Throughout the twentieth century, African Americans, and black South Africans fought against the structural, physical, and psychological violence of American and South African transnational white supremacy. The histories of South Africa and the United States had broadly similar trajectories of racial subordination, beginning with the seventeenth-century arrival of European immigrants and the conquest of indigenous peoples, then centuries of slavery and post-slavery societies marked by political disenfranchisement, economic exploitation, and justifying ideologies of black inferiority. Particularly during South African apartheid, white government officials of both countries pointed to these broadly similar histories to claim a shared sense of identification with each other during their Cold War-era alliance.Footnote 1 On the other hand, beginning in 1890, transatlantic connections between African Americans and black South Africans exemplified early black international solidarities against what W. E. B. Du Bois called in 1903 a “global color line” that he regarded as the central problem of the twentieth century. It was a source of pride and inspiration for many black South Africans that African Americans, many from the US South, projected and sought to extend an “Up from Slavery” narrative of progressive achievement that contradicted white supremacist claims of a right to rule over “inferior” blacks. Part of an expanding historiography of US–South Africa ties, this article demonstrates African American–black South African transnational linkages in entertainment, sports, religion, and politics that sought to dismantle the global color line.Footnote 2 It combines the broad historical sweep of classic US–South Africa historiography with the more recent chronologically specific case studies that add depth and nuance to this longer historical trajectory. In doing so, this article internationalizes the histories of the US South and African Americans while, unlike most scholarship on the African diaspora, centering (South) Africa and Africans in the global human rights struggle against white supremacy.
The article begins with a brief, broad historical sweep of African American–black South African relationships from 1890 to the World War II era. Within this necessary historical context, we shall examine how Nobel Peace Prize winners Albert Luthuli, president of the leading South African antiapartheid organization, the African National Congress, and Martin Luther King Jr. sought to align their antiapartheid struggles with the UN Charter of Human Rights and advanced “international nonviolence” strategies of economic sanctions, boycotts, and diplomatic isolation against apartheid South Africa. Both men articulated Christian-influenced freedom dreams informed by the African American slave spiritual “Let My People Go,” and visions of, in King's words, “a Beloved Community,” a revolutionary, inclusive vision of an unprecedented phenomenon: a just, peaceful, and equitable multiracial democracy. Conventional antiapartheid politics had made little progress when both Luthuli (June 1967) and King (April 1968) died within a year of each other. In the year of King's death, the African American tennis star Arthur Ashe began twenty-five years of antiapartheid activism by using similar international nonviolence strategies to bar South Africa from the 1968 Olympics and other global competitions. But Ashe then made four controversial visits to South Africa in the 1970s that defied the emerging global antiapartheid consensus to isolate and boycott the country. Like King's, Ashe's Jim Crow upbringing informed his antiapartheid activism. This article moves beyond previous treatments of Ashe's antiapartheid activism by placing his activities within a century-long African American–black South African transnational relationship. Ashe's South African trips were also part of a longer historical trajectory in which successive South African governments sometimes regarded African Americans as “honorary whites,” exempt from segregationist laws, but more often regarded them as incarnations of a subversive “black peril” that threatened to undermine the racial order.
AFRICAN AMERICANS AND BLACK SOUTH AFRICANS: THE BEGINNINGS OF A TRANSNATIONAL RELATIONSHIP
The African American presence in southern Africa began as early as the 1780s, with a small trickle of sailors, traders, and adventurers, but a transnational relationship solidified after 1890, when the Virginia Jubilee Singers, an African American theatrical troupe of formerly enslaved African Americans, made two separate tours of southern Africa between 1890 and 1898.Footnote 3 Both societies, undergoing rapid socioeconomic change caused by industrialization and urbanization, were enacting more intense forms of racial subordination.Footnote 4 Before Booker T. Washington's celebrated autobiography, Up from Slavery, which championed the progress that he and other African Americans had made in moving from slavery into freedom, his Hampton classmate, the Jubilee Singers’ charismatic leader Orpheus McAdoo, with his immaculate suit, top hat, gloves, and cane, personified the “Up from Slavery” narrative. McAdoo often opened the troupe's performances with a history of African American progress from slavery to political, educational, economic, and religious achievement within the first generation of freedom. The Virginia Jubilee Singers gave about a thousand wildly popular concerts featuring exultant and moving American Negro spirituals, dramatic and comedic skits, short history lessons, and minstrelsy.Footnote 5 They offered South Africans the first sustained depiction of African American history and life, overturning earlier images of dull-witted, enslaved African Americans that had been conveyed by previous traveling minstrel shows. They also sponsored South African students to study at Hampton, encouraging notions that black Americans and Africans were bound together in a program of transnational racial uplift.
The Jubilee Singers sang prophecies of liberation. The biblical place names in their spirituals were coded language in the world of the slaves of the US South, who viewed themselves as modern-day Israelites in their spirituals. Egypt, Babylon, and hell were symbols of the American South; Pharaoh and his army were slave catchers; Egyptians and Satan were slave-owners. Canaan, Heaven, and the Promised Land were territories of aspiration in the US North, Canada, and Africa. Their liberation and progress placed American Negroes in the center of God's unfolding plan, seen as divinely ordained by some Africans:
Hear! Today they have their own schools … and also universities. They are run by them without the help of the whites. They have magistrates, judges, lawyers, bishops, ministers, and evangelists, and school masters. Some have learned a craft such as building, etc. When will the day come when the African people will be like the Americans? When will they stop being slaves and become nations with their own government?Footnote 6
The Virginia Jubilee Singers internationalized African American struggles for full citizenship by demanding that American diplomats protect them from discriminatory treatment in southern Africa. From their unique vantage point as formerly enslaved people from the Jim Crow South confronted with racial segregation in South Africa, the Singers experienced the transnational nature of white supremacy. McAdoo remarked, “There is no country in the world where prejudice is so strong as here in Africa … the native today is treated as badly as ever the slave was treated in Georgia.”Footnote 7 McAdoo asked how a supposedly civilized and Christian white community could compel “every man of dark skin, even though he is a citizen of another country, to be in his house by 9 o'clock at night, or he is arrested.”Footnote 8 Jubilee Singers’ performances were sometimes disrupted by rowdy whites, while others, mistaking troupe members for Africans, sought to deny them access to bars and other public places. Ironically, they appealed successfully to American diplomats in southern Africa to intervene on their behalf, asserting their American citizenship as a basis on which they could become, essentially, “honorary whites,” exempt from racially discriminatory laws.Footnote 9 While this “honorary white” status was problematic in its reinforcement of white supremacy, in another way South African authorities tacitly acknowledged that American blacks had acquired the hallmarks of civilization in just one generation out of slavery, not the two thousand years that whites claimed Africans would need to be “civilized” enough to regain their precolonial independence.
