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In this episode, we speak with Dr. Lisa Brock, a historian, radical intellectual and activist who became known as a leader of the Chicago Anti-apartheid movement while in graduate school. She shared her account of one of the first campaigns she organized once she got here: helping coordinate the Chicago movement to boycott the South African Rugby team, which was supposed to play a game here in the fall of 1981.
Show Notes:
In the episode, we discuss the publicity techniques used by the Chicago coalition of the Stop the Apartheid Rugby Tour to get their word out, including press releases, press conferences, and protests. Examples of these documents can be found in the Lisa Brock Collection of the Chicago Anti-Apartheid Movement Collection:
https://digitalcommons.colum.edu/brock/
You can also peruse documents from a similar campaign by the New York Coalition of SART earlier in 1981.
https://africanactivist.msu.edu/organization/210-813-183/
We didn’t include Lisa’s account of the many protests that took place in the New Zealand leg of the “Apartheid Rugby Tour,” but it was an important backdrop to the U.S. protests and future developments in New Zealand history.
Lisa also shared a copy of the letter to the Chicago Sun-Times threatening her - and partially setting off the series of events on Sept. 6, 1981 she chronicles in the episode.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zLN2ZVk4s7zDAIGfQKwt0DRgRiiYrdjI/view?usp=sharing
To learn more about the Anti-Apartheid Struggle - and the work of her mentor Dennis Brutus - Lisa recommends the documentary, Have You Heard From Johannasberg, which also provides a powerful illustration of the importance of boycotts and divestment as tools for social change, then and now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Brutus
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/haveyouheard
Credits:
Image: : Columbia College Chicago, ""Apartheid Rugby is Not Sport"" (1981). Lisa Brock Anti-Apartheid Collection. 13.
https://digitalcommons.colum.edu/brock/13
Hosts:
Madhurima Chakraborty - https://madhurimachakraborty.net/
Sean Johnson Andrews - http://breakingculture.substack.com
Show music: composed by Kris Stokes - https://www.krisstokes.com
