Apartheid

“ Since this is fundamentally a human question, we can take heart in the fact that at our side in our struggle against apartheid are ranged the vast majority of human race. But to justify their support we must ourselves scrupulously and militantly enforce the measures which we have agreed upon. ”

“ Though apartheid used legal means to exclude the majority of this country's people from civic and material justice, the law—embodied in a detailed founding document—would now form the basis for our national aspirations. ”

“ There must be an end to white monopoly on political power and a fundamental restructuring of our political and economic systems to ensure that the inequalities of apartheid are addressed and our society thoroughly democratised. ”

“ We can accept assistance from those who seek the same ends only if the other precious freedoms which we equally cherish are not thereby prejudiced.
In our struggle to eliminate from the African continent the ugly sore of apartheid, so repugnant and loathsome to us Africans, unhappily, all too little progress has been recorded. Much has been said and written in condemnation of this most ignoble and inhuman form of the abasement by man of his fellows, each one of us here has roundly and unequivocally condemned this evil. ”

“ We have also seen how, once the coloured people of South Africa won recognition of their human rights and fundamental freedoms, joined forces with those who had excluded them to set in motion one of the most original and exemplary political processes this century, rapidly leaving all trace of apartheid, that modern form of slavery, far, far behind them. ”

“ Unfortunately, no continent has been spared the pain of human rights violations. In South Africa the manifest injustices of the apartheid system of racial discrimination persist. Refugees continue to flow from the communist nations of southeast Asia. ”

“ Today the majority of South Africans, black and white, recognise that apartheid has no future. It has to be ended by our own decisive mass action in order to build peace and security. The mass campaign of defiance and other actions of our organisation and people can only culminate in the establishment of democracy. ”

“ Now in the most serious protest against apartheid, nearly 200 of our people have been killed, most by the authorities who are using the army, as I have said, against a peaceful civilian population, and the West does not appear to care. ”

“ Reaffirms that the national liberation movements recognized by the Organization of African Unity -- the African National Congress of South Africa and the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania -- are the authentic representatives of the overwhelming majority of the South African people; 3. Strongly condemns the racist regime of South Africa for its criminal policies and practices of apartheid, its massacres of black people, including schoolchildren, and its ruthless repression of all those struggling against apartheid ”

“ Calls upon the Government of the Union of South Africa to initiate measures aimed at bringing about racial harmony based on equality in order to ensure that the present situation does not continue or recur, and to abandon its policies of apartheid and racial discrimination ”

“ Requests the Centre against Apartheid, in consultation with the Special Committee against Apartheid, to intensify publicity for the cause of all those persecuted for their opposition to apartheid in South Africa. ”

“ Expresses concern over violation of human rights, including manifestations of racial discrimination, racism, apartheid, colonialism, foreign aggression and occupation, and the establishment of illegal settlements in occupied territories, as well as the recent resurgence of intolerance, neo-nazism, xenophobia and ethnic cleansing. ”

“ Why is it that the free people of color are now, in almost every part of our country, threatened with banishment from State to State, and with hunting from city to city, until there shall be no place for the soles of their feet in this their native land? Is it because they are in reality, as slaveholders tell us, an inferior race of beings? No, my friends: their consistent conduct, their polished manners, and their great respectability, wherever they have enjoyed the advantages of equality of education and equality of motives, proclaim the contrary. ”

“ Is it because those who cherish it are treated as the offscouring of all flesh, in the place of their birth? or because they do not possess equal rights and privileges with other citizens? or because they are the victims of incorrigible hate and prejudice? or because they are told that they must choose between exilement and perpetual degradation? or because the density of population renders it impossible for them to obtain preferment and competence here? or because they are estranged by oppression and scorn? ”

“ We therefore consider all laws to enslave or degrade the people of color as contrary to the letter and spirit of this Declaration; [Pg 50] and that according to it we are freemen, and have as indisputable a right to enjoy our liberty as any white man. To deny it to us, because we differ in color, is oppression. To say that Africa is our native country is untrue. Here we were born, and here we mean to die; for all men are born free. ”

“ I say, therefore, in answer to the question whether, without the full fraternity which seems impossible here, the white and the black races may not live together in South Africa in political liberty and equality, that the trend of events leads to the belief that the established pride of race of the whites, and the growing pride of race among the Natives will conduce to voluntary separation wherever this is possible, and that in this way the coming generations will contrive to live territorially separate under a common governance, founded upon political equality and liberty. ”

“ The denial of rights guaranteed the Negro by the Constitution and the refusal to grant him the ordinary privileges of a freeman have created what is called the “Negro Problem”—the most prominent, the gravest and the most important question in American affairs. Ten millions of people with African blood in their veins—“an undifferentiated part of the Nation”—are made the objects of the meanest discrimination and the most unjust treatment by a so-called superior race seven times their number. ”

“ Colonialism and the policy of racism impose soul searching questions of human rights, weighing equally on the conscience of all men and nations of good-will. History amply shows that the freedom enjoyed by the many becomes fragile when the denial, even to the few, of basic human rights is tolerated. ”

“ As these things are seen in increasing light, they will be condemned in no uncertain words; nor will the denial of equal rights, on account of color, escape the judgment awarded to slavery itself. Human conduct on this question is a measure of character. Where the African race is enslaved or degraded, where it is exposed to any indignity or shut out from that equality which is a primal right to humanity, there civilization is still feeble. ”

