05 Apr Please read the attached articles (five in total) and read instructions, Word document labeled Primary Source 3 to complete the questions b
Please read the attached articles (five in total) and read instructions, Word document labeled Primary Source 3 to complete the questions based off the readings. Thank you.
The Singing is Over, Julius Lester, The Angry Children of Malcolm X, November 1966 (crmvet.org)
http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/speeches/malcolm_x_ballot.html
"RACISM ANYWHERE THREATENS FREEDOM EVERYWHERE": THE LEGACY OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. IN BLACK AMERICA'S ANTI-APARTHEID ACTIVISM
Author(s): JESSICA O'CONNOR
Source: Australasian Journal of American Studies , December 2015, Vol. 34, No. 2 (December 2015), pp. 44-58
Published by: Australia New Zealand American Studies Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44779733
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44 AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
ARTICLES
"RACISM ANYWHERE THREATENS FREEDOM
EVERYWHERE": THE LEGACY OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. IN BLACK AMERICA'S ANTI-APARTHEID ACTIVISM
JESSICA O'CONNOR
Australian Catholic University
ABSTRACT : Just as opposition to Soviet communism had served as a measure of American patriotism during the Cold War, so too did opposition to apartheid evolve to signify the commitment to racial justice in the United States during the Reagan era. In expanding Jacquelyn Dowd Hall 's "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past "framework it has been possible to break new ground in the historical analysis of the US anti-apartheid movement. The "long movement" has allowed an historical analysis of the profound role the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement played in the US anti-apartheid movement during the Reagan era. There is a multi-faceted historical connection between the civil rights movement and the peak of anti-apartheid activism in the United States during the 1980s, and it is this connection which this article seeks to uncover and analyse.
The US anti-apartheid movement launched into public consciousness in November 1984, when three prominent African Americans were arrested at the South African embassy in Washington, DC. The embassy sit-in marked the beginning of a twelve-month protest in which thousands of citizens were arrested, and local anti-apartheid movements proliferated in cities and universities across the United States. The tactics, reminiscent of the civil rights movement, facilitated media and popular interest in US diplomatic relations with South Africa and came to the forefront of US politics.
Although the role of African Americans in the US anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s was fundamental to its success, the US anti-apartheid movement is a relatively neglected area of study in African American history. Indeed, the role of African Americans in this movement was not considered until Francis Nesbitt's Race for Sanctions: African Americans Against Apartheid, 1946-1994 in 2004. This article analyses the contributions of African American individuals and organisations to US anti- apartheid activism, with particular emphasis on the strategy of linking anti- apartheid to the traditions of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. It adds a new layer to our understanding of how African Americans struggled against apartheid, focusing more attention than has been given previously on the
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AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES 45
legacy of US civil rights in energising black anti-apartheid activism in the United States at the peak of the movement.
The first historical analysis of the US anti-apartheid movement was Robert Massie's Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid Years, which linked the internal struggles against apartheid in South Africa with anti-apartheid politics in the United States from 1948 to 1994. However, the role of African Americans in the US anti-apartheid movement was not considered until Francis Nesbitt's Race for Sanctions. Nesbitt's book is the only in-depth examination of African American anti- apartheid organisations. The third major historical study of the US anti- apartheid movement, David Hostetter's Movement Matters: American Antiapartheid Activism and the Rise of Multicultural Politics, is a postmodern approach to social movement theory that concentrates on the shift away from simple black-white politics to multiculturalism in the 1990s, illustrated in the anti-apartheid movement.1 These historians all acknowledge the connection between anti-apartheid activism and the civil rights movement. For example, Massie describes the US anti-apartheid movement as "the natural extension of America's turbulent concern about civil rights and racial justice into the international sphere."2 However, none of these historians examine the use of civil rights memory in the US anti-apartheid movement. This article concentrates on the largely overlooked historical relationship between the two movements. There is a multi-faceted historical connection between the civil rights movement and the peak of anti-apartheid activism in the United States during the 1980s, and it is this connection which this article seeks to uncover and analyse.
