RSA & USA

Ronald Reagan’s November landslide stripped the political terrain so bare of issues that leftish rebels have been straining to find a politique for their mystique. The Republic of South Africa serves nicely, thank you. Thus some seven hundred liberals, including congressional Black Caucus members, white liberal Senator Lowell Weicker, TransAfrica’s Randall Robinson, Coretta King, Arthur Ashe, Harry Belafonte, and a sampling of Kennedy offspring, have been booked in the daily Massachusetts Avenue liturgy of sacrificial arrest.

The contagion has even spread to conservatives. Last December, 35 GOP congressmen (mostly young populists) signed a letter to the South African ambassador threatening to “curtail new American investments” and organize other internal economic sanctions unless the South African government took definite action to end apartheid. The conservatives pushed the idea of making the Sullivan Principles mandatory for all U.S. companies doing business in South Africa (128 out of 284 now subscribe). Offered by the Reverend Leon Sullivan, the black pastor of Philadelphia’s Zion Baptist Church, the code demands total workplace desegregation, training and promotions for non-whites, and improved outside-the-workplace conditions for blacks in the employ of U.S. corporations. (In fulfilling the last-mentioned, by the way, U.S. corporations have given more than $78 million for medical, housing, and educational expenses to South African black employees and their families from 1978 to 1983. Oddly, just as conservatives were embracing the Sullivan Principles, the author himself weakened their leverage by announcing in early February that he supports, paradoxically, disinvestment by U.S. corporations.

JM

About the Author

John McLaughlin

Featured Tags

Manage following

South Africa

Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan’s November landslide stripped the political terrain so bare of issues that leftish rebels have been straining to find a politique for their mystique. The Republic of South Africa serves nicely, thank you. Thus some seven hundred liberals, including congressional Black Caucus members, white liberal Senator Lowell Weicker, TransAfrica’s Randall Robinson, Coretta King, Arthur Ashe, Harry Belafonte, and a sampling of Kennedy offspring, have been booked in the daily Massachusetts Avenue liturgy of sacrificial arrest.

The contagion has even spread to conservatives. Last December, 35 GOP congressmen (mostly young populists) signed a letter to the South African ambassador threatening to “curtail new American investments” and organize other internal economic sanctions unless the South African government took definite action to end apartheid. The conservatives pushed the idea of making the Sullivan Principles mandatory for all U.S. companies doing business in South Africa (128 out of 284 now subscribe). Offered by the Reverend Leon Sullivan, the black pastor of Philadelphia’s Zion Baptist Church, the code demands total workplace desegregation, training and promotions for non-whites, and improved outside-the-workplace conditions for blacks in the employ of U.S. corporations. (In fulfilling the last-mentioned, by the way, U.S. corporations have given more than $78 million for medical, housing, and educational expenses to South African black employees and their families from 1978 to 1983. Oddly, just as conservatives were embracing the Sullivan Principles, the author himself weakened their leverage by announcing in early February that he supports, paradoxically, disinvestment by U.S. corporations.