Students and youth have always been on the front lines of struggles for freedom. That is as true today as it’s ever been. As I have witnessed, applauded, and supported the courageous young people on campuses across the country waging relentless struggle to stop the genocide in Gaza, I am reminded of another important period of student and youth organizing more than 40 years ago, one that I was intimately involved in. The issues were transnational solidarity, fighting racism, settler colonialism, and apartheid. And the demand was divestment. Today, the issues and demands are very similar. The place is Palestine, not South Africa, and the tools and technologies of organizing are different as well. In this time of renewed resistance, it's worth remembering and reflecting on the history of the anti-apartheid movement, whose goals and tactics helped inspire the Palestinian campaign for boycott, sanctions, and divestment.
As a Black college student in New York City in the early 1980s, the struggle against South African apartheid resonated deeply with me. I was a returning student in my mid-20s, so I was enrolled in Columbia’s School of General Studies, as was required if you were over 21. I saw similarities to the Black experience in the United States and what I was learning about South Africa. My parents were from the Jim Crow South, and their childhood stories resembled the Black South African experience.
I grew up in Detroit in the 1960s and ’70s. By 1980 it had become a predominantly Black city surrounded by white suburbs, some of which we dared not venture into. There were no pass books like the South Africans were compelled to carry, but there were deep lines of separation between Black and white, and relatedly between the haves and have-nots. The auto industry, like the mining behemoths of South Africa, loomed large in our lives. Work was regimented, racially stratified, dirty, and dangerous. It was the kind of backbreaking Black labor that made capitalists rich from Detroit to Durban. This was the backdrop of my solidarity activism.