San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Fight against apartheid inspires protesters
When he addressed 60,000 people at the Oakland Coliseum in 1990 after his release from prison, Nelson Mandela credited California activists for pushing the UC system to divest from companies with ties to South Africa — a pivotal moment in the fight against the country’s racist apartheid system.
Today, pro-Palestinian student activists are drawing inspiration from that same movement, which successfully pressured the UC to divest $3.1 billion from companies doing business in South Africa.
Much like before, campus activists today are demanding that universities divest from companies doing business with Israel. They’ve notched some progress, with Sacramento State this week becoming the state’s first public university to align its investment policy with demands from pro-Palestinian student demonstrators. Officials said the school will refrain from investing in companies that “profit from genocide, ethnic cleansing, and activities that violate fundamental human rights.” Two UC campuses are negotiating with campus activists to tweak other policies in exchange for dismantling protest encampments on campus.
But both the UC and CSU systems have issued statements saying they will not change their investment strategies because of demonstrator demands.
“I don’t support divestment,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said flatly when asked Friday about the protesters’ demands. He declined to comment on Sacramento State’s agreement with protesters, saying he hadn’t yet been briefed on what exactly they had agreed to, but planned to learn more later that afternoon.
Leaders’ reluctance drives
home the ways in which the pro-Palestinian movement is different from its antiapartheid predecessor, starting with the most important one: There was near-unanimous opposition to South African apartheid.
Now, Americans are split. A February Pew Research poll found 31% of Americans said their sympathies were mostly or entirely with the Israelis, 16% with the Palestinians and 25% were equally with both. Among respondents under 30, 33% backed the Palestinians, 14% the Israelis and 21% equally supported both.
“There was real consensus around the issue of apartheid,” said Doug McAdam, a professor of sociology at Stanford University and author of “Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Post-War America.”
“Nobody favored it. There weren’t pro-apartheid student groups counter-protesting. There weren’t clashes between anti- and proapartheid groups on campus,” McAdam said. “There’s a lot more conflict and violence in the present than there was in the ’80s.”
A generation ago, protesters rallied around antiapartheid leaders like Mandela, who were lionized during star-studded anti-apartheid albums and in songs by leading musicians of the era including Peter Gabriel and
The Specials.
Now, few iconic leaders have captured mainstream attention in a media environment that is more splintered than the one that existed four decades ago. Instead of courting and clamoring for media attention, many proPalestinian demonstrators have shunned mainstream journalists who could be helping them broaden their appeal. Complicating their challenge is that in today’s social media-influenced landscape, many activists hide their identities, fearful of being doxxed or harassed by political opponents.
In the 1980s, “most Americans were getting their news and information from three centrist (television) networks and a host of centrist daily papers. We’re not in that world anymore,” McAdam said.
McAdam, who was an anti-Vietnam War demonstrator as a college student and active in the Occupy Wall Street movement at Stanford, recalled that “everybody was willing to talk (in previous movements). Nobody was wearing masks, scarves, etc. I’ve never seen that on U.S. campuses.”
The online vitriol could be having a chilling effect on the movement, discouraging some from participating for fear of the blowback they might receive online or in person.
Campus
administrators
and political leaders are largely ignoring student’s divestment demands.
That wasn’t the case a generation ago.
A spectrum of elected leaders that would be unthinkable in these polarized times, from Republican California Gov. George Deukmejian to Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, supported the South African divestment movement. East Bay Rep. Ron Dellums led a congressional effort to divest from South Africa. Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy was arrested at an anti-apartheid protest.
The then-Berkeley Mayor Gus Newport was arrested alongside comedian Whoopi Goldberg and several students during an April 1985 sit-in on the UC Berkeley campus.
State Sen. Nancy Skinner, a Berkeley City Council member at the time, was also arrested during an April 1985 demonstration alongside Pedro Noguera, then the UC Berkeley student presidentelect.
Now, many state leaders — particularly Democrats— have remained mum on divestment. Instead, many offer anodyne statements calling for calm on campuses, fearful to offend either young voters who are generally siding with the Palestinians or older ones who tend to favor Israel.
Like today, student demonstrators in 1985 gathered
on the steps of UC Berkeley’s Sproul Hall. At one point, police drove them away and cleared an encampment they had set up. Administrators instituted a camping ban in response to the students’ actions, and threatened students with arrest if they violated it. University officials accused students of doing “extensive and costly damage” to nearby Eshleman Hall.
Unlike the UC Berkeley protests today, many demonstrators were arrested. The Chronicle reported that 625 people, including politicians, professors and students, were arrested in April 1985 for protesting in Sproul Plaza and outside University Hall, the UC’s systemwide administration building at the time.
When UC regents met at the Lawrence Hall of Science near campus to discuss divestment that May, about 300 police officers and 900 demonstrators amassed outside the meeting in the surrounding hills.
“It was either sit down peacefully, sing a song or get bashed in by a baton,” Staci Nesbitt, a 21-year-old senior at UC Santa Cruz, told the Chronicle at the time, adding that she was disappointed she hadn’t been arrested.
Deukmejian, who served as a regent, left the meeting by helicopter. He and other regents didn’t decide on divestment at that meeting, but later voted to divest the university’s holdings in companies with ties to South Africa. In 1986, California became the largest government in the U.S. to require divestment of South Africa-related investments — $11 billion at the time.
David Sanders, who was a graduate student at UC Berkeley in the mid-’80s, recalled attending a talk by Bishop Desmond Tutu, one of the movement’s leaders.
“It was an incredible experience to hear him talk,” said Sanders, who now teaches biology at Purdue University and serves on the City Council in West Lafayette, Ind. “He had immense respect from everyone at the time.”
Sanders recalls walking through crowds of protesters in Sproul Plaza while pursuing his doctorate in biochemistry. He didn’t have enough time between running experiments to help organize the protests, but he would attend when he could to hear what the demonstrators had to say.
“I thought this was an important endeavor,” said Sanders, a Democrat who has since run unsuccessfully for Congress in his Republican-leaning district. “I heard what people were saying and I agreed. I was on the same page.”
The protests he sees at U.S. universities today differ in part because they don’t seem as clearly focused on divestment as the ones he observed in the ’80s. They were also far less controversial.
“There was not real opposition to the proposition that South Africa was an apartheid,” Sanders said. “It wasn’t like this was a divisive issue.”