Albert Luthuli. Robert Trent Vinson

Luthuli’s South African origins, the owner effectively declared Luthuli an “honorary white,” telling him he could stay, but not Gandy, whereupon the exasperated men left in disgust. Luthuli remarked that this southern tour had a profound effect on him, allowing him to “see South African issues more sharply, and in a different and larger perspective.”²³ Luthuli’s American tour reminded him of the transnational nature of white supremacy: “those moments—a door closed in one’s face, a restaurant where a cup of coffee has been refused—that jolt the black man back to the realization that, almost everywhere he travels, race prejudice will not let him be at home in the world.”²⁴ Luthuli heard stories from African Americans insulted by long-time prime minister Jan Smuts, who in 1929 had told American blacks that Africans “were the most patient of all animals, next to the ass.”²⁵ Luthuli left America in February 1949 having felt the sting of American Jim Crow but also encouraged by African American progress against long odds.

      When Luthuli returned to South Africa, the National Party, keenly aware that their slender electoral victory could be overturned in the next elections, was already moving to translate apartheid from a provocative electoral slogan into a comprehensive and ambitious social engineering political program that would ensure ethnic Afrikaner advancement and white racial supremacy. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and the Immorality Act (1950) outlawed marriage and sexual relations between whites and other racial groups. The Suppression of Communism Act (1950) stifled political dissent by defining communism broadly to include any resistance to the apartheid state. The Population Registration Act (1950) divided South Africa’s inhabitants into four racial groups, Africans, Coloureds, Asiatics, and Whites—and on this basis the National Party set out to create racially differentiated citizens and subjects in their “own” residential areas, with different employment, educational, political, economic, and social rights. The Group Areas Act (1950) extended government powers to create racially separate residential zones, including the forcible removal of people to create racially homogeneous areas. In Luthuli’s view, the apartheid regime and its white supporters had pirated the land, wealth, and government. More particularly, it had claimed ownership of the African majority, virtually enslaving them through apartheid laws. Africans were the “livestock which went with the estate, objects rather than subjects,” political footballs tossed about by the Nationalists and their white parliamentary rivals.²⁶

      At the December 1948 conference, ANC Youth Leaguers such as A. P. Mda, Walter Sisulu, Nelson Mandela, and Oliver Tambo argued that the advent of the new apartheid regime forced the ANC to move beyond strictly constitutional methods. They proposed a Program of Action that would consist of civil disobedience tactics, including strikes and boycotts. Before the December 1949 ANC annual conference, they challenged Xuma to move beyond strictly constitutional measures to fight apartheid, but he refused to commit himself to the Program of Action. Inspired partially by Kwame Nkrumah’s direct-action anticolonial stance in the Gold Coast, the Youth Leaguers effectively seized power within the ANC at the 1949 conference, as delegates voted to adopt the Program of Action. Delegates also voted for the Youth League’s candidate for president-general, Dr. James Moroka, who defeated the chastened Xuma. Sisulu became ANC secretary-general, and six Youth Leaguers joined the National Executive.²⁷