The role of African Americans in the US anti-apartheid movement can be analysed within two conceptual frameworks. The first framework focuses on African Americans in the tradition of black internationalism or pan- Africanism. Pan-Africanism emphasises the African diaspora and sees blacks as engaged in a collective struggle against the injustices inflicted by slavery, racism, and colonialism.3 Francis Nesbitt's Race for Sanctions is an example of a study of the impact of pan-Africanism on African American anti-apartheid activists. The second framework in which the US anti- apartheid movement might be studied is that of "The Long Civil Rights Movement," as outlined by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall. Hall's thesis draws on the broader connections of the history of African American activism. The "long movement" calls for historians to recast and extend the traditional civil rights era in order to challenge the cultural memory of the "King years" and the linear progression of the struggle to end segregation.4
While these frameworks are not antithetical, the "long movement" allows for a long duree analysis of black freedom movements in the United States. A
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46 AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
critical assessment of the use of the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the anti-apartheid movement, further, provides an example of the civil rights movement speaking to a contemporary challenge. This analysis demonstrates how the memory of the civil rights movement can be "powerful, dangerous," and a "form of forgetting." Remembrance in anti-apartheid activism can also be understood as a challenge to the New Right's distorted appropriation of the "classical" phase of the civil rights movement and a King "frozen" in 1963, which erased any "political bite." Adopting Hall's extended timeline therefore provides a template for a nuanced analysis of the ways in which the legacy of King was used by anti-apartheid activists not only for their own agitation, but also to challenge the ideological basis of conservative "colour- blindness."
Anti-apartheid activism in the United States emerged with the establishment of the apartheid regime in South Arica in 1948. During the 1940s and 1950s, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and A. Philip Randolph were leaders of the Council of African Affairs. For example, in 1945 the Council organised a campaign to raise funds for South Africans during a famine; 5,000 people attended the rally at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem.5 In 1946, the Council supported striking miners and directed attention to the African National Congress's struggle against the South African government as it established apartheid, at a meeting attended by 19,000 people in Madison Square Garden.6 However, during the anti-communist raids of 1950, the State Department revoked Robeson's passport and the organisation was ordered to submit its membership records to the government. In 1951, Du Bois was indicted as a foreign agent.7 African American anti-apartheid activism then became a side issue of the civil rights movement.
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s anti-apartheid views crystallised after he witnessed the independence of Ghana in 1957. After his return to the United States, King joined the American Committee on Africa (ACOA), the leading civil rights organisation focused on Africa. In 1957 King co-sponsored a declaration for world leaders to support "world-wide protest against the organized inhumanity of the government of South Africa."8 King's anti- apartheid advocacy expanded in 1 962, when he met with the South African Nobel Peace Prize winner, Albert Luthuli. Together they encouraged economic sanctions against South Africa. By 1964 King had even begun to rethink his position on the efficacy of nonviolence in South Africa. For example, at an address in London while he was travelling to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, he remarked:
In South Africa even the mildest form of nonviolent resistance meets with years of imprisonment, and leaders over many years have been restricted and silenced and imprisoned. We can understand how in
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AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES 47
that situation people felt so desperate that they turned to other methods.9
It was during this address that King announced his support for the tactic of economic sanctions. On 10 December 1965 King addressed a Human Rights Day rally in New York, stating, "to list the extensive economic relations of great powers with South Africa is to suggest a potent nonviolent path." 10 The speech illustrated King's growing radicalism; not once did he mention traditional forms of nonviolent resistance by South Africans.
However, it was not until the 1970s, with the dramatic rise of black elected officials in the United States, that anti-apartheid activism became a central concern for African American leaders.11 These black elected officials created
new black-oriented political institutions, most notably the Congressional Black Caucus, an organisation representing black interests in Congress, and TransAfrica. Established in 1977, TransAfrica became the leading African American foreign policy lobby organisation, concentrating on issues of US policy towards Africa and the black diaspora.
