Reverend Jesse Jackson’s Anti-Apartheid Speech at Harvard University (1985)

[tone] ...back home, and Mandela was able to get free. And Makatina and Mandela and Boesak and Tutu began to fight for affirmative action, for reparations to offset negative action. And then we have a demonstration just this big against affirmative action because of no regard for years of negative action and abuse. I don't stand here as no ordinary speaker because in my lifetime I know apartheid. First hand, American style, I grew up looking at signs on buses, saying colored seat from the rear, and white seat from the front, if ignored punishable by

law. I grew up in South Carolina, not South Africa, South Carolina, where it was illegal for a black teacher to make the same amount of money as a white teacher, where it was illegal for a black child to be as literate as a white child, where it was illegal for blacks to buy property, illegal to make a bank loan, illegal for my high school class to stand on the green lawn of the state capital. We stand here 25 years later fight South Africa, which is the right thing to do. With the radical disregard for apartheid in our own nation and our own lifetime, we must fight apartheid and its effects in America as well as South Africa to have our moral authority. You cannot be with clarity against apartheid in South Africa and for corrected surgery and for [inaudible] justice and be silent

on the issue of affirmative action in this nation. We cannot inculcate about apartheid and its moral stature. There is a litmus test for apartheid. I listen to all these arguments. I read the Crimson, all this intellectualism about apartheid, saving some modest scholarship, making profits on apartheid. The Third Reich in Germany was built on race. The Fourth Reich in South Africa is built on race. Apartheid in South Africa is the reincarnation of the Reich philosophy forty years later. The same moral standards applied to the Third Reich must apply to the Fourth Reich. Anybody that would disinvest, divest, and disassociate from the Third Reich in

Germany in 1945 must do the same thing from the Fourth Reich in South Africa in 1985. Apartheid is morally wrong. Apartheid is ungodly. Apartheid