Research Guides: Student Activism at University of Maryland: Anti-Apartheid Divestment

Anti-Apartheid Divestment Activism @ UMD

"There is no greater testament to the basic dignity of ordinary people everywhere than the divestment movement of the 1980s."

-Desmond Tutu, “An international campaign: Build moral pressure to end the occupation” (2002)

young Black woman holds sign saying "UMD Tuition is Blood Money"

flyer for "South Africa Organizing Meeting"

four students shit in front of a wooden shanty that's spray painted with "UMD DIVEST NOW!"

April 1994 saw the legislative end of apartheid in South Africa, when a non-discriminatory interim constitution took effect and Nelson Mandela was elected as the country's first Black president. While South Africans who opposed apartheid protested and resisted in their own townships and cities, the like-minded international community channeled its energy into divestment activism, pressuring nations, corporations, and institutions to cut financial ties with the racist, minoritarian South African government.

UMD students, faculty, and staff joined those demanding their universities divest from companies that had business with South Africa as early as 1972, when Edward V. Hurley, the first Black member of UMD’s Board of Regents, asked the board to use its power as a stockholder in firms operating in South Africa to speak out against apartheid. He renewed his push in 1976, by questioning UMD’s investments in 21 companies doing business in South Africa and urging the board to ask those firms to support Black South Africans by helping to solve the racial problems plaguing the country.

Hurley’s efforts began to see broader support in 1977, when Black Faculty and Staff Association chairman Kenneth Morgan chaired the first meeting of the Ad Hoc Committee to End United States Involvement in Southern Africa that was attended by representatives of the Black Student Union, the Revolutionary Student Brigade (RSB), the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), the Student Coalition Against Racism (SCAR), and workers from the campus Food Co-op. The committee quickly organized a widely-sponsored event entitled, “South Africa: The College Park Connection,” featuring speakers such as UMD’s Ed Hurley and members of the Soweto Students' Representative Council. When Gov. Marvin Mandel did not reappoint Hurley to the Board of Regents a month later, seven members of the RSB barricaded themselves inside Chancellor Robert L. Gluckstern’s office to demand that the University divest from firms doing business in South Africa and reinstate Hurley to the Board of Regents.

Over the next 12 years, campus anti-apartheid activists continued to protest by marching, occupying space, holding vigils, interrupting Board of Regents meetings, confronting administrators, and building shantytowns. The building of shanties, in particular, was a popular divestment protest method on college campuses because it was a physical reminder of the housing many Black South Africans were forced to live in due to the social, political, and economic inequalities of the apartheid system. Although multiple campus organizations were involved in the divestment movement, the most active was the Divestment Coalition. Formed in 1985, the Divestment Coalition brought members of various groups–such as the Black Student Union and Student Government Association–together under one name. Its members were responsible for the first shanties built on the Mall in 1986 and some would even be arrested as the Coalition continued to coordinate much of the campus divestment activism leading up to the Board of Regents’ decision to divest all $11.1 million tied to South Africa by the end of 1989.