Civil Rights, Apartheid, and Global Protest

Nonviolent protest worked because it attacked different weak points depending on the tactic. A boycott cut off money: when Black residents of Montgomery, Alabama refused to ride city buses for over a year starting in 1955, the bus company lost the fares it depended on. A march converted private opinion into a visible public fact, forcing officials and bystanders to see the scale of opposition, as when hundreds of thousands gathered in Washington in 1963. A sit-in took direct, physical possession of a segregated space, like students occupying a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960 and simply refusing to leave. Three different pressures, aimed at money, public perception, and contested space.

Apartheid in South Africa, formalized after 1948, used law to make racial separation physical and permanent. The Population Registration Act sorted every person into a racial category. The Group Areas Act then assigned where each category could live, work, and own property, pushing Black South Africans into townships like Soweto, often far from jobs, with inferior housing, schools, and services. Pass laws required Black citizens to carry documents controlling their movement outside designated areas. Resistance, led by groups like the African National Congress, ranged from boycotts and strikes to, after peaceful options were repeatedly crushed, underground armed struggle.

By 1968 these tactics had crossed oceans. Students in Paris occupied universities and fought police in the streets. Prague saw a reform movement crushed by Soviet tanks. Mexico City hosted protests before the Olympics that ended in a massacre at Tlatelolco. Civil rights and anti-war demonstrations convulsed American cities after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. Activists watched each other on television and borrowed what worked.