The idea of a black foreign policy lobby in the United States had been suggested as early as 1959. Congressman Charles Diggs suggested that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the oldest and largest African American civil rights organisation, establish an office to influence US policy on African issues.12 TransAfrica was established during the Black Leadership Conference in 1976, as events coincided to push the injustices in South Africa into full public view. Particularly notable on this front was the Soweto uprising in South Africa that resulted in hundreds of school children being shot and killed, and the rise of the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement (PRWM) in the United States protesting the company's investment in South Africa.
Both the Congressional Black Caucus and TransAfrica were central players in the US anti-apartheid movement during the Reagan era. They sought to pressure the US government and companies to divest in the racist state in order to weaken the ability of the apartheid regime to control blacks.13 However, Reagan and US business used the Sullivan Principles to challenge the viability of the goals of the US anti-apartheid movement.
In 1977 Reverend Leon Sullivan, the only African American on the board of directors of General Motors, outlined six steps for US companies in South Africa to comply with, including desegregation of their business operations. The Sullivan Principles featured in the Reagan administration's African foreign policy, Constructive Engagement.
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48 AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
The policy of Constructive Engagement was conceived by American Chester Crocker in an article in Foreign Affairs in 1980. 14 The strategy employed incentives to encourage moderates in the South African National Party to gradually reform apartheid through positive economic and diplomatic engagement. The ultimate goal of Constructive Engagement was to prevent Soviet expansion into southern Africa. The Reagan Administration believed that punitive measures, like those advocated by anti-apartheid activists, would have a destabilising effect on South Africa, isolating its government and radicalising the black opposition.15
By early 1981, African Americans were concerned with the new Reagan administrations' direction on racial matters in both the United States and
South Africa. For example, Nathaniel Clay's article in the African American newspaper Chicago Metro News, "Blacks have a Right to Oppose Reagan's Africa Policy," outlined African Americans' concern about the administration's approach to civil rights in South Africa:
It is heartening to see the Black community rising up in anger at the attempt by the Reagan Administration to clean up South Africa's image … whether we are successful or not, Black Americans have a moral obligation to oppose Reagan at every turn in his tilt towards four million whites on a continent of half a billion blacks}6
The 1981 Annual TransAfrica fundraising dinner also raised enough money to extend its anti-apartheid activism into major US cities. African American anti-apartheid organisations began to work in tandem after the Reagan administration approved an International Monetary Fund loan of $1.1 billion to South Africa in 1983. 17 TransAfrica circulated copies of a State Department cable revealing South Africa's plan to apply for the loan. Seven Congressional Black Caucus members responded with a letter to the Secretary of Treasury Donald Regan, asserting, "a vote for a substantial IMF loan to South Africa would be yet another counterproductive application of
1 Ä
this Administration's political commitment to Constructive Engagement." Caucus member Walter Fauntroy additionally led a march outside the IMF headquarters in Washington, DC. Joseph Lowery, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), King's civil rights organisation, also claimed "approval of the loan implies international affirmation of racist policies of the South African government."19
On November 21, 1984, four prominent African Americans met with the South African ambassador to the United States at the South African
embassy in Washington, DC. They demanded the release of all political prisoners in South Africa, including Nelson Mandela, and a new constitution for "one man, one vote," refusing to leave until their demands were met.20
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AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES 49
Three were arrested as one addressed the media waiting outside the embassy. After their release from jail, the group announced the formation of the Free South Africa Movement, a coalition of individuals, organisations, and unions dedicated to overturning apartheid in South Africa.21
The Free South Africa Movement began a twelve-month protest in which protesters were arrested daily at the South African embassy. From 1984 anti-apartheid sentiment gained momentum in the United States with a series of events coinciding, including the re-election of Reagan, increasing violence in South Africa, and the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to South African bishop Desmond Tutu. These events allowed Randall Robinson, executive-director of Trans Africa and instigator of the first embassy sit-in, to capitalise on this momentum and create a mass anti-apartheid movement to pressure Congress to pass sanctions legislation, as well as to challenge Reagan's approach to domestic race relations.
