Introduction

An apartheid sign in South Africa

A Jim Crow sign in Georgia, USA

This Special Topics chapter will cover two of the most important human rights campaigns of the 20th century: the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, and the Anti-Apartheid Movement in South Africa. Both movements ended long periods of legalized, institutionalized racial discrimination in their respective countries, removing major barriers to true democracy. Neither of these movements attained its goals easily; it took years of coordinated effort in the face of violent government and social resistance to finally remove undemocratic systems in their nations. This chapter will narrate each movement, analyze the outcomes, and compare the two movements.

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Jim Crow in the United States

After the US Civil War in the 19th century, the federal government thought that widespread racial discrimination in the South would end, now that slavery was eliminated. However, after US troops withdrew from former Confederate states, those states enacted laws to prevent African Americans from achieving full citizenship and civil rights. Known colloquially as Jim Crow laws, these state statutes physically separated the races, preventing African Americans from attending the same schools as Whites, or even using the same restaurants and hotels. They also legalized employment discrimination, preventing African Americans from holding well-paid jobs, or jobs with legal power, such as judges. Finally, they also prevented African Americans from voting in elections. Although the US Constitution gives all adult citizens the right to vote, Jim Crow laws circumvented the Constitution by allowing states to place requirements on voters, such as literacy tests or poll taxes. These laws, therefore, effectively prevented full democracy in the Southern states and legally protected racial discrimination.

Before WWII, African Americans challenged Jim Crow laws, and discrimination in general, mainly through court challenges and public outreach. Leaders such as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois struggled against discrimination, although they often used different tactics. The strongest advocacy organization was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which filed lawsuits against cases of racial discrimination.

WWII energized African Americans and their struggle. Many African Americans served in the military; they gained leadership experience and confidence in the war, and knew that the nation owed them full rights since they had fought for the nation. Also, the fascists preached racist doctrines, and Allied propaganda emphasized freedom. It now seemed the height of hypocrisy to suppress African American rights after fighting against the very same philosophy during the war. Then, during the Korean War, President Truman desegregated the military, and White and Black Americans fought together side-by-side for the first time.

But what is referred to as the Civil Rights Movement began in 1954. Litigants (with the help of the NAACP) sued state governments over segregated schools, claiming that schools for African Americans were underfunded and inferior by design. Proponents of segregation claimed that schools, and other facilities, did not violate civil rights because they were “separate but equal.” The US Supreme Court, in the famous Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, proclaimed that “separate but equal” was a lie, and that the claimants had proven their case. The court then ordered all states to desegregate their schools “with all deliberate speed.” Other rulings desegregated other public spaces, such as restaurants and bus stations. But the states chose to ignore the rulings.

This set up the coming conflict. It is the responsibility of the Executive Branch of the US federal government to uphold the law, but it was politically explosive to try to desegregate the South, where discrimination was a tradition. Activists now saw that legal victories were not enough to eliminate Jim Crow, because the government would simply ignore the law. Therefore, the movement which followed was won through direct action, such as protests and other demonstrations. Activists were now convinced that there was no other way. The objective was clear: to dismantle the racist Jim Crow system.

The first mass demonstration in the movement came in December 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama. Rosa Parks, an NAACP activist, refused to give up her seat on a bus to a White passenger. She was arrested and convicted of violating a local law. This triggered a response from local African American leaders, who formed the Montgomery Improvement Association to launch a protest movement. They chose for their leader young Baptist minister of extraordinary charisma and ability: Martin Luther King Jr. In King’s first major leadership role, he organized a boycott of Montgomery busses in order to bankrupt the public bussing system; the boycott continued for about a year, when the Supreme Court intervened, ordering the city to desegregate bussing. The city complied, and the movement had won its first victory. King had taken Gandhi’s tactics of nonviolent resistance and coupled them with Christian morality to create a new and powerful tool for resisting racism in America. The next year, he and his supporters formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an organization which provided support for direct action campaigns.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The next major challenge for the movement came in Little Rock, Arkansas. The Little Rock school board had decided to desegregate after Brown v. Board of Ed, unlike most of the South. In 1957, nine African American students enrolled in Little Rock High School, the first Black students to ever do so. Arkansas governor Orval Faubus ordered the National Guard to prevent the Little Rock Nine from entering the school the first day of the term. A federal judge intervened, allowing the nine students to attend, but they were again blocked, this time by an angry mob of local White citizens. Finally, President Eisenhower intervened, sending federal troops to protect the Little Rock Nine as they attended classes. Despite the protection, the abuse the teenagers suffered from White students was traumatic; only one of the nine, Ernest Green, managed to graduate.

