These actions have focused on demands that universities get rid of stocks they hold in U.S. companies operating in South Africa.

Student protests have put the spotlight on the huge profits U.S. corporations reap from the brutal exploitation of Black labor. The have also begun to expose the U.S. political, economic, and military support that protects those profits and bolsters the apartheid regime.

Campus-based actions have already begun to convince growing numbers of Americans that the United States must get out of South Africa altogether.

The Young Socialist Alliance is part of the developing movement. YSA National Chairperson Cathy Sedwick explains why. “As a revolutionary socialist youth organization, it is the YSA’s internationalist duty and responsibility to aid the struggle of our South African sisters and brothers,” she says.

“The U.S. government, corporations, and banks provide powerful support for the apartheid regime.

“Protests demanding that universities divest reflect the desire of thousands of students and other young people to aid the African liberation struggle.

“When Soweto exploded in 1976, it had a tremendous impact in the United States, especially in the Black community.

“Black youth marched with banners proclaiming, ‘Harlem-Soweto—Same Struggle,’ as they protested repression in South Africa.”  
 
November 23, 1953
The long hard legal battle of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to end segregation of Negro children in schools has once again forced the issue to a hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court on Dec. 7-8. An historic legal decision on segregation is within sight.

To put pressure on the Supreme Court, the Southern bourbons are preparing to brazenly circumvent any “adverse” decision by organizing a Jim Crow “private” school system. Governor Talmadge of Georgia has given the signal for such a maneuver in the Georgia legislature.

The school boards argued their case in the lower courts on the notorious Jim Crow “separate but equal doctrine.” In this way they sought to evade the clear intent of the Fourteenth Amendment to destroy all caste and color legislation in the United States.

Talmadge gave the Georgia legislature his “solemn promise…that as long as I am your Governor there will be no mixed schools and colleges in Georgia.”

The NAACP court fight is an important step forward in the struggle. But the reactionary racist forces will not be defeated by court action alone. What the South needs is a militant labor movement to establish democracy by direct mass action. A court decision eliminating segregation in the schools will give a powerful impetus to the fight against Jim Crow. But only the mobilization of the entire labor and minority movement can enforce a legal decision that the Jim Crow forces are determined to obstruct at all costs.  
 
 
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