The Vietnam protest generation across US college campuses forwarded a culture of student solidarity with transnational liberation struggles. These students criticized US intervention and lack of economic democracy amidst the Cold War, forming the New Left movement. The New Left also criticized the USSR for its political totalitarianism. This framework was embraced by groups like Students for a Democratic Society, which spearheaded early anti-Apartheid campaigns.

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a major New Left organization that called for popular democratic government and a just democratic economy.¹ My discussion of the New Left will look at the transnational and intersectional currents in the student movement from the 1960s-70s.

In 1964 The Bi-College News sympathetically covered an event at Georgetown University raising awareness about Apartheid. The author called attention to the fact that atrocities like Sharpeville were happening with support from the US and Europe, calling on Americans to continue to agitate for an end to Apartheid.²

As early as 1965, Swarthmore students wrote an open letter to the college to end investment in Chase Manhattan Bank, as part of a SDS call to put pressure on the Bank for its investments and policy of lending in Apartheid South Africa. This movement was simultaneous with the movement for Civil Rights in the US, taking down a similarly racist segregation system. At Bryn Mawr, student activists participated in the Civil Rights movement, holding fundraisers and participating in the Freedom Rides, a voter registration effort organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

The student movement was global, and many of such were met with brutal crackdown. May 1968 is famous for hundreds of student demonstrations across the world demanding worker and civil rights, an end to militarism, and for many different freedoms; From Paris, France to Orangeburg, South Carolina to Mexico City. Police responded to protesters with brutality, and in some cases massacres.

The South African student movement precipitated in June of 1976, when secondary school students resisted the introduction of the Afrikaans language into ‘Bantu schools’. This event is called the Soweto Uprisings. Police opened fire and tear gassed the 20,000 students who were peacefully protesting, murdering over 176 people.⁴

In the wake of Soweto, the student movement increased its efforts to protest Western governments’ policies of arming Apartheid, as well as corporations who were profiting from the Apartheid regime. This emerging movement called forDivestment from South Africa. This strategy sought to challenge US complacency and cut ties with corporations profiting off of Apartheid. Divestment within the anti-Apartheid movement would come to mean “individuals and institutions selling their stock in companies that have subsidiaries in South Africa,” defined here by Haverford student Howard Snipes.⁵

Student activists would pressure their college’s executive boardrooms to divest their endowment holdings in South Africa. Hampshire College was the first US school to divest, in 1977. By 1988, 155 schools divested.⁶

1. Students for a Democratic Society. The Port Huron Statement (1962). https://www.americanyawp.com/reader/27-the-sixties/the-port-huron-statement-1962/
2. Bryn Mawr College Special Collections. The College News, 1964-04-17, Vol. 50, No. 19.
3. “Social Action – Who Built Bryn Mawr?,” https://digitalprojects.brynmawr.edu/who-built/1960s-and-race/social-action/#.
4. Zinn Education Project. “June 16, 1976: Soweto Uprising – Zinn Education Project,” June 17, 2023. https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/soweto-uprising/.
5. Haverford College Special Collections. HCV PRESIDENT’S PAPERS ROBERT B STEVENS 1985-1986. B-Commonwealth Box 16 Folder: Bryn Mawr- South Africa, 1986 Snipes, Howard. “Statement on Divestment”.
6. Amherst College. “Divestment from South Africa.” https://www.amherst.edu/campuslife/ourcommunity/studentgroups/greenproj/divest/history-of-divestment-at-amherst/node/590306.