I Write What I Like

The 1960s saw an increase in student activism around the world. In South Africa, Black Consciousness (See: Index of Terms) originated in the mid-1960s at the University of Natal in Durban, the country’s third largest city. Spearheaded by Biko and other Black student leaders, the BCM was a grassroots antiapartheid movement that emerged out of the political vacuum left by the 1960 banning of the African National Congress and Pan Africanist Congress, part of a government response to demonstrations that resulted in the police massacre of 69 Black protesters in the township of Sharpeville on March 21, 1960 (McRae, Matthew. “The Sharpeville Massacre.” Canadian Museum for Human Rights, 2019).

Under Biko’s leadership, the BCM sought to empower Black people by restoring Black pride after centuries of erosion under white rule. Critical of the paternalistic attitudes of white liberals, advocates of Black Consciousness held that the psychological liberation of Black people was a necessary step to emancipation. As a prime tenet of SASO, Black Consciousness spread across South Africa’s college campuses and beyond, from its foundation under Biko until the arrest of several BCM leaders under the Terrorism Act in 1976.

The BCM is of a piece with roughly contemporary student movements around the globe. Key among these is the civil rights movement in the US (1950s-1960s), a social movement whose aims included abolishing racial discrimination, segregation, and the disenfranchisement of Black people. Students were deeply involved in the civil rights movement. In the spring of 1951, for instance, Black students at Moton High School in Virginia protested school segregation, overcrowding, and the lack of funding for their failing facilities. This protest gained the support of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and led to the landmark 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional (“Brown v. Board of Education.” National Archives).

Similarly, in 1955, a 15-year-old student named Claudette Colvin was arrested after refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger while riding a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama, an act of civil disobedience famously repeated by Rosa Parks, who became a symbol of the Montgomery bus boycott (“Montgomery Bus Boycott.” History, 2023). In 1960, Black college students staged a sit-in at a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina, to protest the store’s segregated lunch counter. These student movements from the 1950s laid the foundation for later protests, notably, at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1964, Berkeley students protested when administrators tried to prevent them from organizing on campus, galvanizing students across the country to speak out against various forms of injustice, including restrictions on free speech, racial discrimination, and US foreign policy, including the war in Vietnam (“The Student Movement and the Antiwar Movement.” Khan Academy).

Students across Europe staged their own protests during this period. In 1968, for example, students in France joined forces with striking workers to stage mass rallies that upended social norms, giving rise to the women’s liberation and gay rights movements (Rubin, Alissa J. “May 1968: A Month of Revolution Pushed France Into the Modern World.” The New York Times, 2018). The same year, students in the Netherlands and Denmark formed action groups protesting environmental degradation, while students in Sweden protested hydroelectric plans. In 1968, there were mass student protests in Germany against political authorities, and in Yugoslavia against social injustice. These global student movements help contextualize Black Consciousness, one of the most important student-led movements for social change in 20th-century South Africa.