Booker T. Washington, president of the world-renowned Tuskegee Institute that featured an all-black faculty and staff of three hundred serving an all-black student body of roughly fifteen hundred students, was the most important model of self-determination and organizational development to black South Africans. Africans like future African National Congress (ANC) presidents John Dube and Pixley Seme, the ANC secretary-general Sol Plaatje and educator D. D. T. Jabavu visited the school and became virtual disciples, with Plaatje showing films of the school throughout South Africa. African American missionaries, primarily from the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) and the National Baptist Convention (NBC), established churches and schools in South Africa that thousands of Africans joined, breaking from racist white missionary societies, in order to practice Christianity without a color bar and to access educational opportunities. Since there were no schools of higher education for Africans in South Africa before 1915, hundreds of black South Africans used these religious networks to attend American universities, including historically black colleges and universities like the AME-affiliated Wilberforce, the NBC-affiliated Benedict, and other black schools like Hampton, Tuskegee, Howard, and Lincoln.
The Texas-born boxer Jack Johnson, the world's first black heavyweight champion (1908–16), threatened the ideological basis of global white supremacy, with its claims that white rule was necessary to preserve modern civilization and usher blacks toward higher evolutionary development.Footnote 10 Fight films of Johnson's defeats of white boxers like former champion Jim Jeffries, all showcasing Johnson's powerful punches, his elusive defensive measures, and his amiable chatter with opponents and ringside spectators, circulated widely in South Africa, galvanizing both blacks and whites. The South African government, alarmed at the subversive images of a black man beating white men to a bloody pulp, banned blacks from seeing these fights, though many still managed to view the victories of Johnson, dubbed the “Negro's Deliverer” and the “Ethiopian Colossus.”Footnote 11 For black South Africans, Johnson's victory reaffirmed the special role of African Americans in refuting claims of black inferiority; one black crowed, “The white races can do or say what they may, but the fact remains branded in the heavens that the Black man is wearing the laurels of the world, and may always be. A white man cannot do as he pleases. Man proposes but God disposes.”Footnote 12
By 1920, the government had banned virtually all African Americans, because champions like Johnson proved the falsehood of the white supremacist claim of black inferiority and thus became inspirational models to many black South Africans, even though the US government acquiesced to South African racial policies. Despite these bans and attempts by some whites to portray Washington as a conservative black role model, Marcus Garvey's American-based Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), with its “Africa for the Africans” program of African independence, swept across southern Africa. It brought the dream of black economic, educational, and religious self-determination, along with millenarian prophecies of “American Negro” liberation.Footnote 13 The genie of black liberationist transnationalism was already out of the bottle. In the 1930s, Africans could point to the knockout victory by Alabama-born black heavyweight champion Joe Louis over the German Max Schmeling, and track star Jesse Owens's gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, as timely deflations of Adolf Hitler's well-publicized fantasy of Aryan supremacy. In 1943, North Carolina's Madie Hall Xuma, who had married Tuskegee graduate and ANC president Dr. Alfred Xuma, reprised the Virginia Jubilee Singers’ “Up from Slavery” narrative by producing The American Negro Revue: The Progress of a People, a play that began with slavery and ended with profiles of successful African Americans, including the artist–activist Paul Robeson, the Tuskegee scientist George Washington Carver, and the operatic singer Marian Anderson. The play was a smash hit, raising over £200 for the nearly bankrupt but now rejuvenated ANC, which established new branches and formed the ANC Youth League (1944) and the ANC Women's League (1943), of which Hall-Xuma was the first president.Footnote 14
SOUTH AFRICA IN THE JIM CROW SOUTH: ALBERT LUTHULI AND THE GLOBAL COLOR LINE
Albert Luthuli was the 1960 Nobel Peace Prize winner and a successor to Xuma as president of the ANC between 1952 and 1967.Footnote 15 Largely forgotten today in the global North, Luthuli was one of the most respected African leaders of his era. Born in 1898, he became South Africa's most prominent proponent of the nonviolent civil-disobedience strategy famously launched in South Africa by Mahatma Gandhi at the turn of the twentieth century. Luthuli advocated strikes, boycotts, and mass protests, and engaged in dialogue with the government and the all-white electorate to facilitate a negotiated end to apartheid. He also championed noniolence internationally, with repeated calls to the United Nations and its member nations, especially South Africa's strongest Western allies, Great Britain and the United States, to apply strong pressure on South Africa through political isolation, economic sanctions, arms embargoes, and boycotts of South African goods. By the 1980s, the burgeoning global antiapartheid movement used these tactics to great effect, contributing to the end of the apartheid regime.
