In the 1980s, American College Students Helped Stop Apartheid

[NashVegas]

The movement began in the early/mid 1980s. The Specials - a UK Two-Tone group - gave us the song "Free Nelson Mandela," a dance floor hit in underground clubs (rock and pop radio wouldn't touch it). A bunch of famous musicians started to boycott SA's major venues, that part was crystallized in Steve Van Zant's "I Don't Want to Play Sun City."

When the shit started flying was in the latter half of the decade, when college students began protests to force their schools to divest their endowments of, and stop doing business with, corps that did business in South Africa. When one big school (Harvard?) dropped Kodak, it was headline news. I had already graduated, but my roommate was in NYPIRG, she was always organizing stuff for SUNY Albany. The phone never stopped ringing. It was going on at campuses all over.

I'm guessing that Michelle Obama wasn't a part of this movement when she was at law school, because if she was, then surely the work of her peers, then, would be something to be really proud of.

Helping rid the world of apartheid in South Africa was probably the last of the great campus movements we'll ever see in my lifetime. Today it's all about that GPA.

[anamandujano]

1. Thank you.

[H2O Man]

2. The divestment effort,

in which college students pressured for changes in the US approach to South Africa, began in the 1970s.

[anamandujano]

3. Maybe she never had a history class.

[NashVegas]

4. I Lived It

It was in the 1980s, when Michelle Obama was in college, that the anti-apartheid protests became concentrated and gradually, successful.