Randall Robinson selected the other members of the embassy sit-in, not only because of their previous anti-apartheid activism, but also because of their historical civil rights connections. The Congressional Black Caucus member, Walter Fauntroy, had previously been the Washington branch director of the SCLC and was involved in many of the major civil rights campaigns.22 Mary Frances Berry was chosen because of her position as a board member of the US Commission on Civil Rights, the agency monitoring the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. She was well known by African Americans at the time because Reagan had removed her from the position and replaced her with a conservative administration- friendly commissioner. 23 Georgetown University Law Professor Eleanor Holmes Norton had been an organiser for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was highly involved during the civil rights protests.24 Norton's involvement in civil rights continued when President Jimmy Carter appointed her as the first female chair of the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, another organisation subsequently weakened by the Reagan Administration.25
One of Robinson's goals in establishing the Free South Africa Movement was to challenge the Reagan administration's misappropriation of King's legacy. Reagan's rhetoric on Martin Luther King, Jr. disconnected contemporary racial tensions from those of the past, by locating the civil rights movement within an idealised narrative of American progress.26 The King remembered by Reagan advocated that people be judged "not by the colour of their skin but the content of their character" – nothing more.27 The conservative civil rights rhetoric situated Reagan's political agenda, attacking programs of "reverse-racism" and civil rights protections, within the context of the "true" goal of the civil rights movement: colour-blind
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50 AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
equality.28 Reagan's civil rights rhetoric and the conservative misappropriation of King were used to attack policies and programs beneficial to African Americans, and freed the federal government of responsibility for improving the social, political, and economic condition of African Americans.
However, ironically, the anti-apartheid activists' also, at times, skewed the memory of King to enhance their own agenda. Many of the connections with the civil rights movement were consciously developed: in particular, comparisons of Bishop Desmond Tutu and King. For example, the Chicago Metro News reported the Nobel Peace Prize had been awarded to Tutu, "generally viewed as the Martin Luther King … of his country."29 As Chester Crocker observed in his autobiography, Randall Robinson simplified the civil rights movement to fit into catchy anti-apartheid phrases.30
While opposing the racial policies implemented by Reagan, the African American anti-apartheid movement was prepared to validate the appropriation of King for their own agenda. To address this limitation, Trans Africa endeavoured to emphasise the differences between South African brutality and the brutality witnessed in the pre-civil rights American South. Robinson published an article in Ebony in 1985, in which he attempted to clarify the differences between the civil rights movement and anti-apartheid activism. When recalling his 1976 trip to South Africa, Robinson described the experience as "another world, closed off, dramatically crueller than the old south of my memoiy."31 However, the media and anti-apartheid activists continued to view South Africa in a "black vs. white" framework, and the attempts to widen African American understanding of apartheid in order to challenge Reagan's civil rights rhetoric were undermined.
The correlation between anti-apartheid activism and the civil rights movement was further entrenched with the embassy arrests of civil rights legends. Rosa Parks, who sparked the civil rights movement in 1955 when she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus, was arrested in the South African embassy protests. Coretta Scott-King was arrested for the first time in her life with her children at the South African embassy in June 1985.32 As they were detained they sang the civil rights anthem "We Shall Overcome." Harry Belafonte, the singer, actor, civil rights activist, and a leading advocate for anti-apartheid activism as a board member of TransAfrica, was also arrested. The executive-director of SCLC, Joseph Loweiy was arrested three days after the formation of the Free South Africa Movement.33
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AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES 5 1
In the twelve months of protest in Washington the total number of arrests amounted to over 5,000, and included nearly every member of the Congressional Black Caucus. The success of the tactic resulted in the district attorney dropping all charges to "prevent the clogging of the courts."34 The act of civil disobedience, reminiscent of the civil rights movement, spread into anti-apartheid campaigns throughout the United States, including in cities such as Seattle, New York, and San Francisco.