Luthuli traveled to the United States in June 1948 for a seven-month speaking tour of churches, civic groups, youth groups, and universities that deeply informed his antiapartheid activism.Footnote 16 Luthuli had been a student, then a teacher in schools of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABM), an American Protestant mission established in South Africa in 1835. His ABM association exposed Luthuli to founding American democratic ideals and Constitutional rights that, though not practiced in Jim Crow America, he saw as governing models for both America and South Africa.Footnote 17 Luthuli came to America right after the May 1948 South African election won by the pro-apartheid Nationalist Party and during the 1948 American presidential campaign that featured the “Dixiecrat” revolt of southern segregationists against the mild civil rights agenda of incumbent President Harry Truman. His trip mirrored the three-month South African sojourn a decade earlier by the black American civil rights activist, future UN diplomat, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph Bunche.Footnote 18 Suspecting that the South African government monitored him closely, Luthuli visited historically black universities Howard, Atlanta University, Tuskegee and Virginia State. Displaying the strong racial affinities and solidarities developed between some black South Africans and African Americans, Luthuli remarked, “I have such a great desire to visit my people in the South that I would have been awfully disappointed to return to Africa without doing so.” He lectured on African history and culture and the virtues of Gandhian nonviolence, met faculty and students from Africa and other parts of the black world, and was hosted by black lawyers, academics, and ministers.Footnote 19 Everywhere, his visits sparked an “awakening on campus relative to Africa and an eagerness on the part of students to know more about this great continent.”Footnote 20
Surrounded by vestiges of the Confederacy, Luthuli admired nineteenth-century American abolitionists like John Brown, who in 1859 joined with black freedom fighters in an anti-slavery revolt at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.Footnote 21 Luthuli also observed educational and agricultural practices that could counter the negative impact of South African segregationist laws that severely limited African land ownership, leading to overcrowding and soil exhaustion. At Virginia State and Tuskegee, he visited black-owned farms, dairies, rural development and school projects; discussed sustainable agricultural methods with successful black farmers; and toured rural communities.Footnote 22 But Luthuli understood that the impressive institutional and personal achievements of African Americans happened despite the barbarism of Jim Crow. Howard, the Mecca of black education and the educational pillar of an upwardly mobile black elite, was in Washington, DC, the nation's capital – and a segregated Jim Crow city. Luthuli traveled on Jim Crow trains and encountered segregated public facilities throughout the South.Footnote 23 In Petersburg, Virginia a white proprietor refused to allow Luthuli and his Virginia State host Samuel Gandy to eat on the premises. Informed that Luthuli was not an African American, but an honored guest from South Africa, the storeowner allowed Luthuli to stay, treating him as an “honorary white” – but still barred Gandy. The exasperated men immediately left in disgust.Footnote 24 Luthuli later remarked that this southern tour had a profound effect on him, allowing him to “see South African issues more sharply, and in a different and larger perspective.”Footnote 25 A friend, the South African novelist Nadine Gordimer, later described the impact of confronting the transnational nature of white supremacy, those times – “a door closed in one's face, a restaurant where a cup of coffee has been refused – that jolt the black man back to the realization that, almost everywhere he travels, race prejudice will not let him be at home in the world.”Footnote 26 Luthuli would link South Africa's freedom struggle to a global color line that included decolonization and labor movements in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, and the US civil rights movement.Footnote 27
He returned in February 1949 to a South Africa now headed by the Nationalists, intent on translating their electoral slogan of apartheid into a comprehensive political program that would ensure ethnic Afrikaner advancement and white racial supremacy. They outlawed marriage and sexual relations between whites and other racial groups with the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and the Immorality Act (1950). The Suppression of Communism Act (1950) defined communism broadly to include all extra-parliamentary resistance to the apartheid state, thus stifling political dissent. The Population Registration Act (1950) divided South Africa's inhabitants into four racial groups – Africans, coloreds, Asiatics, and whites – as a basis on which to create racially differentiated citizens and subjects; residential areas; employment; education; and political, economic, and social rights. The Group Areas Act (1950) extended government powers to create racially separate residential zones, including the forcible removal of people to create racially homogeneous areas. In Luthuli's view, the Nazi-inspired apartheid regime and its white supporters had pirated the land, wealth, and government; more particularly, it claimed ownership of the African majority, shackled in virtual enslavement by apartheid laws. Africans were the “livestock which went with the estate, objects rather than subjects,” and political footballs tossed about by the Nationalists and their white parliamentary rivals.Footnote 28
During the Cold War, the US deepened its diplomatic, economic, political, and military ties with South Africa, a critical source of uranium and other strategic minerals for the nuclear arsenal at the heart of its arms race with the Soviet Union. America, along with Great Britain and France, used its veto power on the United Nations Security Council to block antiapartheid resolutions from the UN General Assembly. To counter apartheid's powerful international allies, Luthuli sought to cultivate transnational ties with a nascent global antiapartheid movement.
LUTHULI, KING, HUMAN RIGHTS AND INTERNATIONAL NONVIOLENCE IN THE GLOBAL ANTIAPARTHEID STRUGGLE
Luthuli became a national political figure during the iconic 1952 Defiance Campaign, a multiracial mobilization led by the ANC. Luthuli rallied thousands of people as Africans and Indians defied segregation practices in public facilities and Africans defied curfew laws in Durban.Footnote 29 Over nine thousand people of all races went to jail for defying apartheid laws and the prisons resounded with their freedom songs. The campaign modeled itself on Gandhi's nonviolent civil-disobedience strategy that helped win India's independence from Great Britain.Footnote 30 Luthuli endorsed Gandhi's ideals of satyagraha, first developed in South Africa, as an “active nonviolence” that he felt had the power to change individual lives, mobilize the masses, and end apartheid. By August 1952, government officials had concluded – not surprisingly – that Luthuli's Defiance Campaign activity conflicted with his chiefly duties to administer and enforce government laws. Summoning Luthuli to Pretoria, Secretary of Native Affairs Dr. W. W. M. Eiselen ordered Luthuli to resign from either the ANC or the chieftaincy. When, after two months, Luthuli refused to choose, the government stripped him of his chieftainship. Luthuli's politics reflected his own understanding of Christianity:
I am in Congress precisely because I am a Christian. My Christian belief about human society must find expression here and now … My own urge, because I am a Christian, is to get into the thick of the struggle with other Christians, taking my Christianity with me and praying that it may be used to influence for good the character of the resistance.Footnote 31
Widely admired for his personal sacrifice and principled integrity, Luthuli was elected president by his ANC colleagues in December 1952.
