Principle of Vital Importance

Every weekday for more than eight months now, through winter freeze and summer swelter, scores of Americans, black and white, have been assembling in front of the large, sand-colored South African embassy on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington to demonstrate their revulsion from apartheid. Every weekday for those eight months, some of the protesters have been arrested. Through last week, Washington police had detained nearly 3,000 antiapartheid demonstrators; in virtually all the cases, they were quickly freed after posting $50 bail, and none were prosecuted. Among those arrested since last November are 22 Congressmen, former First Daughter Amy Carter, two of the late Robert Kennedy's children, and Coretta King, the widow of Martin Luther King Jr.

As the situation in South Africa has grown more inflamed, the protest in Washington has kept pace. In response to Pretoria's imposition of a partial state of emergency, 1,500 demonstrators gathered outside the South African embassy last week; 43 were taken into custody, including John Jacob, the president of the National Urban League, and 35 of that organization's officials. Noting that he had never been arrested in a demonstration before, Jacob said, "It is an experience to be considered only when the principle is of vital importance."

More than any other international issue since the Viet Nam War, the question of apartheid has touched off a wave of public protest and voluntary arrest in the U.S. that is far from being confined to Washington. While demonstrators have been taking to the streets of the capital, others across the country have sought to pressure state and local governments, universities and colleges to rid themselves of holdings that involve U.S. and foreign companies with interests in South Africa. Both houses of Congress have called for economic sanctions against Pretoria, and divestiture proposals have come before virtually every state legislature. "Many Americans knew nothing about apartheid before the demonstrations began," says Randall Robinson, executive director of Transafrica, a black-led lobbying group that coordinates the Washington protests. "Now there is a new understanding of South African repression."

Outside the capital, the protest movement has been most visible on college campuses, where, in raising their fists against apartheid, demonstrators have also raised memories of the '60s. At the University of California, Berkeley, about 200 protesters staged a sleep-in vigil in April that culminated in 159 arrests. Harvard has seen a dozen demonstrations, including a silent ten-day vigil in front of the college's spiritual center, the statue of Founder John Harvard. At Cornell, students built a settlement of mock South African shanties and lived inside them until a fire swept through the area and the local fire department declared the huts a hazard.