Figure 2.2. One of the first black administrators in the Ivy League, Carl A. Fields (center) of Princeton University, attended the inaugural banquet of the Association of Black Collegians in May 1968. Fields is with the association’s president Paul C. Williams (left) and member Alan D. Buchanan. Courtesy of the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University.
Although very able as recruiters, ABC’s larger agenda extended further. The group saw itself as part of the tradition of black students and youth who changed society for the better. With that in mind, ABC, with the help of Carl A. Fields, organized a national conference that involved students from over forty universities and colleges.75 Under Fields’s tutelage, the members of ABC focused on the future of the “Negro undergraduate” with seminars concerning education, economics, politics, and community organization.
When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, ABC members led students in a boycott of classes.76 In an emotional letter to the school newspaper, the ABC expressed its sorrow and anger with the civil rights leader’s murder: “It is not one man, however guilty he may be, that murdered Dr. King. Rather, it is the society as a whole that we indict.” The group lamented that because of the “injustice of this society, black America is under no constraints to obey white America’s hypocritical laws. It is in America’s best interests that the black man revolts.”77 The ABC declared that “No black student will attend classes! No black student will work any job!” In order to avoid controversy, President Goheen provided his endorsement of the group’s actions.78
Members of the ABC looked beyond themselves toward the larger black freedom movement and fell in line with other student activists. Following the lead of Malcolm X, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the late 1960s sought to tie the struggle of black people in the United States to that of black people abroad.79 In taking a Pan-Africanist approach to the struggle, SNCC eventually called for an end to European colonization of African countries. As it was, black South Africans dealt daily with the impacts of colonization under apartheid—a racial caste system of governing that not coincidentally mirrored America’s Jim Crow laws and culture.
In the 1960s many African Americans who battled poverty and racism domestically also chose to denounce South Africa’s racist policies. As the United States officially desegregated, South Africa further entrenched its racial caste system. Organizations like the American Committee on Africa, which enjoyed the support of black fraternal and sorority groups, the National Council of Negro Women, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the Congress of Racial Equality, the NAACP, the National Urban League, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, registered their objections to apartheid. In 1962, the committee issued a resolution calling for black Americans to protest the mistreatment of Africans abroad, and three years later made recommendations to the federal government regarding apartheid.80 The United Nations general assembly also brought apartheid to the forefront in the early 1960s. Black politicians like Congressman Charles Diggs brought up the issue of apartheid to U.S. political officials who had previously turned a blind eye to South African policies.81 Tennis star Arthur Ashe was another who loudly protested against apartheid, as did the scholars John Henrik Clarke and C.L.R. James. Abroad, scholars in Britain opposed apartheid in a boycott of South Africa.82 Other anti-apartheid activists included the American student/athlete members of the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), which was led by former athlete and educator Harry Edwards.83
The members of the OPHR were not the only students to oppose what they viewed as immoral policy in South Africa. In 1968, black Princeton students, in alliance with white radical students, protested against Princeton University’s investment policy with regard to South Africa. In doing so, the student activists preceded the American collegiate anti-apartheid movement by nearly two decades.84 Furthermore, they set the stage for what would become a major battle for justice within the U.S. Congress in the 1970s and 1980s. Princeton students envisioned their anti-apartheid campaign as part of the international struggle for black freedom and the Pan-Africanist movement.
In April 1968, students at Princeton proposed that the university not invest any future funds into companies associated with the apartheid-sanctioning governments of South Africa and Mozambique. While students at Yale demanded a Black Studies program, and those at Columbia demanded that their university show more respect to its black neighbors in Harlem, students at Princeton insisted that the university divest $127 million from its financial portfolio.85 The students recognized that they had peers from nations like Tanzania and Kenya where Africans had won their independence from European colonists. Those African students interacted with black students born and reared in the United States and informed them of the human rights struggle that was occurring in southern African nations.86
Armed with the knowledge of history concerning segregation and apartheid, the students took action. ABC members and other anti-apartheid student demonstrators marched at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs—a school named for a man who reinstituted the American version of apartheid in the civil services—and caught the attention of university officials. Princeton authorities, aware of protests elsewhere that escalated to violence and destruction, attempted to defuse the rising controversy.
University officials formed a committee that included administrators, faculty members, and students to study the impacts of the school’s investments and the efficacy of divestment. In January 1969, the committee issued a report that claimed that the university had no investments in companies that “directly support the governments of southern Africa, or that have substantial operation in the region.”87 Furthermore, the committee reported, “the designated companies [that the students had identified] derive an average less than one per cent of their sales and profits from southern Africa.”
The student members of the committee refused to endorse the report, which explained that divesting might cause the university to lose the equivalent of 10 percent of its educational budget. Doing so, according the committee report, would necessitate the curtailment of programs such as urban studies and “important programs that make a direct contribution to the cause of racial justice such as the active recruitment and granting of scholarship aid to more black students, the establishment of closer working relationships with organizations in New Jersey concerned with racial problems, and other programs such as the summer program for the disadvantaged youth.” Asserting that divestment would be mostly a “symbolic gesture” anyway, the report suggested that such a gesture “would be a heavy price to pay.”88 What did a university creating leaders in the land of the free continuing to do business with apartheid-supporting nations symbolize?
The report placed the student opponents of apartheid in a moral conundrum. If they chose to push forward with their protests, then they might have won a victory for the image of the university and against what they perceived as evil. At the same time, by continuing their efforts they risked losing funding that was used to attract and cultivate potential black students. If the students abandoned their push against the university’s financial ties to apartheid South Africa and Mozambique, then they became implicated in a relationship they believed was immoral. Then, if the university acceded to the students’ requests, it risked the financial stability of the institution. Essentially, the authors of the report constructed a scenario in which only black people abroad or black people domestically could be helped, but not both at the same time.
Presenting a potential slippery slope regarding the negative impacts of divesting, the report speculated about what type of precedent divesting might set. It stated: “If a policy of using moral, social, or political criteria in investment in a number of different instances, including ‘munitions makers,’ companies with ‘unfair’ labor practices, companies dealing with discriminatory unions, companies with investments in Portugal, companies doing business with communist countries, etc.… No company is completely free of connections that might be morally-politically-socially objectionable to a significant part of the University