Human rights scholars have not sufficiently recognized how fully black South Africans and African Americans framed their freedom struggles within international human rights ideals.Footnote 32 The UN Declaration of Human Rights, enacted on 10 December 1948, was largely a reaction to fascism and Nazi atrocities during World War II. The Charter built upon older documents like the American Declaration of Independence and more recent World War II-era claims to self-determination expressed in the 1941 Atlantic Charter championed by American President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and in the “four freedoms” doctrine articulated during the fight against Nazi Germany and its fascist allies. Ironically, it was South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts who introduced the language of human rights into the UN preamble. This irony went deep. As a young man Smuts had been a brilliant Boer general in a losing vryheidsoorlog (“freedom war”) against the late imperial Britain of Kipling and Rider Haggard. Now he was an elder statesman and war leader of the British Commonwealth presiding over a segregated South Africa, soon to be defeated by the Nationalist Party that would introduce full-blown apartheid. Against ANC president Alfred Xuma's insistence that human rights and self-determination be applied to Africans, Smuts (along with Churchill) refused to accept that such rights were universal claims that extended to “natives.”Footnote 33 Yet among the Charter's preamble and thirty articles were declarations that every human should have “inherent dignity, equal and inalienable rights of all humans,” as the “foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” The Charter stipulated freedom of speech, religion, assembly and movement, equal education and pay, equal protection and rights under the law, and democratic governance, and prohibited slavery and involuntary servitude, and arbitrary arrest, detention, or exile.Footnote 34 No wonder, then, that South Africa was one of eight countries to abstain when UN member countries voted overwhelmingly to adopt the Charter.Footnote 35
Though the Defiance Campaign effectively ended by January 1953 without the elimination of apartheid laws, it did lead to a dramatic increase in ANC membership from 25,000 in 1951 to 100,000 at the end of the campaign. It also facilitated the Congress Alliance, a broad antiapartheid front of independent multiracial, multi-ideological organizations that sought to end apartheid. Luthuli contextualized the Defiance Campaign as a manifestation of emerging international human rights norms. He celebrated the significant domestic and international support for the Defiance Campaign's fight for the democracy and “fundamental human rights of freedom of speech, association and movement” that would modernize South Africa.Footnote 36 The Congress Alliance's Freedom Charter, a landmark 1955 document that demanded freedom, justice, and material equity for all South Africans, was declared “a South African Declaration of Human Rights”Footnote 37 and a “Magna Carta – a Bill of Human Rights” that would lead to an actual South African parliament.Footnote 38 For the ANC president, the Freedom Charter joined the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the American Declaration of Independence as another timeless document that provided a basis for the continuing struggle for freedom and human dignity against racial oppression.Footnote 39 Luthuli also advanced strategies of international nonviolence. In 1958, his call for a global boycott of all South African goods helped develop early antiapartheid movements in several countries – including Ireland, Great Britain, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, India, the US, and Ghana.Footnote 40 Inspired by this appeal, global antiapartheid activists coordinated closely with the South African domestic struggle and with the exiled ANC, broadening the terrain for sanctions beyond economics to other sectors like sport, culture, and higher education.Footnote 41 Against views that economic sanctions would be counterproductive because they would most hurt economically vulnerable black South Africans, Luthuli argued soberly,
The economic boycott of South Africa will entail undoubted hardship for Africans. We do not doubt that. But if it is a method which shortens the day of blood, the suffering to us will be a price we are willing to pay. In any case, we suffer already, our children are often undernourished, and on a small scale (so far) we die at the whim of a policeman.
And he later added,
already in any case, they [the poor] are in difficulties; at some time this vicious circle must be cut; at some time some generation must suffer to do that … if you suggested that the African people should not suffer you in fact are saying that they should remain slaves … So with this question of “It will hit the Africans hardest”, let us be hit, let some of us die, even if necessary die through bullets, if necessary die through starvation, if this will end this vicious circle.Footnote 42
Despite suggestions that the ANC's commitment to human rights ideals “receded from the mid 1950s,” Luthuli was internationally recognized for aligning his domestic politics with UN-led human rights efforts, calling on all South Africans to observe International Human Rights Day on 10 December 1959.Footnote 43 He became the first African-born recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his nonviolent antiapartheid and human rights activism. In fact, he was the first Nobel winner after the committee had explicitly added human rights as one criterion for winning the prize.Footnote 44 Presenting Luthuli with his Peace Prize on International Human Rights Day, Nobel Committee chairman Gunnar Jahn praised Luthuli's ANC for fighting “for the ideals expressed in the declaration of human rights embodied in the Charter of the United Nations.”Footnote 45 The Nobel Committee's award exemplified international recognition and support for the antiapartheid struggle as a fundamental human rights issue. In his acceptance speech, Luthuli lamented that, in the golden age of Africa's independence, white South Africa was in the dark ages, having missed “the wind of progressive change” of “entrenched fundamental human rights.”Footnote 46 He emphasized that apartheid was the antithesis of “humanity's highest aspirations of which the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights is a culmination. This is what we stand for. This is what we fight for.”Footnote 47
The Nobel propelled Luthuli to global celebrity, raising the profile of the ANC, but his nonviolent efforts to end apartheid were in vain. In March 1960, when police killed sixty-nine African pass protesters and injured upwards of 180 during peaceful demonstrations against pass laws, headlines captured world outrage over apartheid viciousness. The bloodbath brought martial law and pariah status to South Africa. A state of emergency gave the government sweeping powers to detain over 25,000 people and outlaw the ANC as well as other liberation organizations. Newly independent African and Asian countries passed numerous antiapartheid resolutions in the UN General Assembly, South Africa was forced out of the British Commonwealth, there was a massive withdrawal of capital, and antiapartheid protesters around the world called for diplomatic isolation, economic sanctions, trade boycotts, and other punitive measures against the apartheid regime.