So great was the resistance to integration that Little Rock chose to close all its public schools rather than allow White and Black students to attend together. This “Lost Year” was finally ended by a federal court order in 1959, forcing the public schools to desegregate.

The first major split in the movement came in 1960. King and the SCLC had been moving slowly and carefully; some activists, especially younger ones, wanted to move faster and with less top-down control, a common disagreement in social movements. In February 1960, a group of African American college students in Greensboro, North Carolina decided to protest segregation by sitting at the Whites-only lunch counter in a Woolworth department store. They were not part of any organization; they simply thought up the plan on their own and executed it. If they were denied service, the department store would be violating the Supreme Court’s desegregation orders; if the authorities did not intervene, they would not be enforcing the court’s ruling, opening them to lawsuits. The idea was to agitate for change.

[As an aside: college students are famous as activists in social movements and rebellions throughout history. College students are educated, able to understand the injustices in their societies. Furthermore, they are typically young, without spouses or children or professional jobs, and thus have little to lose. The combination of the two makes for dedicated activists.]

The police began arresting the protesters, who were immediately replaced by more protesters. By the end of the spring, over 70,000 protesters had participated in sit-ins in dozens of towns in the South, and media coverage allowed the entire world to watch.

Civil Rights protesters at Woolworth's Sit-In, Durham, NC, 10 February, 1960

The Greensboro Sit-Ins had an influence far beyond the Woolworth lunch counter (which is now a civil rights memorial site). The NAACP and SLCL tried to bring the movement under their control, but the students declined. Following the philosophy that “strong people do not need strong leaders,” the students instead established the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). This was a grassroots group dedicated to helping local activists follow their own plans, rather than operate with a top-down philosophy, as the NAACP and SCLC did. This presented King and other leaders with a problem: if they were to continue leading the movement, they would have to satisfy the younger activists and push for more agitation and faster change; but that would bring a harsher reaction from White authorities, perhaps even violence. In the end, King shifted towards a more confrontational stance in an attempt at retaining some unity in the movement.

The opportunity came in 1961, when the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) launched the Freedom Rides. In the South, it was illegal for Whites and Blacks to ride busses together or sit together in bus stations. Interracial groups, composed mainly of college students, many from the North, planned to ride together to challenge segregationist laws. In Alabama, one bus was firebombed, and the riders beaten by a White mob when they fled the flaming vehicle. When CORE considered abandoning the protests as too dangerous, SNCC and SCLC stepped in to offer support. The rides continued and expanded throughout the South. In many places, particularly Mississippi, riders were arrested for daring to ride together and were thrown in prison. The Freedom Rides represented an intensification of the movement, with the SCLC shifting to more provocative actions.

All of this was causing problems for the Democratic Party in the United States. The Executive Branch under Democratic President John F. Kennedy was tasked with desegregating the South, as the Supreme Court had ordered; but the South was controlled mainly by Democrats. Although northern Democrats sympathized with the protestors, their southern counterparts, called Dixiecrats, were segregationists. This caused a split in the Democratic Party, where the President could not enforce the law without angering much of his own party. This was one reason why the government was so unwilling to enforce its own laws. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy asked the movement for a “cooling off” period, but movement leaders refused; they knew that only sustained pressure would bring change.

The next major campaign – and probably the most intense of the entire movement – came in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. Local activists had failed to make headway in what was thought to be the most segregated city in America. King and the SCLC stepped in to help, launching huge protests composed mainly of young people. Local authorities responded brutally. The Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor, ordered police to use fire hoses and police dogs to attack protestors, assaulting and arresting thousands. King himself was quickly jailed in an attempt to break the protests.

