A Moral Imperative: The Role of American Black Churches in International Anti-Apartheid Activism

In the twentieth century Americans bore witness to the rise of harsh white supremacy in South Africa. With the advent of apartheid rule in 1948, the draconian Pretoria government sought to control the majority black population through more violent enforcement of segregationist laws. As apartheid took root, U.S. anticolonial organizations---comprised of labor union members, church groups, and civil rights advocates--increasingly protested racial injustice in South Africa. These organizations, in solidarity with black South Africans, fueled an international fight against apartheid. A Moral Imperative focuses on four successive anticolonial organizations in the U.S., which fiercely challenged white supremacy in South Africa over a fifty-year period, beginning with the post-WW II civil rights campaigns that culminated decades later in black power movements. These organizations include the Council on African Affairs (CAA), American Committee on Africa (ACOA), TransAfrica's Free South Africa Movement (FSAM), and the Southern Africa Support Project (SASP). Black church people in America effectively shaped the strategies of these four organizations. Clergy and parishioners initiated and participated in U.S. anti-apartheid protests from African Freedom Day rallies in the 1950s and 1960s to Free South Africa Movement demonstrations in the 1980s. Yet the key scholarship on transnational anti-apartheid activism has not only overlooked their vital contributions but also their galvanizing ideology of radical pacifism.;The primary evidence underpinning this thesis is drawn from period newspaper accounts, internal documents of the four anticolonial organizations, transcripts of oral history interviews conducted by other researchers, and the author's own oral history interviews with key organization founders, theologians, and church leaders. A Moral Imperative critically evaluates these sources to analyze how Cold War politics, racial solidarities, and gender dynamics influenced the black religious activism of four U.S. anticolonial organizations, which shaped the international anti-apartheid struggle.