In 1985, Atlanta, Georgia, was one of the nerve centers of opposition to apartheid South Africa in the United States. The branch of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) was coordinating a national boycott against Coca-Cola, led by Thandi Gcabashe, the daughter of African National Congress (ANC) leader Albert Luthuli. Activists in the city and at Georgia’s universities were fighting for divestment, while the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was working with mine unions to picket investor meetings. And progressive civil rights leaders like Georgia state legislator Julian Bond, the founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, were locking horns over divestment with moderate counterparts like Andrew Young, the mayor of Atlanta.

The history of the anti-apartheid movement in the United States has gained a certain cachet with organizers and policymakers. Divestment, pioneered and popularized by liberation activists to weaken the South African apartheid regime, is now being applied to climate change and Israel. The South frequently gets left out of this history — yet in Georgia and elsewhere below the Mason-Dixon line, anti-apartheid activism was a vital issue.

Within unions, workers were worried about deindustrialization and the role multinational corporations played in South African apartheid; in progressive churches, the violence of apartheid amplified fears of war; for people of color, South African apartheid highlighted both the fight against white supremacy and the unmet demands of the civil rights movement. All of these found expression in the South and especially in Atlanta.

The Struggle in the South

The American South figures into some of the earliest episodes of anti-apartheid sentiment in the United States. In the mid-1950s, when South Africa was unfamiliar to many Americans, Martin Luther King Jr expressed admiration for the leader of the ANC, Luthuli. By 1962, King endorsed a full boycott of South Africa and continued to speak out until his assassination in 1968. Members of the American Committee on Africa discussed Atlanta as a possible site to jump-start organizing in the South. Still, organizing remained scattered and small scale.

That began to change in the 1970s, when events like the 1976 Soweto uprising dispelled the myth that black South Africans accepted apartheid and starkly revealed the system’s brute violence. In Atlanta, opposition to apartheid sprouted in several different places, but it invariably converged around the issue of US businesses in South Africa. Faith-based activism came from the SCLC: it coordinated protests against the sale of South African krugerrands and, with the United Mine Workers, against the Southern Company importation of South African coal.