Civil Rights Protest

When a group of eight Alabama clergymen published an open letter in a local paper, asking King to stop the protests, King replied with one of the most eloquent and important statements in US history, the Letter from a Birmingham Jail. In his open letter, MLK replied point-by-point to the clergymen’s pleas, explaining why the protests were necessary and exposing the clergymen’s apparent concern for safety as mere self-serving excuses to continue segregation.

The Birmingham campaign was the turning point in the movement and in American history as well, occurring as it did at the height of the Cold War. Via the expanding media of television, the entire world saw the nonviolent protestors being attacked simply for pursuing their civil rights – this in the “home of the free.” The USSR took full advantage of this, claiming that the American capitalists were hypocrites and racists; why should Africans join the US side in the Cold War, when White Americans abused Black people in their own country? It was a convincing argument, and America’s allies were deeply concerned that it was working.

It was Birmingham which finally convinced Kennedy that he had to act, even if it would divide his own party. He planned to sign civil rights legislation to end segregation in the South, but was assassinated before he could do so. It would fall to his vice president and successor, Lyndon Johnson, to carry it out.

Kennedy did intervene in Birmingham, where Jim Crow laws were dismantled as a result of the protests. MLK and the movement continued since segregation continued throughout the South. In August 1963, over 200,000 people attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It was here that King gave his most famous address, “I Have a Dream,” in which he linked African American appeals for civil rights to the aspirations of the Founding Fathers. It was a positive, aspirational view of America which sought unity rather than division.
The movement finally achieved its first national victory since Brown v. Board of Ed with the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. President Johnson fought hard against the Dixiecrats to get Congress to pass the act, which prohibited segregation in America. When he finally signed the act in July, legend claims that he told a Democratic aide, “We have lost the South for a generation.” It was to prove a prophetic statement.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not end voting discrimination in the South, which was one of the most egregious aspects of Jim Crow. The movement therefore continued, even as MLK was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the same year. The next major campaign was a series of marches from Selma, Alabama, to the capitol of Montgomery, to protest the ongoing denial of voting rights for African Americans. Many of the protestors were beaten by state police, and White mobs killed several of them. President Johnson sent troops and federal agents to protect the marchers because the state government would not. That summer, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which removed all Jim Crow restrictions on voting. This was the last major victory for the movement.

The next year, the movement began to splinter once again. Young African American radicals launched their own organizations, and their goals and methods were not the same as King’s. Rallying around the cry of “Black Power,” the new activists rejected collaboration with Whites and sought more than just civil rights, but also political, economic, and social power. Perhaps most importantly, they rejected nonviolence as a necessity. Race riots were breaking out across America; some White police brutalized Black citizens in retaliation for what they saw as a Black takeover of the country, and Black citizens were longer of a mind to accept it passively. The Watts Riots of August 1965 killed 34 people and injured a thousand. Other major riots broke out in Chicago and Detroit.

The Black Panthers were the most famous of the radical groups. Originally formed as armed neighborhood patrols to counter police abuse, the group also sponsored volunteer programs to assist the poor. The group rejected King’s nonviolence, and sometimes engaged in fights with the police, killing people on both sides. King denounced such tactics, claiming that it stained the reputation of the movement and would slow social change. The Black Panthers believed that King was too moderate. Malcom X, spokesman for the Nation of Islam, felt the same way. Discouraged with the slow rate of change in America, he rejected the civil rights movement and preached that Black people should not live with Whites. His dream was to create a separate homeland in America for African Americans; but that was just a step on the way to the end goal, which was the return of all African diaspora to the true homeland of Africa (see Pan-Africanism in Chapter 9). Martin Luther King called Malcom X misguided, and Malcom called MLK a “chump.” Nevertheless, King’s part of the movement continued with the December 1967 launch of the Poor People’s Campaign, designed to lobby for an end to poverty in America.

The FBI had been running a campaign of monitoring civil rights leaders from its very beginnings. Edgar J. Hoover, head of the FBI, suspected King of having communist sympathies, especially after King spoke out against the Vietnam war. The FBI even sent King anonymous letters encouraging him to commit suicide. The agency went even farther against the Black Panthers, whom they regarded as an existential threat to the country.

