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 1984, 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. Some 400 people demonstrated on December 9. Local black clergymen Rev. Leon Jones (left) and Rev. Samuel McKinney (right) were among the first arrested. Wearing their robes, they had walked up the steps of the consulate in symbolic defiance of the police cordon before being led back down to police vans.
Caption information source: “23 seized at apartheid protest”, by Don Tewkesbury, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, December 10, 1984, pages A1, A11. 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.
