Posters advertising South African apartheid divestment protests

Posters advertising South African apartheid divestment protests

In the 1980s, students protesting apartheid demanded that Duke divest from companies that did business in South Africa. In 1986, demonstrators constructed shanties and a makeshift “Apartheid Prison” in front of the Chapel. Six Duke students and one alumna were arrested and charged with trespassing. The charges were dropped, and the Board of Trustees eventually agreed to divest. Susan Cook (T’88) defended the protests in a Chronicle op-ed, arguing that her great-grand-uncle Julian Abele, primary designer of Duke’s campus, “was a victim of apartheid in this country.” This brought Abele, a Black man excluded from Duke’s history, into the community’s consciousness.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 DEED

1986

"Posters advertising South African apartheid divestment protests." Student Activism Reference Collection, Box 3, South Africa 1986-1988 Folder, Duke University Archives, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

Horizontal aligned piece of green paper with black typed text.

Divestment; H.Keith H. Brodie; posters

1986