MLK was assassinated in April 1968, by a White supremacist, and the civil rights movement began to decline. One reason was that the movement had succeeded in eliminating Jim Crow laws in the South, and many people considered its goals accomplished, even though racism remained in many forms. Furthermore, radical organizations like the Black Panthers turned many moderates away from the movement, and the urban riots disenchanted others. Finally, the FBI cracked down on the radicals, arresting many of them and even killing some of the leaders. Malcom X eventually rejected Nation of Islam as too radical, and was killed by some of their members in revenge. Both moderate and radical leaders were dying, and enthusiasm for the movement was waning. Although the movement had no distinct end, most historians agree that it was mostly over by 1968.

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Results of the Civil Rights Movement

What the movement accomplished, and failed to accomplish, have been hotly debated. Clearly, the movement did force the government to enforce the constitution and the Supreme Court’s findings and eliminate Jim Crow laws. As a result, African Americans in the South seized the franchise which the constitution granted them after the Civil War; it also allowed African Americans to run for public office, which many successfully did. The movement also removed legalized discrimination in hiring. None of this came without a price. At least 41 activists were killed during the movement by police or White supremacists; another 74 are suspected to have been killed for their work. Add to that the thousands who were beaten or imprisoned, and it is clear that the movement paid a considerable price for victory.

However, the movement failed to bring complete equality to African Americans, nor could it have in such a short time. Racism and stereotyping still exist, often with deadly consequences when it comes to policing. African Americans are incarcerated at a rate five times greater than White Americans, destroying their chances at economic mobility. Economic disparities are very difficult to overcome. Banks are often guilty of “redlining,” or refusing to give mortgages to people living in areas which are mainly African American. This prevents home ownership, a major factor in building intergenerational wealth. Informal hiring discrimination still exists. Schools are still largely segregated, not by laws, but by the fact that Blacks and Whites tend to live in different neighborhoods due to old racist practices. That means that school districts will lean towards one race or the other, and predominantly African American schools tend to be underfunded when compared with White ones.

Martin Luther King shifted the movement after 1964 to address these disparities, but died before he could make much headway. In any case, economic justice is a much more difficult task than repealing unjust laws, and will probably take decades to accomplish, although a great many activists are intent on succeeding. In that respect, the Civil Rights Movement was not only partially successful, but is also still ongoing.

Besides eliminating the Jim Crow system in the South, the movement had another lasting effect on American society, although it was unintended. Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon noticed the division in the Democratic Party and decided to leverage it, just as Johnson feared he would. Nixon approached the Dixiecrats and invited them to join the Republican Party, promising that he would not pursue civil rights the way that Johnson did; this became known as the Southern Strategy. Angry with their own party, the Dixiecrats switched parties, handing the South to the Republicans and the presidency to Nixon in 1969. Nixon had little to do with civil rights, because the movement was largely defunct by then. When the federal courts instituted a system of bussing children out of their school districts in order to eliminate de facto segregation, Nixon did not oppose it, hoping instead to remove segregation as a public issue before the next election. He would have won that election, too, were it not for the scandal of Watergate.

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South African Apartheid

Concurrent with the civil rights movement in the United States was an even larger movement in South Africa with essentially the same purpose.

South Africa was unusual among African colonies in that it did not go through the normal decolonization struggle so common after World War II. It was a British colony until 1910, when it became an independent nation. Unlike most of Africa, South Africa contained a significant White population of both Dutch and British descent (the Dutch were the original European settlers of South Africa). The temperate climate and good agricultural land of South Africa made the colony an attractive place for Europeans to emigrate. Their one concern was the people who already lived there. As elsewhere in the imperial world, the Europeans stole the best agricultural lands from the indigenous people and forced them to live on marginal land. The Whites also enslaved the Black Africans; when that practice ended in 1834, the White South Africans were unwilling to grant them total freedom in a case similar to the US after the Civil War. To maintain White supremacy, the White colonists established laws to formalize the racial hierarchy. This African version of the American Jim Crow laws, formally finalized in 1948, was called apartheid (“apartness” in Afrikaans, the local dialect of Dutch). From 1948 to 1959, various laws were made to maintain the separation between races and keep the White minority in power. These included:

1. The establishment of Black “homelands” in South Africa. All Black people were forced to live in these “Bantustans,” which were essentially giant ghettos for each tribe. Eighty percent of South Africa now belonged to White people, while the remainder – the worst agricultural lands – were given over to the indigenous. By the end of apartheid, more than three and a half million people had been forcibly moved into the Bantustans. These homelands not only removed Black Africans from the political life of the country, but also separated the tribes from each other, to prevent them from forming a unified resistance. Black Africans who were needed to work in the cities were required to live in “townships” outside the city; Black people were not allowed to live in White cities. They were required to commute to work each day, showing their passports to cross the border between communities.
   
