Tragically, Lumumba's fate was sealed from the beginning when he emerged on the political scene as the country's most influential leader. Western governments, led by the United States, saw him as a threat to their geopolitical interests in the Congo and in Africa as a whole because of his strong nationalist views and beliefs as a Pan-Africanist. On 18 August 1960, a CIA dispatch from the Congo to Washington described Lumumba as "a commie playing the commie game." The American ambassador during that time was Clare Hayes Timerlake.

Americans and other Westerners saw Patrice Lumumba as another Castro and a friend of the Russians who would give the Soviets the upper hand in the Congo at the expense of the West, in spite of the fact that he was not a communist or an ideological ally of the Soviets in the rivalry between the East and the West.

The Americans, including President Dwight Eisenhower and his successor John F. Kennedy and their advisors as well as congressional leaders, saw the Congo as the most prized possession in Africa in pursuit of their geopolitical interests and competition with the Soviet Union because of the country's vast mineral wealth and strategic location including its proximity to the white-ruled countries in southern Africa which were ideological allies of the West against Eastern-bloc countries during the Cold War.

Therefore they did everything they could to gain control of the Congo and prevent the Soviets from getting it, even if it meant going to war, especially by using surrogate forces to secure Western interests. And to them, Lumumba symbolized the worst they could think of. All attempts to portray Lumumba in his true colours and and try to explain to the rest of the world what type of leader he really was, were ignored or dismissed as lies by Western leaders, especially the Americans.

One young American reporter who was on the scene when the tragic events were unfolding in the Congo provided a detailed account of Western machinations against Lumumba masterminded by the United States. And she produced what were probably some of the most balanced reports coming out of the Congo during those tragic years.

Her name was D"Lynn Waldron. She was 23 years old in 1960 when she was in the Congo. She worked for The Cleveland Press and News in Cleveland, Ohio, and her dispatches from Congo before independence were published in that newspaper, although she complained that her editors in the United States censored and slanted her reports to portray Lumumba and the Congolese people in a negative light and added to the published reports some things she never wrote or said.

These are some of the things she said about what happened and what was going on when she was in the Congo with Lumumba:

"In the spring of 1960, I was the only foreign correspondent covering Patrice Lumumba in Stanleyville just before Independence, and as such and an American, I became Lumumba's confidant and the one he entrusted to mediate between himself and the Belgian administration and to get the word to Eisenhower and the American people that he was absolutely not a Communist....

It was well known in the Congo before Independence that Belgium and the banking and mining interests were arranging for the coming Independence to disintegrate into chaos so they could take back Katanga with its gold, uranium and copper, and Kasai with its industrial diamonds, while dumping the unprofitable remainder of the Congo.

The "White Congolese" of Belgian descent were even more aware of this and more angered by the betrayal of a trust, than almost any "Black African", except Patrice Lumumba.

It was these disaffected White Congolese, and especially the colonial governor of Kasai, who told me exactly what the plans of the banking and mining interests were. I even have their hand-drawn maps showing the parts of the country that would be reclaimed from the chaos. The governor of Kasai was so disgusted with the Belgian government that he took down from his wall his prized historical maps of the Congo and handed them to me (I still have them).

Before I went up the Congo River to Stanleyville, which was Lumumba's political headquarters, I had read newspaper stories and been told by some people in the Belgian Colonial Administration that Lumumba was a madman and a Communist puppet of Russia.

What I found was a thoughtful, dignified, dedicated man who naively believed that if... Eisenhower were told the truth, Eisenhower would no longer listen to the Belgian lie that he, Lumumba, was a Communist.

My cabled newspaper stories had things added and removed by Scripps-Howard, and all references to Lumumba's admiration for America and his requests to President Eisenhower for training for his people were cut out.

Lumumba rightly believed that the Russians didn't like him any more than the Belgians did, because he was not a Communist and because he would never do the bidding of any foreign power. Lumumba only wanted what was best for the Congo and that was his death warrant. The Russians would have killed Lumumba, if the Western powers hadn't done it first.

I was with Lumumba in his living room in Stanleyville when Lumumba got the telegram which said that instead of Gizenga's staying in Accra for training with Nkrumah’s people, Gizenga had been taken straight from the airport in an Aeroflot plane to Moscow. Lumumba was terrified by this and said to me, “The Russians will use Gizenga as my Judas.”

However, Gizenga's subsequent life indicates that the Russians would have found him as dedicated to the Congo and as difficult to dictate to as Lumumba. (See the e-mail about their family's travails written to me by Dorothee Gizenga in July 30, 2003.)