Luthuli and Nelson Mandela agreed that apartheid was a moral evil with tragic consequences for South Africa and the world, but they engaged in heated debate about the appropriate use of nonviolence and violence in the antiapartheid struggle. For Mandela and other ANC leaders, nonviolence was not a rigid principle, but a conditional tactic. Now, even Luthuli, South Africa's foremost exponent of Ghandian nonviolence, recognized that South African conditions had sufficiently worsened to necessitate the conditional use of violence. Ultimately, the ANC retained its nonviolent policies but authorized and accepted the formation of a separate though affiliated sabotage unit, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). MK had a qualified mandate not to engage in open warfare or target human lives, but to confine itself to tightly controlled sabotage. Such actions would be against critical South African infrastructure, including government buildings that administered and enforced apartheid laws like pass offices and police stations, and state infrastructure like government installations, electricity transmission towers, and communication and transport links. These attacks by a small but disciplined group would disrupt the South African state machine and have a wide-ranging effect. Ultimately, the goal would be to damage the country's economy, raise national and international consciousness of apartheid's evils, and bring the government to the negotiating table.Footnote 48 Predictably the ruling National Party responded to MK, inaugurated on 16 December 1961, with further state repression. In July 1962 the South African parliament passed the General Laws Amendment Act, entrenching indefinite confinement without charge, and by 1964 the state had captured most MK leaders, sentencing several, including Mandela, to life imprisonment in June 1964.Footnote 49
In this bleak milieu, the banned Luthuli, restricted to his rural home of Groutville, tried to recover political momentum, continuing his calls for international nonviolence via weapons embargoes and trade boycotts particularly by Britain, South Africa's largest trading partner, and participating in protests against South Africa through the American Council on Africa (ACOA) and the UN Special Committee on Apartheid.Footnote 50 Luthuli's international nonviolence had support from his friend and fellow antiapartheid crusader Martin Luther King Jr., who had prayed for the “Beloved Community” of antiracists to aid the ANC when he had little idea of winning the Nobel Prize. En route to his 1964 Oslo ceremony, King stopped in London to give an “Address on South African Independence.” In the audience sat citizens of Luthuli's continent, his exiled compatriots, and human rights advocates from India, Pakistan, the West Indies, and the US. King opened by connecting the global color line from America to apartheid: “Clearly there is much in Mississippi and Alabama to remind South Africans of their own country.” He identified “with those in the far more deadly struggle” who “strove for half a century to win … by non-violent methods” before “the shootings of Sharpeville and all that has happened since.”Footnote 51 Rivonia convinced King that peaceful demonstrations only produced “years of punishment for Mandela” along with “hundreds wasting away in Robben Island.”Footnote 52
On 10 December, excerpts from King's London address were broadcast as he regaled the Nobel audience with a parable of soaring in the flight of Albert Luthuli, “pilot in the struggle for human rights … [who] met with the most brutal expression of man's inhumanity to man.” King, too, distinguished the right of freedom seekers to repel their oppressors.Footnote 53 He and Luthuli, two laureates confronting variants of transnational racism, had merged forces through the ACOA. This organization provided a pulpit for King's critique of Pretoria's “white supremacy,” in which he wished to “Let My People Go” to combat “a medieval segregation … organized with twentieth-century efficiency and drive.” Likening apartheid to “a sophisticated form of slavery,” King pondered, “Have we the power to be more than peevish with South Africa, but yet refrain from acts of war?”Footnote 54
Human rights scholar Samuel Moyn claims that King only placed “civil rights in a global frame in the last year of his life … he occasionally invoked human rights as well.”Footnote 55 But King's long-standing condemnation of apartheid South Africa tells a different story.Footnote 56 In a July 1957 joint statement, “Declaration of Conscience,” calling for the proclamation of 10 December as International Human Rights Day (the tenth anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights), King declared his support for South Africans “to achieve basic human rights for all as proclaimed in their ‘Freedom Charter.’”Footnote 57 When the apartheid regime regarded the Freedom Charter as a treasonous document and charged Luthuli and 154 fellow trialists with treason, King and other US civil rights activists raised money for the legal defense for these defendants during their five-year trial. By July 1962, King and Luthuli issued the “Appeal for Action against Apartheid,” a call for governments, political, religious and civic organizations and all freedom-loving people to support economic sanctions, trade boycotts and “an effective international quarantine of apartheid” until South Africa aligned its policies to the UN Declaration of Human Rights.Footnote 58
On 10 December 1965, International Human Rights Day, flanked by South African exiles the singer Miriam Makeba, and ANC leader Robert Resha, King made his most comprehensive speech against South Africa, entitled “Let My People Go,” a nod to the African American spiritual and the title of Luthuli's autobiography. He declared, “the issue of human rights is the central question confronting all nations,” but in reviving “the nightmarish ideology and practices of Nazism,” South Africa was “this formidable adversary of human rights.”Footnote 59 He supported the call made by the 1965 Declaration of Conscience for the US to join the decade-long movement for a cultural boycott of entertainers, athletes, and artists to isolate South Africa, a tactic that the UN General Assembly supported.Footnote 60 Not only focussed on South African white supremacy, King also supported Malcolm X's petition to the UN declaring the US in violation of the UN Declaration of Human Rights for America's horrific treatment of African Americans. King then backed Luthuli's international nonviolence stance, proposing “a massive international boycott which would involve the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Great Britain, France, the United States, Germany, and Japan,” directed against the white minority regimes of South Africa, Rhodesia, and Portuguese-held Mozambique and Angola.Footnote 61 King also accepted the invitation of South African student groups to visit South Africa to discuss human rights, but to the South African government, well aware of King's long-standing criticisms, he was a “black peril” and they barred him from the country.Footnote 62 The US government acquiesced in King's exclusion. In his 1967 book Chaos or Community?, King condemned the US for its support of apartheid South Africa, which he described as the new Nazi Germany. South Africa was, King said, “the classic example of organized and institutionalized racism … the incarnation of the doctrine of white supremacy” made possible by “more than 700 million dollars of American capital” and “the billions of dollars in trade and the military alliances which are maintained under the pretext of fighting Communism in Africa.”Footnote 63 Luthuli and King would die violently within a year of each other. In July 1967, a Durban goods train mortally wounded Luthuli on railway tracks. The next April an assassin killed King. The white man charged with this murder, James Earl Ray, considered emigrating to South Africa (or Rhodesia).Footnote 64
ARTHUR ASHE AND THE POLITICS OF SPORTS IN APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA AND THE US ANTIAPARTHEID MOVEMENT
By 1968, South Africa's ruthless repression of domestic resistance, and the support of its powerful Western Cold War allies, massive capital inflows to a galloping economy helped significantly by artificially low labor costs, and the leveraging of their economic power to forge détentes with several African states, had allowed it to weather post-Sharpeville international and domestic pressure.Footnote 65 The incoming Nixon administration believed that the white minority regimes in southern Africa would retain power against communist-influenced liberationist movements that were potentially hostile to US interests and disavowed political, economic, and cultural isolation of South Africa.Footnote 66 In this context, global sport became the greatest arena of success for antiapartheid activists.Footnote 67 South African exiles like Dennis Brutus knew that sport – completely segregated – was a virtual national religion in their country, and that international bans on South African sports teams would have a powerful impact on white South Africa.Footnote 68 Thanks to Brutus and mostly African and Asian countries, the International Olympic Committee banned South Africa and its all-white Olympic teams from the 1964 and 1968 Olympics.Footnote 69