2. Demanding that every citizen, by age 16, be classified as a particular race, with appropriate identification.
   
3. Forbidding mixed-race marriages and even sexual relations between races.
   
4. Establishing “pass laws,” requiring nonwhites to have government visas when traveling outside their homeland or township.
   
5. Creating separate public facilities for Blacks and Whites, as Jim Crow did.
   
6. Gave the White government authority to run schools in the Bantustans, to control education.
   
7. Outlawing communism and communist parties, and associating all anti-apartheid activity with communism in order to eliminate that as well.
   

Black suffrage was not even forbidden by the apartheid laws because it had never existed in South Africa. Blacks could vote in elections in their Bantustan, but not in national elections, since they were not considered full citizens.

Although these laws were more far-reaching than Jim Crow in the US, the purpose was the same: to prevent Black people from gaining the same rights as Whites.

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Resistance to Apartheid

Naturally, resistance to these laws began immediately. The most prominent resistance organizations at the start of apartheid were the African National Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party (SACP), and the South African Indian National Congress (SAINC, the party Gandhi had worked with in South Africa). Influenced by the SAINC, the new movement opted for nonviolent opposition. In 1950, this coalition organized a massive workers’ strike against the Suppression of Communism Act – even the non-communists knew that the law was meant to suppress all anti-apartheid groups, not just communists. The government broke up the strikes with violence, killing 18 workers.

The same coalition launched an even larger protest movement which lasted the second half of 1952, called the “Campaign of Defiance of Unjust Laws.” Black workers in the townships, when entering the White cities, would enter “Whites only” areas in a prelude to the American sit-ins; they would also burn their passbooks. While the workers protested, an ANC leader named Nelson Mandela rose to prominence within the movement by traveling throughout the country, giving speeches inspiring people to rebel against apartheid. Again, the government responded brutally, shooting protesters and arresting their leaders, including Mandela.

The Defiance Campaign caught the world’s attention. A group of African and Asian countries asked the United Nations to send a committee to South Africa to observe the situation and report back to the General Assembly. The resolution was vetoed by the United States. This was the beginning of a long and sometimes contentious US policy of supporting the South African government. Although the US was uncomfortable with apartheid, particularly during the civil rights movement, the country was inclined to support South Africa. The South African government was anti-communist, and the US considered it an ally in preventing communist insurgencies on the continent; furthermore, South Africa sold the US certain minerals necessary for steel production but not commonly found in the United States, and the US did not want to lose access to them by embargoing the country.

In 1955, several groups involved in the movement decided to create a unified umbrella group to set forth the movement’s demands and coordinate its activities. They formed the Congress Alliance (CA), with the ANC as the leading organization. At its first meeting – before police interrupted the proceedings – the organization signed the Freedom Charter, which claimed in its preamble: “We, the People of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know: that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, Black and White, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people…” The charter went on to demand democracy, human rights, labor rights, land reform, and nationalization of the nation’s assets.

The fact that the charter accepted the equal rights of White people angered some participants who thought that South Africa should be governed by Black people only; these people broke from the CA and formed the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), dedicated to Black nationalism. And in 1956, the government arrested most of the CA leaders, including all those of the ANC. They were charged with treason, but their 5-year trial ended with an acquittal for all involved.

A turning point in the movement came in March 1960, in the township of Sharpeville. A group from the PAC launched a nonviolent protest, and police responded with violence, killing 67 people, and wounding another one-hundred and eighty. This produced two important outcomes. First, it convinced many leaders of the movement, within the CA and without, that nonviolent resistance alone would not undo apartheid; the state, they believed, was so racist that it could not be shamed into changing its policy. (Remember that Gandhi was dealing with the British, who had the option of leaving India and going home. White South Africans were already home, and so would fight much harder.)