The Russians had thought they would be able to wrap Gizenga in Lumumba's mantel and take control of the Congo. Gizenga did establish himself as Lumumba's heir in the Eastern Congo, but, like the rest of the Congo, the area descended into tribal war, plus Maoist inspired massacres aimed at the 'elite', which included anyone who could read, or even wore eyeglasses....

Before Independence, I know from personal knowledge, that Lumumba asked Eisenhower to provide training in government administration for Congolese, who the Belgians had deliberately kept from learning the most basic skills necessary to run a country. Eisenhower replied that would be interfering in Belgium's internal affairs, a position which was later repeated to me by the State Department.

After Independence, when the Congo needed international assistance to restore order, Prime Minister Lumumba asked Eisenhower to send American troops. However, Eisenhower continued to falsely label Lumumba a Communist and handed Lumumba's unwanted request over to Dag Hammarskjold. Hammarskjold, along with Conor Cruise-O'Brien, was part of the cabal that used the UN to destroy the Congo's Independence, in order to take back Katanga on behalf of Western mining interests.

To try to force Eisenhower to send American troops to restore order in the Congo, Lumumba threatened to bring in Russians troops. This was highly publicized by the American government, and no mention was made of the fact that this was only a threat and Lumumba was appealing to Eisenhower to send American troops. (see the book Congo Cables with the actual cables to an from Washington regarding the Congo and Lumumba, as assembled by Madeline Kalb).

Right up to his being turned over to Katanga to be assassinated, Lumumba pinned his hopes on America and his travelling companion and confidant was Frank Carlucci, who it has since been revealed in Congressional investigations was an American intelligence officer and presumably part of Operation Zaire Rifle, the American plot of assassinate Lumumba.

I left the Congo overland just before Independence through Ruanda and Urundi and the Mountains of the Moon to bring Lumumba's requests for help addressed to President Eisenhower to the American Consulate in Uganda, because mail and cables were being stopped by the Belgian postal authorities. The American consulate refused to accept anything from Lumumba. They said he would have to use the Belgian Post and Telegraph in the Congo for any messages he wanted to send to President Eisenhower.

One this site, and indexed below, are newspaper stories I wrote from the Congo which were highly edited back in the States, and documents including Lumumba's own written responses to my questions on his future plans for the Congo, and in Lumumba's own handwriting with my notes using the same pen, the statement I carried to the Belgians in charge of Stanleyville at the height of the crisis."

The preceding comments are on her web site which features scanned copies of some of the original pages from the The Cleveland Press and News containing some of her dispatches from Congo. Her web site, entitled "Patrice Lumumba, Stanleyville, Belgian Congo D'Lynn Waldron," is:

http://www.dlynnwaldron.com/Lumumba.html

She witnessed some of the most tragic events which unfolded in the Congo in the sixties. And although she provided first-hand accounts of what was going on, and dealt with Lumumba on personal basis, she was ignored by Western leaders including her editors at her newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio, because what she wrote and said did not conform to the ideological dictates and interests of Western nations which wrongly, and deliberately, portrayed Lumumba as a communist, hence their enemy.

Patrice Lumumba was prime minister of the Congo for only three months. Yet his influence went far beyond his brief term in office, and beyond the Congo, and was the dominant figure on the country's political scene even after he was removed from office, and even after he was arrested and put in jail towards the end of 1960.

Although the year 1960 was dominated by the Congo crisis, there were other events which took place in different parts of Africa and which deserve attention for a comprehensive picture of what happened on the continent during that period.

But probably the most significant event was the secession of Katanga Province from the Congo on 11 July 1960, eleven days after the country won independence. It was in the news everyday.

I remember when I was growing up in Rungwe District in the Southern Highlands in southwestern Tanzania in a region bordering what was then Nyasaland (now Malawi) and Northern Rhodesia (renamed Zambia), the conflict in the Congo was the dominant story broadcast by the Tanganyika Broadcasting Corporation (TBC) based in the capital Dar es Salaam, about 300 miles away on the east coast.

We also listened almost everyday to broadcasts from Elisabethville, the capital of Katanga Province which is also about 300 miles from my home region in southwestern Tanzania, almost the same distance to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania's capital on the coast of the Indian Ocean. We also listened to broadcasts from Leopoldville, the capital of the former Belgian Congo.

The broadcasts we listened to were in Kiswahili - a language also spoken in Congo - on shortwave radio. And they are still vivid in my memory today more than 40 years later because of the tragic events and countless lives lost in that country in 1960 and in the following years.