“ How, then, can the natives, who form three fourths of the population of the new Union, and who are far more children of the soil than the Europeans, be said to have protection of their most elementary rights if they are to be debarred from having men of their own colour and race to defend them, and if no white jury can be trusted to do justice where a native is concerned? ”

“ It has scarcely been possible in recent years to open a newspaper without our eye being arrested by head-lines telling us of racial strifes or international contentions. One day we read of race riots; on the next we learn that the inhabitants of a certain area of land demand separation from all surrounding peoples. By a process of 'self-determination' they demand to be recognized as a separate people or nation. ”

“ The groan of the African is not heard among her beautiful hills, nor the whip of the task-master in her pleasant valleys. Would it were thus unto our farthest shores! How can a free people be a slave-holding people? Surely in that social community, where man is claimed as the property of his fellow, the corner-stone of the Temple of Liberty must be laid in the sand; and whither shall we flee when such frail foundation is unsettled?
We have been told of the happiness of the Negro in his bondage ”

“ But it must be admitted, that the rigid oppression abroad in the land is such, that a part of our suffering brethren cannot live under it, and that the compulsory laws and the inducements held out by the American Colonization Society are such as will cause them to alienate all their natural attachments to their homes, and accept of the only mode left open, which is to remove to a distant Country to receive those rights and privileges of which they have been deprived. ”

“ Such a long list of tyrannical acts of persecutions as I could make out — persecutions of the Coloured people as a class as well as individually — can point to but one conclusion, and that is that the whites are determined at all hazards to repress all aspirations of the Coloured people for a higher life, to deny all opportunities of betterment, to keep them politically, civilly and industrially as slaves, and even to force those who have risen back into a state worse than slavery. ”

“ These gentlemen acknowledge the anomaly of those political ethics which make a distinction between man and man, when their foundation is, 'that all men are born equal,' and possess in common 'unalienable rights;' and to justify the withholding of these 'rights' would proclaim to foreigners that we are 'a distinct and inferior race,' without religion or morals, and implying that our condition cannot be improved here because there exists an unconquerable prejudice in the whites towards us. ”

“ And when these colored folk who make up the overwhelming majority of this world demand decent treatment for themselves, the proponents of this theory accuse them of seeking social equality. For white folk to insist upon the right to manage their own ancestral lands, free from the domination of tyrants, domestic and foreign, is variously described as “democracy” and “self-determination.” For Negroes, Egyptians and Hindus to seek the same thing is impudence. ”

“ Taking the civilisation of to-day to mean an ordered and advanced state of society in which all men are equally bound and entitled to share the burdens and privileges of the whole political and social life according to their individual limitations we ask whether the African Natives are capable of acquiring this civilisation, and whether, if it be proved that their capacity for progress is equal to that of the Europeans, the demand for full racial equality that must inevitably follow can in fairness be denied. ”

“ Are these the men to stigmatize as foreigners?
'Colonizationists generally agree in asserting that the people of color cannot be elevated in this country, nor be admitted to equal privileges with the whites. Is not this a libel upon humanity and justice—a libel upon republicanism—a libel upon the Declaration of Independence—a libel upon christianity? "All men are born equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights—among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." ”

“ They thrust the enfranchised African from their public tables--born beneath their own skies, a native of their own soil, a free citizen by their own Declaration of Independence; yet exclaim, in the face of this black injustice--"Our people enjoy equal rights." ”

“ We protest against segregated districts, separate public conveyances, industrial discrimination, lynchings and limitations of political privileges of any Negro citizen in any part of the world on account of race, color or creed, and will exert our full influence and power against all such. ”

“ The habits, the feelings, all the prejudices of society—prejudices which neither refinement, nor argument, nor education, nor religion itself, can subdue—mark the people of color, whether bond or free, as the subjects of a degradation inevitable and incurable. The African in this country belongs by birth to the very lowest station in society ”

“ My third and greatest objection to the Colonization Society is, that its members write and speak, both in public and private, as if the prejudice against skins darker colored than our own, was a fixed and unalterable law of our nature, which cannot possibly be changed. The very existence of the Society is owing to this prejudice: for if we could make all the colored people white, or if they could be viewed as impartially as if they were white, what would be left for the Colonization Society to do? ”

“ It is my purpose in writing this work to show that the American Government has always construed people of African parentage to be aliens, not only when the Constitution was tortured by narrow-minded men to shield the cruel, murderous slave-holder in the possession of his human property, but even now, when the panoply of citizenship is, presumably, all-sufficient to insure to the late slave the enjoyment of full manhood rights as a sovereign citizen. ”

“ That solution is segregation. It offers intact all the advantages which the opportunities of life among a highly civilized race create without the demoralizing and humiliating influences at work on account of race prejudice. It frees the whites and Negroes alike and enlarges the opportunities for the development of each race, under a common flag, that will no longer be under the necessity of polluting the pure air of Heaven by withholding its protection from among even the humblest of its citizens. ”

“ This prejudice is invincible, irremediable. The poor African is hopelessly and irretrievably doomed to scorn, contempt and degradation while in the midst of the white race. Is the African allowed the ordinary privileges of the white man any where in all the liberty loving North? ”

“ Racial solidarity has been the immortality of you Jews, and sometimes—no offence, Magnus—I’m inclined to believe that the instinct that moves many of your brilliant race into Socialism is a contempt of mere national definitions which in your own world-solidarity have no meaning to you. ”