The second change was that the rest of the world, shocked at the government’s brutality, began to view South Africa as a pariah state. A global movement against apartheid began to build; sports teams would not play in South Africa, academics refused to hold conferences there, and musicians refused to play there. The United Nations severed ties with South Africa in 1962, overcoming American resistance. This pressure would only intensify as the years went on.

After Sharpeville, the South African government effectively banned anti-apartheid parties, including the ANC and the communist SACP, and arrested most of their leaders, imprisoning or executing them. Nelson Mandela toured Africa, speaking to enthusiastic national leaders and garnering support for his cause. However, Black South Africans were not permitted to travel without permission, and Mandela was arrested in 1963, when he tried to secretly re-enter South Africa. The ANC went into exile in Zambia, where it could continue operating. Also, the ANC and SACP cooperated in founding Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK, Spear of the Nation). This would serve as the military arm of the movement, and would carry out sabotage and bombings in South Africa. Initially, this group was unwilling to cause civilian casualties, and aimed to destroy, for example, unoccupied government buildings and electrical infrastructure. The association of the communists in the movement meant that MK would receive considerable technical support from the USSR – and earn it the disdain of the United States.

Mandela Voting in 1994

With MK and other associated organizations such as People's Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN) operating from just outside South Africa’s borders, the South African Defence Force (SADF) began raiding into neighboring “front line” countries to disrupt them. This regionalized the conflict, whether or not the neighboring countries wanted it that way, and made the South African “border wars” a proxy for the Cold War, with Israel and the US supporting South Africa, and the USSR supporting the rebels. MK, PLAN, and other groups attacked government targets in South Africa, and the SADF would cross the borders into Angola, Zambia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Botswana to strike back against their bases. They  sometimes tangled with the local militaries in doing so, as well as kill local civilians and destroy local infrastructure. The greatest of these proxy wars was the Angolan Civil War, fought between communists and anticommunists starting in 1975. The US and South Africa supported the anticommunists, and the SADF even sent troops to aid them (to no avail). These border wars continued with none of the actors gaining a distinct advantage.

The 1976 protests in Soweto, a Black township outside Johannesburg, increased tensions even further. The government demanded that all Black students be taught Afrikaans, the language of the apartheid government. Since language is a major marker of ethnic identity, the students naturally rebelled against this. About 20,000 Soweto students protested, and the police broke up the protests with bullets and tear gas, killing hundreds.

The protests convinced many South African Black youths that they would never have peace under apartheid, and the international community, astonished by the government’s brutality, agreed with them. Thousands of youths left the country and joined the MK or other militant organizations. This in turn led to a surge in militant attacks. Students also formed the Black Consciousness Movement, based on the Black Power movement in the United States. The point of the movement was to remove the stigmas and inferiority complexes instilled by the Apartheid government. The leader of the movement, Steven Biko, was arrested in 1977 and beaten to death in police custody.

The intensification made the 1980s the most intense time in apartheid South Africa. The movement’s objective was to make the nation ungovernable through protests, strikes, killings of pro-apartheid leaders, and militant attacks. Violence and nonviolence were to work together towards the same goal, which was, according to Mandela, to crush apartheid “between the anvil of united mass action and the hammer of the armed struggle.”

The White majority had no intention of relinquishing power at that point. The election of P. W. Botha, a White supremacist and anti-communist, as prime minister in 1978, portended difficult times ahead. In 1985, Botha proclaimed a state of emergency across most of the country, giving him sweeping autocratic powers. Tens of thousands of people were arrested and imprisoned without trial, and tens of thousands more were whipped as punishment for resistance. Curfews were imposed and the media was censored. Thousands of Black activists were murdered by government paramilitaries, and the government even killed South African activists who had fled to the UK, sending agents to murder them in London.

To maintain apartheid and White minority rule, Botha and his ministers developed a plan called “Total Strategy,” which focused all aspects of national life on security. Young men received military training while still in school, and were required to serve two years in the military afterwards. Military spending ballooned to 20% of the national budget. Attacks on militant bases in neighboring countries increased. But resistance to apartheid also increased; a new organization, the United Democratic Front (UDF), united hundreds of civil groups under the motto of “UDF Unites, Apartheid Divides.” This group coordinated multiracial, nonviolent actions such as massive workers’ strikes, demonstrations, and rent strikes.

