November 21, 2021

The Free South Africa Movement in the United States began on this day in 1984 with the arrest of Randall Robinson, Executive Director of Trans Africa; Mary Frances Berry of the United States Civil Rights Commission; and Congressman Walter Fauntroy of Washington, DC at a sit-in at the South African Embassy. A fourth person, Georgetown University Law Professor Eleanor Holmes Norton, as part of the plan, was spared arrest as she addressed journalists. All this was an elaborate effort to bring focus on the apartheid regime as part of the world-wide anti-apartheid movement.