The tennis champion Arthur Ashe was one of the many African American athletes and activists who successfully petitioned to prevent South Africa from participating in the 1968 Olympics.Footnote 70 At the time Ashe was the best US tennis player and eventually became the top-ranked player in the world. A college national champion at UCLA, Ashe also won the world's most prestigious tournaments, including Wimbledon, the US and Australian Opens, and the Davis Cup, in which each country's best male players compete against each other. Born in 1943, in the southern US city of Richmond, Virginia, the former Confederacy capital, Ashe's firsthand experiences with Jim Crow, which he described as “our American brand of apartheid,” primed him for antiapartheid activism.Footnote 71 Subscribing to the nonviolence philosophies of Dr. King, who wrote directly to Ashe encouraging his increasing activism, and mixing with civil rights activists Andrew Young and Jesse Jackson, the tennis star vowed to “advance materially this whole human rights struggle.”Footnote 72 Enraged by apartheid, Ashe declared his desire to drop a hydrogen bomb on its largest city, Johannesburg. To one South African reporter who claimed that apartheid was a benign but misunderstood policy and who challenged Ashe to come to South Africa to see for himself, Ashe countered, “Abolish apartheid first.”Footnote 73
But Ashe, a thoughtful, measured intellectual who had previously supported isolationist tactics, decided to take up the journalist's challenge to visit South Africa and thereby break the cultural boycott long supported by antiapartheid activists, including the now deceased King. By doing so, he illuminated debates among antiapartheid activists about whether visiting South Africa and seeing apartheid firsthand hurt or helped the antiapartheid struggle. In July 1969, after South Africa had informed Ashe through back channels that they would not issue a visa for him to enter the country to play the 1969 South Africa Open, Ashe called for South Africa's exclusion from the Davis Cup and the International Lawn Tennis Federation (ILTF), tennis's international governing body, because of its apartheid policies.Footnote 74 In December 1969, he applied for a visa to enter South Africa to play in the 1970 South African Open. South African government officials knew that the country, already banned from the Olympics, risked banning from the Davis Cup as well if they denied Ashe a visa. US diplomats urged their South African counterparts to let Ashe into the country. On the other hand, Prime Minister Vorster, who had taken criticism from hardliners within his own party because his government allowed black African diplomats and trading representatives to stay in whites-only spaces, had his eye on upcoming national elections and wanted to bolster his conservative credentials in the eyes of his all-white electorate. In January 1970, two days after Ashe won a major tournament, the Australian Open, the South African government refused him a visa, citing several of his antiapartheid comments to support their claim that he wanted to play politics instead of tennis.Footnote 75 As they had with King four years earlier, the South African government regarded Ashe as a “black peril” and, despite earlier personal diplomatic interventions on Ashe's behalf, the Nixon administration acquiesced in South Africa's decision.Footnote 76
At a special meeting held at the request of the US Lawn Tennis Association, in March 1970 the ILTF barred South Africa from the Davis Cup; the International Olympic Committee also banned their participation. Ashe agreed with this decision: “If we isolate South Africa completely – athletically, legally, culturally, physically – will they change? Maybe they will say the world really hates us. Maybe they will change.”Footnote 77 Though international sporting bodies punished South Africa for its exclusionary policies, domestically Vorster used the government's ban of Ashe as political capital on the eve of his successful reelection in April 1970.
That same month, US Congressman Charles Diggs, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, and a leader in the new Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), whose members would ultimately write successful antiapartheid bills, held Congressional hearings on Ashe's visa denial.Footnote 78 Baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson called on the Nixon administration to “say no to South Africa like they said no to Arthur Ashe.”Footnote 79 Ashe told Congress and the UN Special Committee on Apartheid that his visa denial was not for his antiapartheid statements but because he was black; white athletes who had also criticized the regime had received entry visas.Footnote 80 But Ashe did go to Africa in 1970; alongside fellow US tennis player Stan Smith, he played exhibition matches and led tennis clinics as part of a State Department-sponsored tour of Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Uganda, Nigeria, and Ghana.Footnote 81
South African Opens came and went. Keeping the pressure on, Ashe continued to apply for a South African entry visa. Then in October 1973 he received the surprising news that South Africa had granted him entry.Footnote 82 This visa was part of the regime's cynical effort to make cosmetic reforms to its sports policies to improve South Africa's chances of being reinstated in the Davis Cup and other international competitions. Vorster now allowed foreign blacks to compete in South Africa in order to ease acceptance of the country's segregated teams in international competition. Shortly after issuing Ashe's visa, South Africa was reinstated in Davis Cup competition. Ashe understood very clearly the connection between his visa and the Davis Cup decision, later remarking sarcastically, “Gee, what a complete coincidence. The ILTF allowed South Africa back into the Davis Cup in 1973 to play in ‘74. A more cynical man than I might think that I was a quid pro quo.”Footnote 83
Ashe was contemplating a very difficult course of action. By 1973, the CBC, the ACOA, American activists, and prominent South African exiles like the musicians Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela formed a broad consensus to isolate South Africa.Footnote 84 Supporting the cultural boycott of South Africa, black activists specifically argued that “Afro-Americans can do more to assist their African brothers by carrying on the fight on the home front than by entertaining, lecturing or touring in South Africa.”Footnote 85 Though some entertainers like Eartha Kitt could not resist the lucrative offers to perform in South Africa, other prominent blacks like Muhammad Ali, after twice signing contracts to fight in South Africa, bowed to severe black American pressure and abandoned those plans.Footnote 86
Ashe canvassed many black political figures, intellectuals, and antiapartheid activists like Harry Belafonte about whether he should actually go to South Africa. Several African Americans – elected officials Andrew Young, Barbara Jordan, Julian Bond, and Ron Dellums and the poet Nikki Giovanni – felt that Ashe should go to collect much-needed firsthand information, to increase international attention and pressure on the regime, and to inspire black South Africans. Young noted that Ashe could have the same positive impact on black South Africans as earlier star black athletes Joe Louis and Jesse Owens.Footnote 87 However, Brutus strongly disagreed, arguing that Ashe already had sufficient knowledge of apartheid's evils, including such torture methods as electric shocks to the genitals of political prisoners, and warned that the government would manipulate Ashe for its own nefarious purposes. Challenging Ashe to a public debate on this issue, Brutus reminded the tennis star that his main point of contact would be the South African Minister of Interior Piet Koornhof, a member of the Broederbond, the Afrikaner secret society that provided the political and intellectual ballast for apartheid.Footnote 88 Ultimately, Ashe made the controversial decision to go to South Africa. He argued that his mere presence in South Africa as a world-class tennis player who routinely defeated whites would debunk white supremacist theories of black inferiority. He viewed his two-week South African sojourn as a fact-finding mission to observe apartheid firsthand and draw his own conclusions, and to allow him to have a more authoritative and informed position in his own antiapartheid activism. He also wanted to establish a tennis foundation and provide tennis facilities to help develop black tennis players who could ultimately compete on the international stage for a postapartheid South Africa.