The United States under President Ronald Reagan, as well as Margaret Thatcher’s United Kingdom, both supported the apartheid government in the interests of preventing communism from taking root in Africa. Both countries declared the ANC a terrorist group, forbidding their citizens from giving it material support. This created tension in the two countries, as their citizens viewed their governments as supporters of apartheid. In the United States, Rep. Ronald Dellums (D-CA) introduced legislation to embargo South Africa until apartheid was ended. Reagan vetoed the legislation, and the US Senate and Congress overrode the veto in a rare rebuke of Reagan’s policy. The resulting Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (CAAA)severely damaged the South African economy at a time when it was already reeling from strikes.

It was during the 1980s that international opposition to apartheid reached its peak. Sports teams and cultural organizations refused to have anything to do with South Africa; international banks refused to do business with the nation; ninety American corporations would not trade with South Africa; and citizen worldwide pledged not to buy South African consumer products. The nation had become almost completely ostracized.

P.W. Botha, 1962

Botha responded by trying to defuse the situation. He offered to allow Indians and mixed-race people to vote in national elections. Then he abolished the pass laws and the restriction on interracial marriage. None of these efforts dissuaded the opposition, who by this point would settle for nothing short of full equality. He even offered to release Nelson Mandela, who had been on Robben Island (a notorious prison) since 1964, if Mandela would disavow violence and go into internal exile in his Bantustan. Mandela declined the offer. Botha paid a price for these overtures: extremists in his own government chided him for giving in to Black activists, and some even threatened civil war rather than dismantle apartheid.

In 1989, Botha suffered a stroke, and resigned to make way for F.W. de Klerk. De Klerk was a conservative from the same apartheid National Party (NP), but he understood that apartheid was preventing South Africa from participating in the community of nations. He decided to work out a negotiated settlement with the ANC to deconstruct apartheid without allowing the Black nationalist radicals to take power. To begin negotiations, de Klerk eliminated some apartheid laws and unbanned the SACP, ANC, and PAC, allowing exiled leaders to return to South Africa. He also released Nelson Mandela from prison after 27 years.

The ANC was regarded to be the main negotiating party for the anti-apartheid side, and Mandela was its chief negotiator. The government’s main stipulation for talks was that the ANC and MK cease all militant attacks. Although Mandela had to work hard to convince his party to do so, they agreed; the government lifted the state of emergency and committed to talks regarding a new non-racial constitution and Black suffrage in the next elections.

The negotiations were fraught, as extremist groups on both sides tried to sabotage the talks by attacking police or anti-apartheid activists. The talks broke down at one point over this violence, but then were restarted. After three years, the two sides agreed to create an interim constitution, under which it would hold multi-party elections with universal suffrage in 1994. The provisional constitution would be made permanent in 1996. For their efforts, de Klerk and Mandela shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize.

In April 1994, the historic elections were held, and the ANC won the majority of votes, making it the leading party in South Africa, and Nelson Mandela was elected president. With a new constitution and universal suffrage in place in South Africa, the apartheid era was over.

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Results of the Anti-Apartheid Movement

The movement succeeded in pressuring the government to remove all apartheid laws from the books, disbanding the Bantustans and townships, and allowing for Black suffrage in South Africa, bringing true democracy to the nation. At least 600 activists had been killed by police and security forces, and fighting between different movement parties – mainly the Black nationalists and the ANC – killed thousands more. Tens of thousands had been imprisoned and physically abused.

While the movement did succeed in ending apartheid, it did not succeed in bringing full equality to South Africa – something the movement leaders recognized and sought to address after the first election. Generations of legalized discrimination had created a society in which only White people had significant wealth, and that continued after apartheid. Today, perhaps eighty percent of the land in South Africa is owned by the White minority, and Black South Africans are vastly more likely to live in poverty than Whites. This has led to serious crime in Black communities.

When it gained political power in 1994, the ANC pursued a policy of strong state intervention in the economy, and affirmative action programs, to give Black Africans some opportunity for economic success. The ANC shifted from this policy in 1996 to one which was more neoliberal, or capitalist, in outlook, drawing much criticism from leftist parties in South Africa. Still, the ANC’s policies remained geared towards a mixed economy, in the hope of removing the racial wealth gap in their country.

