Soon after South African police gunned down 72 unarmed Black men, women, and children in Sharpeville in March 1960, Robinson served as chairman for an “Emergency Action Conference on South Africa.” Robinson opened the conference with a speech in which he connected the movement to end racism in the US with campaigns against apartheid in South Africa. “I see the struggle against race supremacy and racial inequality as world-wide,” Robinson said to the crowd of about 200 people gathered at the Carnegie International Center in New York. “The fight against Jim Crow here is part of the same struggle in South Africa, and if I were in South Africa, I would hope to be numbered among those either threatened with or actually in prison for opposing the apartheid policy being followed by the government there.”
To combat apartheid in South Africa, Robinson and his fellow conference organizers put forward 24 actions the crowd of labor union members, clergy, and civil rights leaders could take. Chief among them were resolutions to boycott, divest, and sanction South Africa. Robinson, in particular, led a workshop entitled “Contacts with South Africa: Tourists, Athletes, Artists,” in which attendees agreed to “withhold their participation in tours and programs in South Africa until such time as South Africa abandons her racist policies.” Conference participants also resolved to launch a consumer boycott of all South African products. The labor unions that cosponsored the conference agreed to “study the possibility of an industrial boycott of South African goods through refusing to unload ships from South Africa.” Investors were urged to consider selling their stock of companies doing business in South Africa if they were unwilling or unsuccessful in pressuring the government to end apartheid. The conference attendees resolved to ask the US government to prohibit the importation of goods from South Africa and to stop purchasing gold and other strategic minerals from the country.
Robinson and his colleagues at the American Committee on Africa launched this boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign as a response to a request from the African National Congress (ANC) and other anti-apartheid and anti-colonial leaders across Africa. “Economic boycott is one way in which the world at large can bring home to the South African authorities that they must either mend their ways or suffer for them,” read a joint statement from the ANC, the South African Indian Congress, and the South African Liberal Party in December 1959.