Ashe came to South Africa at a time of renewed political activity, with about 100,000 striking workers protesting their artificially low wages, most of whom gained 10 to 20 percent raises. Also, the burgeoning Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) advocated black psychological liberation, particularly against the government's Bantu Education, an explicitly inferior educational model designed to ensure permanent societal subordination, and created political, educational, and community organizations for black grassroots development.Footnote 89 Many black South Africans also hoped the quickening pace of anticolonial revolutionary fervor in Mozambique, Angola, and Southern Rhodesia would spread to their country. Ashe's time in South Africa was a performance on and off the tennis court. He had insisted on several conditions to playing in South Africa, including government recognition of him as a black man, not an “honorary white” (the status of the black light heavyweight champion Bob Foster, who had accepted a lucrative $200,000 payday to defend his title in Johannesburg against a South African), integrated seating at the Ellis Park tournament site, and the freedom to travel without restrictions and to meet black and white political leaders.Footnote 90 He unsuccessfully attempted to meet Prime Minister Vorster, settling for Minister of Sport and Energy Piet Koornhof. On the court, he won the South African Open doubles title, and in singles he beat white South Africans Bob Hewitt (who claimed that blacks were happy under apartheid) and Cliff Drysdale (who did not support apartheid) before losing the final to rising star Jimmy Connors. He received raucous applause from black spectators accustomed to cheering for the opponents of white South African sports figures.Footnote 91
But Ashe's presence generated widely divergent opinions among South Africans about whether he had helped or hindered the antiapartheid cause. In a meeting with Ashe, BCM advocates firmly told him he should not have come to South Africa because his visit allowed South Africa back into the Davis Cup, painted a false liberal picture to the world, and thus appeased sports-mad whites who chafed at sporting isolation. For hours, Ashe debated his BCM counterparts, arguing that integrated facilities at Ellis Park and his meeting with Koornhof represented small, incremental progress that could only accelerate with continued communication and contact. The BCM students maintained their belief that Ashe was “a tool of the Government.”Footnote 92 Tailed by security police and observing white hostility reminiscent of his Jim Crow childhood, Ashe conducted tennis clinics in Soweto, where black youths angrily denounced him for legitimizing the apartheid regime. Ashe later lamented, “I never felt so much an outsider, a meddling outsider, in that country.”Footnote 93
But Reggie Ngcobo, president of the black South African National Lawn Union, (SANLU), a black tennis association, praised Ashe's visit as an inspiration to black South African tennis players. The black writer–activist Don Mattera reassured Ashe that his visit was valuable because it reminded black South Africans that they had concerned allies and contacts in the outside world. But right after Mattera organized a meeting between Ashe and black journalists, the government banned him for five years; he could no longer practice journalism and it was now illegal to publish any of his writings. Yet, in messages smuggled to Ashe just before his departure, Mattera wrote a salutary poem about the tennis star's visit, “An Anguished Spirit: Ashe.” The banned Winnie Mandela praised Ashe for inspiring Soweto youths, but reminded him not to take unilateral action: “the best thing you can do is ask the South Africans what you can do to help in their struggle.” After meeting with Koornhof, who apparently told him that South African tournaments would be completely open starting in 1974, Ashe felt that the promised mixed-race sports competition represented “breezes of change” borne from “contact and communication between and among the races.”Footnote 94
Back in the US, during a speech at Howard University, two black South African students loudly dismissed Ashe as an “Uncle Tom”: “You betrayed us in South Africa! You betrayed your black brothers! Shame on you, Arthur Ashe! Sit down and shut up!” An enraged Ashe fired back, asking why the two black South Africans were “hiding away” at an American university instead of directly fighting apartheid in their country.Footnote 95 Brutus also lambasted Ashe for meeting with Koornhof, for staying with a wealthy white family in the all-white Johannesburg suburb of Sandton, and for allowing himself to be photographed at superficially desegregated dinner parties, thus creating the false impression of an integrated South Africa. To Brutus's repeated calls for sanctions and isolation, Ashe countered that such tactics by the US government had not brought about desired changes of government policies in China and Cuba. Contrasted with Ashe's mixed reception and uncertain impact, white South Africa clearly gained from the visit. Because the apartheid government granted Ashe's visa and opened their national tennis circuit to all players, an all-white South African team reentered the Davis Cup in 1974, winning it for the first and only time when their last two opponents, Argentina and India, abided by UN General Assembly resolutions to boycott racially segregated South African sports teams and refused to play them.Footnote 96 Ashe thought that India's default in the Davis Cup final was a “poor strategic move,” feeling instead that an Indian team of “non-whites” besting white South African players was the best possible rebuke to apartheid.Footnote 97
In November 1974, a month after South Africa won the Davis Cup, Ashe competed again in the South African Open, where he once again was a finalist. He also established the Black Tennis Foundation (BTF) with the aim of identifying and developing young black tennis players who eventually would earn tennis scholarships at American universities and play in the Davis Cup for South Africa. Responding to renewed criticism from American antiapartheid activists and from some black South Africans, Ashe believed that in the absence of complete economic isolation – which he thought unlikely – contact and communication “with politically active American blacks” would contribute to meaningful change in South Africa. He was encouraged too by the imminent decolonization of Portuguese colonies Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique. With King's former civil rights lieutenants the US Congressman and CBC member Andrew Young and Michigan State University dean Dr. Robert Green, Ashe met the banned black leader Robert Sobukwe. He told his visitors that “dialogue” with pro-apartheid government officials was futile and directed them to raise awareness of black poverty and subjugation in South Africa, thereby rallying Americans to fight apartheid.Footnote 98 A chastened Ashe nevertheless described Sobukwe as “a real leader of the African people. It is so evident, so obvious, after spending two hours with him. It was the most fascinating two hours I have spent in South Africa – and that includes my trip last year.”
