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.

This flier promotes a rally on July 23rd, 1986 in Red Square on the University of Washington (UW) campus to encourage the Board of Regents to divest from South Africa. In August 1986, the UW Regents voted to sell the university's investments in South African companies, valued at approximately $2.58 million. However, in 1988, the UW anti-apartheid student group Students Against Apartheid claimed the university had reinvested in companies operating in South Africa.

Caption information source: "UW will sell stocks linked to S. Africa," by Caroline Young, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, August 23, 1986, page A1.
Caption information source: "UW's re-investment in South Africa," Students Against Apartheid, retrieved from https://africanactivist.msu.edu/recordFiles/210-849-22297/SAA_UWs_SA_Investment.pdf.