Norton Celebrates the 25th Anniversary of Her South African Embassy Sit-in Launching (12/15/09)
Norton Celebrates the 25th Anniversary of Her South African Embassy Sit-In Launching the Free South Africa Movement
December 15, 2009
WASHINGTON, DC - Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), one of four people who founded the Free South Africa movement with a sit-in, organized by TransAfrica, at the South African Embassy in 1984, today celebrated the 25th anniversary of the groundbreaking event that began the collapse of U.S. opposition to sanctions that ultimately were critical to ending apartheid in South Africa. "My student sit-in days prepared me well for our unusual sit-in at the South-African Embassy. Because of our fairly high profiles (Walter Fauntroy, then-D.C. Congressman; TransAfrica President Randall Robinson, and Professor Mary Frances Berry), the South African Ambassador agreed to meet with us concerning the arrest of Black South African trade unionists whom we feared were in grave danger. Little did the ambassador know that we had no intention of leaving, or that I would be given the mission by my three co-conspirators, to excuse myself from the meeting for the purpose of informing our people, who were already picketing, and the press, that we were staging a sit-in.
"Although we had no grand ideas of what our actions would yield, it soon became clear that on that day 25 years ago, a movement was born. Hundreds of superstars and ordinary citizens alike spontaneously flocked to the capital for months demanding to be arrested unless sanctions were forth coming. These arrests became a citizen badge of honor and ultimately ended Reagan administration opposition to sanctions. The results of the Free South Africa movement are apparent 25 years later in a rare example of a peaceful transition from an oppressive and exclusionary government to Black majority rule democracy in South Africa today."