Fresh from his 1975 Wimbledon victory, and now the world's best tennis player, Ashe returned to the South African Open that November, where he ceremonially broke the ground for a million-dollar black tennis complex. Ashe understood well that his visits to South Africa did not repeal any apartheid laws or alleviate black poverty, but he felt that his BTF foundation, the sports complex, the desegregation of Ellis Park, and greater support for black South African tennis players reflected his long-term strategy to chip away at apartheid through sport. Ashe claimed that black South Africans like Winnie Mandela wanted visits by foreign blacks to expose South Africa's “practical slavery,” and the African choral music leader Khabi Mngoma praised his visits as a psychological boon to black South Africans, rhetorically asking, “would you refuse to visit a brother in an American prison just because you hate the prison system?”Footnote 99 But Ashe's 1976 US exhibition tour with white South African tennis players sparked protests, while the June 1976 Soweto massacres and the subsequent government crackdowns that killed hundreds of Africans and drove thousands into exile illustrated his limited impact.Footnote 100 In advance of Ashe's participation in the 1977 South African Open, primarily to develop his Black Tennis Foundation, Brutus complained, “I think Arthur Ashe is doing more damage to the course of nonracial sport than anyone.”Footnote 101 After 1977, although Ashe still favored some type of productive contact that could push South Africa to end apartheid, he now agreed with Brutus that he should no longer visit the country. In the meantime, the television images of Soweto and its aftermath reinvigorated the American antiapartheid movement. Ashe supported the launch of TransAfrica, the black foreign-policy lobby of the CBC led by his childhood friend, the longtime activist Randall Robinson, who was at the forefront of the ultimately successful drive for economic sanctions against South Africa.Footnote 102 Ashe was one of over six thousand protesters at the 1978 US–South Africa Davis Cup match in Nashville, an activist stand that contributed to South Africa's renewed exclusion from international tennis competition by 1979.Footnote 103
In the 1980s, Ashe periodically taught university classes on the history and sociological impact of African American sports, and his firsthand experience with South Africa helped him to effectively combine objective academic analysis and social activism, illuminating a path for many American academics who sought to replicate this scholar–activist model.Footnote 104 During this decade, Ashe and civil rights veterans like Coretta Scott King, Jesse Jackson, Harry Belafonte, and Rosa Parks used classic civil rights strategies of marching, picketing, courting arrest, and attracting media attention in the burgeoning antiapartheid movement. Ashe and veteran black activists Gay McDougall, Cecelie Counts, Sylvia Hill, and Adjoa Mouton-Dunn, and Congressmen like Ron Dellums and Mickey Leland, were leaders in the Free South Africa Movement, the longest-running civil-disobedience campaign in US history that successfully sought economic sanctions against and divestment from South Africa. Arrested in front of the South African Embassy for protesting apartheid, in March 1984 Ashe and Harry Belafonte cofounded Artists and Athletes against Apartheid (AAAA), which ironically advanced a nationwide cultural boycott of South Africa.Footnote 105 He convinced tennis star John McEnroe not to play in a million-dollar exhibition in South Africa and urged all other athletes not to compete in that country.Footnote 106 But despite winning two titles as US Davis Cup captain, Ashe's antiapartheid activism discomfited United States Tennis Association leaders, who forced him out of the captaincy in 1985.Footnote 107
But Ashe soldiered on. In 1989, he teamed up with black South African exile Mark Mathabane in campaigns to maintain sporting bans against South Africa. Fifteen years earlier, Mathabane had shadowed Ashe as the tennis star moved around Johannesburg's Ellis Park. To Ashe's query about why he was following him, the boy replied, “Because you are the first one I have ever seen.” “The first what?” a confused Ashe asked. “The first truly free black man I have ever seen.” Mathabane earned a tennis scholarship in America and told his story in the best-selling 1986 memoir Kaffir Boy, a compelling firsthand account of apartheid South Africa.Footnote 108 Ashe became close to Nelson Mandela, who, while still in prison, had read Ashe's history of African American athletes, A Hard Road to Glory. When asked by a reporter before his 1990 visit to America who he most wanted to see in the US, Mandela replied, “Arthur Ashe.”Footnote 109 The two met in the US and later in South Africa, and their personal relationship was a poignant example of the enduring transnational connections between black South Africans and African Americans. Ashe died in 1993, just before Mandela led South Africa's new nonracial democracy, helped in small ways by African Americans emerging from the Jim Crow South with an expansive global vision of justice, or what Dr. King called a “single garment of destiny.”Footnote 110
The transnational solidarities between Luthuli and King, as well as the subsequent visits to South Africa by Ashe, who exemplified to many Africans long-standing images of successful, inspirational, and cosmopolitan African Americans, chipped away at the global color line. African American sporting excellence helped desegregate major American sports like football, baseball, basketball, and boxing, and thus played some part in dismantling Jim Crow. But Ashe's tennis prowess could not influence similar change in South Africa, partially because only global sanctions against the national sporting teams in rugby and cricket had the potential to negatively impact whites enough to prompt some reconsideration of apartheid. The Soweto uprising and subsequent brutal government crackdowns convinced Ashe to change his approach to South Africa. Soweto also sparked the pivotal phase of intensifying South African domestic resistance and accelerated the increasingly successful call for international sanctions – championed earlier by Luthuli and King, and later by Ashe – that led to apartheid's demise. In 1995, facing the monumental challenge of creating public symbols to approximate King's “Beloved Community” in postapartheid South Africa, Mandela mixed the politics of Luthuli and King with Ashe's strategic use of sports when he personally endorsed the Rugby World Cup, hosted and won by South Africa, as part of his “rainbow” vision of a democratic, nonracial, and equitable South Africa. In this way, the transnational efforts of African Americans and black South Africans ensured that de jure US segregation and legal apartheid, two main pillars of the global color line, were no more.
