Students and youth have always been on the front lines of struggles for freedom. That is as true today as it’s ever been. As I have witnessed, applauded, and supported the courageous young people on campuses across the country waging relentless struggle to stop the genocide in Gaza, I am reminded of another important period of student and youth organizing more than 40 years ago, one that I was intimately involved in. The issues were transnational solidarity, fighting racism, settler colonialism, and apartheid. And the demand was divestment. Today, the issues and demands are very similar. The place is Palestine, not South Africa, and the tools and technologies of organizing are different as well. In this time of renewed resistance, it's worth remembering and reflecting on the history of the anti-apartheid movement, whose goals and tactics helped inspire the Palestinian campaign for boycott, sanctions, and divestment.

As a Black college student in New York City in the early 1980s, the struggle against South African apartheid resonated deeply with me. I was a returning student in my mid-20s, so I was enrolled in Columbia’s School of General Studies, as was required if you were over 21. I saw similarities to the Black experience in the United States and what I was learning about South Africa. My parents were from the Jim Crow South, and their childhood stories resembled the Black South African experience.

I grew up in Detroit in the 1960s and ’70s. By 1980 it had become a predominantly Black city surrounded by white suburbs, some of which we dared not venture into. There were no pass books like the South Africans were compelled to carry, but there were deep lines of separation between Black and white, and relatedly between the haves and have-nots. The auto industry, like the mining behemoths of South Africa, loomed large in our lives. Work was regimented, racially stratified, dirty, and dangerous. It was the kind of backbreaking Black labor that made capitalists rich from Detroit to Durban. This was the backdrop of my solidarity activism.

During my junior year at Columbia in 1983, the Coalition for a Free South Africa (CFSA) was under the leadership of Danny Armstrong, a 6-foot-5 basketball player from California who had spent more than a year building the coalition out of the Black Students Organization, which was otherwise not very political. Danny and I teamed up to broaden the coalition at the same time the struggle in South Africa was heating up. Campus protests in the U.S. and Europe had been growing since the 1976 Soweto massacre, when the all-white South African government violently shut down student protests in the sprawling black township of Soweto, killing at least 176 people.

That student coalition deepened its political understanding and increased its sense of possibility in three ways from 1981 to 1984, when Danny and I both graduated.

First, we began to link up with students on other campuses. We read about them in various newspapers and reached out. There was no Facebook, Instagram, or X to send out a sweeping message. We connected with other students through prominent speakers like Prexy Nesbitt and African National Congress (ANC) leader David Ndaba (a.k.a. Sam Gulube), who were invited to speak on South African politics. “Who are the student leaders at Yale, Albany, Duke, Howard?” we would ask. We received phone numbers and made connections. We also contacted student reporters and asked to be put in touch with the protest leaders they were writing about. We conferred with our peers on other campuses about tactics, demands, and political strategy. This sharpened us. Some campuses’ struggles were intense.

Conservative students, emboldened by the Reaganism of the 1980s, harassed, threatened, and attacked anti-apartheid organizers. One prominent tactic our movements shared was to build shanties on campus, makeshift dwellings that resembled the ramshackle housing that Black South Africans were relegated to in most townships. The apartheid government denied Black people access to more permanent housing because by law they were “citizens” of remote homelands or rural “Bantustans,” not citizens of South Africa proper, having been effectively exiled and disenfranchised by a series of racist laws. The campus shanties were symbolic, and they served as hubs for organizing. At Dartmouth in 1986, a group — supported by editors from the right-wing publication on campus — attacked the shanties with a sledgehammer; the college later used a forklift or bulldozer to plow through the shanty. More shanties sprang up in response. There were also a number of student meetings, regional and national, organized by the American Committee on Africa and other groups.

The second way our movement at Columbia grew was through more direct outreach to Black students on campus. South Africa’s white elite was motivated by greed and a desire to dominate diamond and mining; moguls made millions off hyper-exploited Black labor. But apartheid was also clearly a racial struggle and a system rooted in colonialism and white supremacy, the ideology that justified the stark economic hierarchy. We made this argument to Black students in the dining hall and between classes. Some liberal white organizers wanted to talk about the contrasts between South Africa and the United States; we wanted to talk about the similarities. After all, the U.S. is a settler-colonial state that decimated and dispersed the Indigenous populations through force and then built the economy on the backs of enslaved Black workers.

