Students Are the Spark: Anti-apartheid in the Long 1980s

In the long 1980s, many Black students at US universities came to imagine themselves as a part of the South African struggle against apartheid. South African radicalism, particularly the 1976 Soweto Uprising, inspired early campaigns among students at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the United States. Black students at predominately White institutions built on the early initiatives of HBCU students and brought White organizations to a global-local perspective that became the crux of the national divestment movement. Their analysis situated Black political movements in the United States within the liberatory struggles of Black South Africans, and vice versa, and pointed to an extended anticolonial radicalism within the long history of the Black Freedom Movement. Black student activism made the Howard, Columbia, Rutgers, and Berkeley campuses focal points of the divestment movement at its apex between 1985 and 1987. The three-wave student anti-apartheid movement reveals the 1980s as a period of dynamic Black internationalism in which continental and diasporic Africans successfully built a movement through strategic divestment campaigns and decades of grassroots organizing.