The correlation between anti-apartheid activism and the civil rights movement continued on the anniversary of King's assassination. As Simon Anekwe wrote in the black newspaper New York Amsterdam News, anti- apartheid protests "[had] all been in keeping with Dr. King's "appeal for action."35 For example, Columbia University students marched to Hamilton Hall and chained shut an entrance to the building. The students demanded the university disinvest in companies doing business in South Africa. The students remained at the entrance for three weeks, until university officials threatened them with expulsion. Once the blockade was over, the students adopted civil rights tactics by marching to a rally at Canaan Baptist Church in Harlem.37 The rally was led by Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker, who had once been chief of staff to Martin Luther King.
In April 1985, the New York Times reported a total of twenty separate sanctions bills pending in the US Congress.38 US media interest in the violence in South Africa assisted in maintaining support for the US anti- apartheid movement and in increasing pressure on the administration and Congress to address economic sanctions. Reagan signed Executive Order 12532, introducing minor economic sanctions on South Africa to placate Congress on foreign policy, which was traditionally a matter for the executive.39 The Order banned the sale of computers to South African government agencies, prohibited nuclear cooperation, and banned imports of the Rand.40 The Reagan administration furthermore began to pressure South African president P.W. Botha to introduce substantial change. 1
However, Botha's response was a public relations disaster for the Reagan administration, with Botha announcing he was not prepared to institute meaningful reforms, stating at one point, "I am not prepared to lead white South Africans and other minority groups on the road to abdication and suicide."42 After the speech, US National Security Advisor Robert MacFarlane admitted to Crocker that the speech reminded him of US segregationist Bull Connor and suggested that Congressional economic sanctions were now all but inevitable. To retain executive control, Vice President George H.W. Bush told the 77th Annual Convention of the NAACP that "apartheid must end."43 The administration then leaked that
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52 AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
Reagan was considering appointing an African American ambassador to South Africa.
Parallels between Bishop Tutu and King continued to be made by a number of African Americans. During the "Family Affair" convention in Atlanta in August 1985, music and radio pioneer Jack Gibson introduced Tutu as "an echo of the bravery that propelled the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr."44 In January 1986, Tutu received the Key to the City of Newark, New Jersey, where more than half the population was African American. During the ceremony Tutu told the largely black audience, "Racism anywhere threatens freedom everywhere."45 This statement echoed King's assertion that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."46
During a sermon he delivered at St. Marks United Methodist Church in Harlem, Tutu asked his audience not to overlook domestic problems: "often it is wonderfully easy to be good to people who are over there and yet you have problems here."47 The African American understanding of Tutu within the framework of King was most clearly demonstrated in January 1986, however, when Tutu was awarded the Martin Luther King Peace Prize, on the first observance of the Martin Luther King Holiday. His speech opened with the words, "I tremble as I stand in the shadow of so great a person," acknowledging their shared commitment to justice, peace, and reconciliation, before closing with a quote from King: "Free at last, thank God almighty, we're free at last."48
Tutu's adoption of King's rhetoric made comparisons inevitable. In Atlanta, Tutu also preached at King's pulpit, the Ebenezer Baptist Church, and pledged a "campaign of civil disobedience against unjust laws."49 Coretta Scott-King saw the day as "the launching of a new and intensified phase in the struggle to end apartheid."50 The celebration of the first Martin Luther King Holiday as a day of anti-apartheid protest established a tradition that was to continue until the end of the US anti-apartheid movement.
This representation of anti-apartheid activism within the framework of King and the civil rights movement was successful in dividing the Republican Party and permitted the passage of the Comprehensive Anti- Apartheid Act of 1986. The Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act was passed over Reagan's presidential veto, with 37 Republicans crossing the floor against the president.51 After the passage of the Act, the US anti-apartheid movement faltered. Black leaders attempted to reinvigorate public support by linking racism in the United States with apartheid, and continued to invoke Martin Luther King, Jr. as African Americans were confronted by a resurgence of white racist violence.
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AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES 53
The outbreak of racial violence in the United States after 1986
enabled African Americans to develop anti-apartheid campaigns that were
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