When South Africa’s National Party came to power in 1948, the white leadership put extreme laws in place forcing the country’s racial groups to live and develop separately. These “apartheid” laws caused much hardship and resentment. The growth of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States in the 1950s brought attention to apartheid, and in the 1970s and 80s, students and other groups staged protests and demonstrations demanding that universities, banks, cities, and other entities divest themselves of any financial holdings in firms doing business in South Africa.
Starting in late 1985, anti-apartheid demonstrators from a variety of organizations protested almost weekly at the South African consulate - the Madison Park home of the country’s honorary consul, James Swing. In this photo, demonstrators join hands and sing outside the consul’s home. Members of Chileans for Democracy and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union and others hold signs in the background. The 700 or so attendees were also celebrating the failure of Swing’s lawsuit to stop the demonstrations.
Caption information source: “Good weather and court victory fan apartheid protest”, by Larry Lange, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 11, 1985, page A3. Caption information source: “Pressure to end apartheid began at grass roots in U.S.”, by Stephen Kauffman, U.S. Missions to International Organizations in Geneva, December 16, 2013. Geneva.usmission.gov. Caption information source: “A History of Apartheid in South Africa,” South Africa History Online, May 4, 2022.
