issue with Gilroy’s dismissal of Africa as an important site for New World Black identities in the late twentieth century and his disregard of Black communities in Latin America.
50 While this chapter focuses on South Africa, thus eliding the complexity of 1980s diasporic identities, students were creating ways of understanding themselves based on their connections with a heterogeneous collection of Black communities around the world.
51 “We’re All Africans!... So Celebrate,” Spelman Spotlight (February 22, 1982): 1.
52 Moore, “Protests Davis Cup Tourney,” 4.
53 In one interesting article, a student journalist discusses the social location of people of African descent in Margaret Thatcher’s England. Vincent Huggins, “Britain, Thatcher Unfair To Blacks” Hilltop (September 7, 1979): 5. This continuous renaming is also significant as students move towards understanding the expanse of the Black world. From an amorphous “Third World,” pitted against the “First World” in the West to African World. It is interesting then that, in the African world section, is that the Continent is positioned alongside other centers of Black populations in the New World, as their first connection to understanding the physical Diaspora. The “World” and “Elsewhere” sections are interesting in their refusal to locate any one country or continent as a “home.” Rather, through these names they are beginning to understand that Black people could be found anywhere in the world.
54 King, “Let My People Go.”
Conclusion
90
1 Culverson, Contesting Apartheid, 155.
2 Many of these issues have included the limited progress of the ANC-NP negotiations, increasing violence in the country, continued economic and political inequality along racial lines, sporadic political scandal, and a neat epidemic of HIV/AIDS which has created a considerable population of orphans and infected children in the country. For a continued discussion of some of these issues see Rob Nixon, “The Collapse of the Communist-Anticommunist condominium: The Repercussions for South Africa,” Social Text, no. 31/32, Third World and Post-Colonial Issues (1992), 235-251; Alexander Johnston, “South Africa: The Election and the Emerging Party System,” International Affairs, 70, no. 4 (October 1994), 721-736; Anne Outwater, Naaema Abrahams and Jacquelyn C. Campbell, “Women in South Africa: Intentional Violence and HIV/AIDS: Intersections and Prevention,” Journal of Black Studies, 35, no. 4 (March 2005), 135-154.
91
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