Continent to Continent

Abstract

The struggle against white minority rule in South Africa drew support from nearly every corner of the globe. In Southern California, the antiapartheid movement constituted a highly visible segment of a wider series of parallel struggles. Invariably, these put communities of color in the forefront of campaigns that linked the global and the local, while connecting domestic antiracist and international anti-imperialist activism. This chapter offers a microhistory of local efforts to connect conditions in Southern California to those in Southern Africa, to sever commercial and diplomatic links, and to impede what Black radicals based in Los Angeles termed “cultural collaboration” with apartheid. The story of antiapartheid activism in Los Angeles is thus the story of both one node in a worldwide movement for majority rule inside South Africa and part of a tale of the persistence of Third Worldist and interethnic organizing in 1980s-era Los Angeles.