Although the people of Congo celebrated independence in 1960, they also became the victims of one of the worst tragedies that befell Africa during the post-colonial era. And what happened in the Congo in 1960 is indelibly etched in the minds of many people not only in that country but in other parts of Africa as well. And that was only the beginning of the tragedies that the continent suffered in the sixties.

Another tragic event was the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa on 21 March 1960, when 69 unarmed, peaceful black protesters were killed. Among those killed were 8 women and 10 children.

Most of them were shot in the back as they fled from the police. At least 180 black Africans were injured and there are reports that as many as 300 suffered injuries at the hands of the police.

The protests were organized by the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), a party led by Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe who was a professor of African studies at Witwatersrand University, South Africa's leading academic institution especially for English speakers.

The demonstrators lived in the black township of Sharpeville on the outskirts of the white town of Vereeniging in the Transvaal, about 30 miles south of Johannesburg. The township was created in compliance with the country's apartheid laws to keep the races apart and the people were protesting against the notorious pass laws which dehumanized them and forced them to carry pass books all time, and restricted them to certain areas while whites enjoyed unlimited access to all parts of the country and enjoyed a lifestyle and privileges blacks could only dream of. As David Sibeko stated in explaining why the Pan-Africanist Congress directed its wrath against and focused its campaign on the pass laws in his article, "The Sharpeville Massacre: Its Historic Significance in the Struggle Against Apartheid":

"The pass system was deliberately chosen because: (i) it is the lynchpin of apartheid; and (ii) of all the apartheid laws none is so pervasive, and few are as perverted, as the pass laws.

They show no respect for the sanctity of marriage - men are forcibly separated from their wives or vice versa because one of them cannot obtain the permit to reside in the same area. They tear away children from their parents: a child above the age of 16 needs a special permit to live with its parents outside the bantustan reservation, otherwise it must find accommodation in one of the location barracks they call hostels in South Africa.

They deny men and women the universal right to sell their labour to whom they choose; every African man or woman seeking employment has to obtain a special permit to look for work - within a limited period, usually 14 days; otherwise they face deportation to the `homeland' bantustan reservation they most likely have never known.

The indignities are legion and falling foul with any of the pass law regulations leaves an African open to arrest and imprisonment. Sentences are most frequently served out on prison farms, under the most primitive conditions.

The best known African campaign before Sharpeville was the potato boycott. It came as a result of exposures in newspapers like the Post about conditions for African prisoners in the potato prison farms of Bethal, in the Eastern Transvaal.

Investigative reporters found that prisoners are dressed in nothing but sacks, they sleep on damp cement floors and are out working the potato fields with bare hands from the crack of dawn until dusk. They are continuously whipped by jailers on horse back, and the one meal a day they eat is always half-cooked dried maize without any protein. Many die from disease and torture before they complete the relatively short terms of imprisonment, between two and six months.

The pass laws, therefore, affect every living black person."

Sibeko went on to explain how the campaign in Sharpeville against pass laws was organized and conducted and what the leaders, including Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe, expected and wanted to be done:

"In this non-violent campaign there is none that could have been more concerned to avoid the shedding of even an ounce of blood than the leadership of the PAC. Mr. Stanley Motjuwadi, a long-time journalist with Drum and its current editor, recalls in the issue of his magazine of November 22, 1972:

'A day after the Sharpeville shootings I had an interview in Johannesburg`s Fort prison with Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe ... He was awaiting trial on a charge of incitement and seemed to have aged overnight. He was depressed and almost at the point of tears - the Sharpeville tragedy had really hit him hard.'

Any who have followed Sobukwe`s role at the head of PAC know full well the man`s courage: he went through nine years of imprisonment without flinching and all those who have seen him, during his imprisonment and now under house arrest, including Members of Parliament from the ruling National Party and the white opposition parties, testify that his convictions remain as strong and his determination as unwavering.

Mindful of the panic a threat to their power creates in despots, Mr. Sobukwe wrote to the Commissioner of Police of South Africa, on the eve of the campaign, emphasising that the PAC campaign against passes would be non-violent and imploring the Commissioner to instruct his men to refrain from the use of violence in an attempt to put down demonstrations. As a further precaution Mr. Sobukwe sternly told PAC leaders and cadres all over the country:

'My instructions, therefore, are that our people must be taught now and continuously that in this campaign we are going to observe absolute non-violence.'”

The authorities did exactly the opposite. Their racist attitude towards blacks, and their total disregard for the lives of black people whom they did not even consider to be equal human beings, largely explains why they opened fire on the peaceful demonstrators. As Lieutenant-Colonel D.H. Pienaar bluntly put it, the mere gathering of blacks was seen as provocation by the white authorities and, by implication, justified the shooting. And typical of the stereotypes about blacks among many white racists, he bluntly stated:

"The Native mentality does not allow them to gather for a peaceful demonstration. For them to gather means violence."