      Luthuli would lead the execution of the Program of Action in Natal. Allison Wessels George (A. W. G.) Champion, who regarded the provincial Natal ANC as his personal fiefdom and felt no obligation to enact national ANC initiatives, also opposed the Program of Action. After initial reservations about African-Indian collaboration after the January 1949 Durban riots, in which some Africans, frustrated by the perceived arrogance and discrimination of Indians toward them, attacked Indians, Luthuli participated in joint-action campaigns with the Indian Congresses. This included a one-day strike on May 1, 1950, in which the South African police killed at least eighteen unarmed, nonviolent protesters, and a multiracial one-day stay at home on June 26, 1950, to protest the Group Areas Act and the Suppression of Communism Act. Luthuli resigned from Champion’s executive committee in protest of his dictatorial control of the Natal ANC, his opposition to the Program of Action, and his general resistance to national ANC centralization efforts.²⁸ ANC leaders in Transvaal and Natal, particularly influential Youth League leaders M. B. Yengwa and Wilson Conco, and Jordan Ngubane, editor of the African newspaper Inkundla ya Bantu, persuaded Luthuli to stand as Natal ANC president at the 1951 Natal ANC conference.²⁹ As Yengwa, who became Luthuli’s close ally as Natal ANC secretary and NEC member, noted, “Mr. Champion was not prepared to cooperate with the Indians, but . . . we argued that we have no alternative but to work with the Indians, that we are fighting the same enemy.”³⁰ On May 3, 1951, Luthuli became Natal ANC president, defeating Champion in a contentious, raucous election. Though the embittered Champion became a longtime antagonist, Luthuli’s victory facilitated greater cooperation with the Transvaal-based national ANC and set the stage for Natal’s participation in the iconic Defiance Campaign.³¹

       3

       The Nonviolent, Multiracial Politics of Defiance

       The Defiance Campaign

      Luthuli became a national political figure during the iconic 1952 Defiance Campaign, a multiracial mobilization to resist apartheid led by the ANC, the SAIC, and the Coloured Peoples Convention (CPC). Luthuli led protests in Natal against the Pass Laws, Group Areas Act, the Separate Voters’ Representation Act, the Suppression of Communism Act, and the Bantu Authorities Act. The campaign modeled itself on Gandhi’s nonviolent civil disobedience strategy, which helped win India’s independence from Great Britain, and the mid-1940s Indian passive resistance campaigns against the so called Ghetto Act, which disenfranchised Indians and restricted their land ownership.¹ Luthuli endorsed Gandhi’s satyagraha as an “active non-violence” that he felt had the power to change individual lives, mobilize the masses, and end apartheid. “We have declared to the world that we do not mean to use violence in furtherance of our cause. We will always follow the path of peace and nonviolence in our legitimate demands for freedom.”² In April 1952, he gathered Natal ANC members to reaffirm their commitment to the Defiance Campaign, a pivotal moment that his close friend M. B. Yengwa remembered reflected his unprecedented willingness to defy government laws despite being a government-paid chief.³

Luthuli’s role as a staff officer was not to be arrested and go to jail, but to tour Natal to organize the campaign. With his rich baritone voice, he led crowds singing freedom songs. The Natal Campaign began in August 1952 as a joint ANC-SAIC endeavor, marking the first large-scale cooperation between Africans, Indians, and other racial groups in the province. Luthuli rallied thousands of people as Africans and Indians defied segregation practices in public facilities and Africans defied curfew laws in Durban.⁴ Over nine thousand people of all races went to jail for defying apartheid laws, and the prisons resounded with their freedom songs. The Defiance Campaign lived up to its name, but it was never going to bring the walls—or the laws—of apartheid tumbling down. Instead, the government used brute force to eliminate all “subversive” activity, soon to be defined yet more comprehensively.⁵ Nevertheless, the Defiance Campaign led to a dramatic increase in ANC membership (from an estimated twenty-five thousand in 1951 to one hundred thousand at the end of the campaign). It also facilitated the Congress Alliance, a broad antiapartheid front of independent multiracial, multi-ideological organizations that sought to end apartheid. If the Defiance Campaign did not end apartheid, it prepared its downfall by transforming the character and nature of the antiapartheid struggle.

      Luthuli signing up volunteers for the Defiance Campaign, 1952. (Luthuli Museum)

      This was particularly significant in Natal, where memories of the Durban riots reinforced mutual suspicion and hostility between Indians and Africans. Even Gandhi had exhibited racial antagonism toward Africans, and his son, Manilal, who had remained in Natal, had previously referred to Africans’ “savage instinct” and doubted their ability to attain and maintain the spiritual and personal discipline to utilize satyagraha techniques.⁶ But Luthuli’s inclusive leadership style, open