While some anti-apartheid activists at the time were fond of the misleadingly triumphant narrative of the civil rights movement’s defeat of de jure segregation, Black communities (and students) knew the persistent reality of racial oppression and violence, especially from the police. So both a class and race analysis increasingly undergirded our work as we learned and debated these issues in meetings and reading groups. We insisted that Black American leadership was important in the U.S. anti-apartheid movement because of a solidarity based on common oppression. It could not be a white-led movement lest it replicate the kind of hierarchies we were seeking to dismantle. This position led to many heated debates.

Another powerful variable, related to our outreach to Black students, was the growing involvement of Caribbean students in the CFSA. Columbia had a concentration of Black students from throughout the Caribbean: Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Jamaica, the Bahamas, and Barbados at the time. They were savvy, well-read, confident, and worldly. Ayesha Mutope, Clairmont Chung, Kelson Maynard, and others became my friends and a part of the orbit of CFSA. Other Black student leaders included Adrian Lunt, Greg Smith, Nadia Marsh, Whitney Tymas, Rob Jones, and Tony Glover. All of us were deeply transformed by our organizing experiences at Columbia, and it expanded our understanding of transnational solidarity and internationalism as a political principle. We learned about the New Jewel Movement in Grenada, Michael Manley’s democratic socialist reforms in Jamaica, and of course the writings of Walter Rodney and C.L.R. James. Some of us sought out the writings of Rhoda Reddock and other African diasporic feminist writers and groups. Our worldviews were expanding. So was our definition of Black politics and our relationship to a broader left in the world. The anti-apartheid movement was thus not exceptional to our struggles but an extension of them. In those days we often quoted Mozambican leader Samora Machel: “International solidarity is not an act of charity. It is an act of unity between allies fighting on different terrains toward the same objective. The foremost of these objectives is to aid the development of humanity to the highest level possible.”

Transnational solidarity was also manifest in the creation of personal relationships with our South African counterparts and peers. Mweli Mzizi was our age and had already been forced into exile after the Soweto uprisings but became a part of campus life. We had long, meandering conversations together about politics and the world over coffee, beers, and meals. Thabi Nyide, another exiled South African freedom fighter, became a close friend. Thabi and I were pregnant with our first babies at the same time. We shared fears and hopes for our unborn children, who would go on to play together and reconnect as teenagers in a free South Africa. Our two boys, Jason and Sukumani, were two of the reasons the fight against racism in the U.S. and apartheid in South Africa was so important to us in our youth.

Last, it was not only a transnational sense of Black politics that further politicized us in those days but a greater sense of transnational politics writ large. Every week outside Columbia’s gate on Broadway and 116th Street, a lively, lanky young Irish organizer with a high-pitched voice and a very thick accent would sell the newspaper of the Irish Republican Army. My friends and I were curious and often engaged the IRA organizer about politics, colonialism, and race. We had a number of Palestinian classmates, including BDS co-founder Omar Barghouti, whom we also talked to and learned from. Our friends in the African National Congress, based at what was the precursor to the United Nations Observer Mission at the time, schooled us about colonialism and empire. They were closely allied at the time with both the IRA and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

These broad international ties and Black student involvement set the stage for the escalating campus protests that culminated in the blockade of Hamilton Hall in the middle of campus for three long weeks in 1985, disciplinary actions against several CFSA leaders, and ultimately the university agreeing to divest its stock holdings from companies doing business with the South African apartheid government.

It is important to note that the blockade did not spring out of thin air. A strategic process of escalation, mobilization, base-building, and political education over three years had led up to the spring of 1985. I won a seat in the Student-Faculty Senate, as a representative of the School of General Studies, in 1983. Soon after my election, we researched Columbia’s finances and discovered, not surprisingly, that the portfolio included many companies doing business with South Africa.

