Chapter 2 - Settings

Summary

Introduction

The ways in which US and southern African racist and anti-racist movements paralleled each other became increasingly apparent during the 1960s. During that decade, leaders in both spaces publicly evoked the places’ similarities while downplaying their significant differences. The US federal government took steps to ensure desegregation, particularly within the US South, and this led directly to the Lawyers’ Committee's founding. At the same time, the South African state under the National Party continued to develop apartheid into a repressive, discriminatory force. As South Africans died in detention, court inquests became a useful space for calling attention to the system's cruelty.

Diplomacy, law and the 1960s United States

By 1960, within the US government's Executive Branch domestic concerns often took a backseat to international Cold War ones. Speaking before a crowd in Bowling Green, Kentucky, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy stressed common ties between the liberation struggles on either side of the Atlantic and reiterated his belief that this would provide a bulwark against the communist bloc, saying, “African leader Tom Mboya invokes the ‘American Dream’—not the Communist Manifesto. And in the most remote bushlands of central Africa there are children named Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington—but there are none named Lenin or Stalin or Trotsky.” This statement lacked some accuracy, particularly in central Africa, where parents often named children Ernesto, Che, Fidel, Raul, Tito or Castro following Cuba's late 1960s and 1970s military campaigns. A generation of children from across the continent, however, would soon also bear the names John, Robert and Kennedy. Mboya's name resounded throughout the campaign trail. Vice President Richard Nixon also often used it in his own campaign speeches.

Internationalizing American civil rights

For all of their differences, both candidates viewed African relations as key to national security and Cold War concerns, driving them in some cases towards expressing sympathy for the United States’ own fights against racial disparities. MLK himself reportedly told Nixon that “[t]he civil rights issue is not some ephemeral, evanescent domestic issue … It is an eternal moral issue which may well determine the destiny of our nation in its ideological struggle with communism.” Civil rights rose to the forefront of American public discourse, yes, due to the heroism of domestic agitators but also due to geopolitical logistics.