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Conclusion

It is natural, in retrospect, to compare the Civil Rights Movement in the United States with the Anti-Apartheid Movement. The movements had a lot in common. The situations of legalized, institutionalized racial discrimination in both countries were the result of European attitudes during the Age of Exploration, hundreds of years before MLK and Mandela. White supremacist ideas were already firmly in place when both the United States and South Africa were colonized, and those ideas carried over into the colonies’ national phases. In South Africa, Black Africans were always suppressed, first by slavery and, after emancipation, by apartheid. In the United States, the situation was very similar, though the Black Africans were first imported to America during the era of slavery. After the US Civil War, the South maintained its own form of apartheid (Jim Crow) to suppress African Americans and keep the racial hierarchy in place.

One important difference between the two countries is that the American Jim Crow system existed only in the former Confederate states, not the entire country. The Northern states did not have such laws, although racism certainly still existed there. Some Northern Whites sympathized with the Civil Rights movement and participated in it, particularly the Freedom Rides. The Jim Crow system, therefore, did not have unified White support in the US.
Furthermore, Jim Crow defied both the US Constitution and the Supreme Court, which ordered states to desegregate. The only reason that they existed was that the Executive Branch was loathe to enforce the law, until Cold War tensions exposed US hypocrisy and made it necessary. The movement leaders could rightfully claim that they were merely demanding that the government faithfully execute American law, which sounded reasonable to Northern Whites.

In South Africa, however, apartheid was the law of the entire nation. Apartheid laws did not violate any national laws, so appeals to justice could not be made on legal grounds. There were White South Africans who fought against apartheid, but apartheid was not simply a regional problem for South Africa; it was an existential problem for the entire nation, and the right-wing Nationalist Party was determined to fight on until it was clear that it could not win. In the American South, the state governments could be restrained by the federal government, and eventually were. The apartheid government, however, was the federal government. No one but a unified resistance could fight it.

Both these factors meant that the situation in South Africa was much more fraught, more extreme, than the one in the American South. With most Whites behind it, the South African government deployed vastly more violence than the Southern states of the US could. Furthermore, the apartheid laws were more restrictive than even Jim Crow, forcing Black Africans into a hopeless situation; they could not move to another state to escape it. And that explains why the South African movement finally accepted violence as necessary.

When the South African state demonstrated at Sharpeville that it was willing to kill even Black children, Mandela and the ANC abandoned nonviolence, and not without careful consideration. Committing violence made it easy for the state to portray the movement as terrorists and murders, which is one reason why Gandhi never used violence. It also makes it harder to achieve peace. Historians have noted that nonviolent campaigns usually meet with more success, and with good reason. Not only can they claim the moral high ground, but they can also reconcile with their former enemies more easily; the enemy is much less to want to talk peace and reconciliation after you have killed their family and friends.

Mandela and the ANC nevertheless chose to turn to sabotage, and later arson, both very limited forms of violence. As Mandela put it in his autobiography:

“Nonviolent passive resistance is effective as long as your opposition adheres to the same rules as you do. But if peaceful protest is met with violence, its efficacy is at an end. For me, nonviolence was not a moral principle but a strategy; there is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon.”

(It should be noted that, for Gandhi, nonviolence was a moral principle, and he thought it effective as well. Mandela was not following Gandhi blindly).

But the extreme nature of South African apartheid, when compared with Jim Crow, is the most important explanation of why MLK maintained nonviolence while Mandela could not. The extreme violence, and all-encompassing totalitarianism of the South African state, explain most of the differences between the movements.

Aside from their successful outcomes, one thing the two movements shared is that they could not solve all their respective countries’ racial problems, particularly the economic ones. Economic inequality based on race is very difficult to uproot without resorting to socialism, even when laws forbidding racist hiring practices or redlining exist. And racism, which exists in people’s minds, instead of in laws and legislation, is perhaps impossible to fully uproot. Therefore, a continuing problem in both the US and South Africa, and one which has spawned new social movements, is to bring equal economic and social opportunity to its Black citizens.

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