The demand to divest from South Africa was by then widespread. Dozens of campuses were in motion. Schools and colleges were being pressed, and many civic and religious groups and unions were being persuaded to do the same. The idea was to isolate, shame, and economically pressure the apartheid government into concessions. The ANC supported this strategy. It went hand in hand with a cultural boycott that was also gaining traction. Big-name celebrities were refusing to be complicit with South Africa as its racist and violent practices became more widely known. In the Senate, I proposed a resolution for Columbia to divest. We lobbied the other student senators and sympathetic faculty, and the resolution passed unanimously.

But the administration was caught off guard and quickly claimed that the senate’s power was merely advisory — the Board of Trustees made policies about the institution’s investment portfolio. It turned out the senate deliberations were a bit of a sham. Students and faculty were outraged, because the backtracking exposed the fact that they were not partners in governing the university, despite what was so often touted. Continued stalling, backtracking, and diversionary maneuvers gave students the justification and support to escalate and take direct action.

The 21-day blockade involved hundreds of students rotating through the encampment on the steps and plaza in front of Hamilton Hall, renamed Mandela Hall. There were speeches, poetry readings, musical performances, and heated political debates on those steps. Tanaquil Jones was another Black GS student whom I met in the Black literature class Amiri Baraka taught as a visiting faculty member. Tanaquil eventually became one of the most visible and vocal leaders of the divestment blockade in 1985 and later an organizer for U.S. Black political prisoners. When the leaders of the blockade felt the university was unresponsive, they turned to a hunger strike, inspired by IRA leader Bobby Sands. A spirit of internationalism and transnational solidarity permeated the protest.

Wealthy institutions like Columbia have repeatedly faced divestment demands over the years around a number of issues. Elite universities with big endowments and fat investment portfolios often espouse principles of inclusion, free speech, and democracy while making money off unethical investments in gun manufacturers, fossil fuel companies, and private prisons. The investment in private prisons in particular animated another generation of abolitionist students in the 2010s and resurrected the call for divestment. Students Against Mass Incarceration helped to form Columbia Prison Divest and linked with Harlem community groups like the Coalition Against Gentrification to pressure the university to divest from private prisons, which it agreed to do in 2015. I am proud to say that my daughter, Asha Ransby-Sporn, was a leader of that campaign.

Fast forward a decade to the spring of 2024, and another, even larger political protest movement dominated the campus on Columbia’s Harlem (a.k.a. Morningside Heights) campus. Hamilton Hall was taken over again, albeit briefly, and renamed Hind’s Hall after Hind Rajab, a six-year-old who was killed alongside her family in Gaza; it has become a symbol of the struggle for Palestinian liberation. In the hearts and minds of this newest generation of anti-apartheid protesters, the heartbreaking images of South Africans shot by police are replaced by scenes of genocidal carnage, where tens of thousands of Palestinian children have been killed by 2,000-pound bombs while others languish on the brink of starvation. All of this has been wrought by another apartheid state, the state of Israel. The terms “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “apartheid” are sadly all apt descriptors of what is unfolding in Palestine/Israel.

Mainstream observers and critics of the use of these terms should be reminded that former U.S. President Jimmy Carter underscored the importance of the term in his 2007 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. His daughter, Amy Carter, was a fellow anti-apartheid activist on Brown University’s campus in the 1980s.

There are a number of similarities between campus protests against South African apartheid in the 1980s and Israeli apartheid today. But one big difference is how university administrations have responded. As we see a polarized country move more toward authoritarianism and away from democratic practices and sensibilities, the managerial class in higher education has followed suit. With the 1960s and ’70s reforms still fresh in 1985 and despite a shift toward Reaganite conservatism, there were few arrests, and police were kept off campuses for the most part. Perhaps the memories of student killings at Kent State and Jackson State in 1970 were still cautionary tales. Today the horrific vigilante attacks on student protesters at UCLA; the police raids on student encampments; the assault on professors at Emory, Dartmouth, and Washington University; and the arrests, suspensions, and evictions of students at numerous campuses portend more repression to come. The threat of further repression requires us to learn from the past, forge steadfast alliances with one another and other movements, and struggle for a more just future.