"For the emancipation of black people everywhere": The African National Congress and NAACP's Coalition to Destroy Apartheid

In 1993, shortly after his release from Robben Island, future President of South Africa Nelson Mandela addressed the NAACP annual convention.  Mandela told the Association members, who “had contributed everything from $20 bills to $1,000 checks in a fund-raiser for the ANC”, that “‘We have come as a component part of the historic coalition of organizations, to which the NAACP and the ANC belong that has fought for the emancipation of black people everywhere.’”

Indeed, many of the strategies that brought about the collapse of apartheid – the isolation of South Africa in the UN, boycotts, divestment, and media attention focused on the brutality of white supremacy – were designed by this transnational team of activists in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  For example, in 1953, Z.K. Matthews, co-author of the African National Congress’ Freedom Charter and head of the ANC’s Cape Town branch, strategized with NAACP leader Walter White about the key points the Association should (and did) make in challenging a World Bank loan that South Africa was attempting to land.  Moreover, the NAACP, after conferring with African leaders, financed the direct action tactic of picketing the South African Embassy to bring media attention to the growing entrenchment of apartheid.  The Association also held a series of meetings with ANC leaders to hone the early strategy within the UN that eventually pushed South Africa into the realm of pariah state. 

Although scholars such as Francis Njubi Nesbitt and Penny Von Eschen have unveiled the coalition of African Americans and the ANC in the anti-apartheid struggle, currently we only have one spectrum of that alliance. The NAACP was not Paul Robeson’s Council on African Affairs or Kwame Toure’s SNCC, but it was, nonetheless, deeply involved, in wiping apartheid off the face of this earth.