That alone was enough justification for the white police to shoot the demonstrators. In justifying the shooting, Pienaar was also quoted by the BBC saying: "It started when hordes of natives surrounded the police station. If they do these things, they must learn their lessons the hard way."

In fact, the authorities stated that the police opened fire because they panicked and feared for their lives; a ridiculous assertion as if heavily armed security forces were indeed under siege and were threatened by unarmed, peaceful demonstrators many of whom were women and children. And as David Sibeko explains what happened on that fateful day, Monday, 21 March 1960:

"It is appropriate to focus on Sharpeville itself at this stage. Under the chairmanship of Nyakale Tsolo, the PAC branch at Sharpeville approached almost every house and the men`s hostel in the township, mobilising support for the strike against passes planned for Monday, March 21, 1960.

The full story of Sharpeville is still to be told, hopefully by those who helped to make this history. I was fortunate as head of the regional executive committee of the Vaal from 1963 to work in the underground amongst many of the organisers and participants in the historic event. Like most veterans of war the people of Sharpeville hate to relive their wartime experience but I was able to learn from direct participants a great deal of what took place.

Not a single bus moved out of Sharpeville to take passengers to work on that Monday. PAC task force members started out before the break of dawn lining up marchers in street after street. By daybreak the marchers, under the leadership of the task force, were moving to a preappointed open ground, where they merged with other demonstrators.

In line with the instruction of the Party leadership, when all the groups had been assembled, the 10,000 and more men, women and children proceeded to the local police station - chanting freedom songs and calling out campaign slogans 'Izwe lethu' (Our land); 'I Africa'; 'Awaphele ampasti' (Down with passes); 'Sobukwe Sikhokhle' (Lead us Sobukwe); 'Forward to Independence, Tomorrow the United States of Africa'; and so on and so forth.

When the marchers reached Sharpeville`s police station a heavy contingent of police was lined up outside, many on top of British-made Saracen armoured cars. Mr. Tsolo and other members of the Branch Executive moved forward - in conformity with the novel PAC motto of 'Leaders in Front' - and asked the white policeman in command to let them through so that they could surrender themselves for refusing to carry passes. Initially the police commander refused but much later, towards 11 a.m, they were let through.

The chanting of freedom songs was picking up and the slogans were being repeated with greater volume. Journalists who rushed there from other areas, after receiving word that the campaign was a runaway success in this mostly ignored African township, more than 30 miles south of Johannesburg, confirm that for all their singing and shouting the crowd`s mood was more festive than belligerent.

But shortly after the PAC branch leaders had been let through into the police station, without warning, the police facing the crowd opened fire and in two minutes hundreds of bodies lay sprawling on the ground like debris. The joyful singing had given way to murderous gunfire, and the gunfire was followed by an authentic deadly silence, and then screams, wild screams and cries of the wounded.

Littering the ground in front of that police station in nearby dusty streets were 69 dead and nearly 200 injured men, women and children; a revolting sight which appalled decent human beings the world over as pictures of the massacre got around.

The same pattern of events had taken place in nearby Vanderbijl Park, where two Africans were gunned down by white police a few minutes later, and at Langa and Nyanga, a thousand miles away in Cape Town, where five people were shot dead by white police.

With that savagery the apartheid regime sealed the path of non-violence and PAC resolved to continue the struggle through arms in future."

Other reports including witness accounts tell basically the same story that the shooting was unprovoked, the protesters were unarmed and did not in way threaten the police.

What is clear is that the police response and shooting was a reflex action triggered by the "natural" bias and hostility prevalent among many whites who saw black people as worthless human beings, if not just some creatures who were less than human beings; a sentiment forcefully expressed by one leader of the ruling National Party which instituted apartheid. As Sibeko wrote about the reaction among many whites, including leaders, after the shooting:

"It was a revealing comment, the one made by Carel de Wet, the Member of Parliament for Vanderbijl Park, a former cabinet minister in Mr. Vorster`s Government, who is currently serving a second term as ambassador to the Court of St. James. He complained: 'Why did the police kill only two kaffirs in my constituency?' Clearly the mass killings were by design and they were intended to 'teach the kaffirs a lesson.'"

And the lesson assumed another dimension because of the highly symbolic value and significance of the place where it was taught and, not only for blacks in Sharpeville, but for black people all over the country.

The town of Vereeniging, of which Sharpeville was an integral part as a segregated township for blacks, occupies a special place in the history of South Africa, especially in the history of white nationalism in that country. It was in that town on 13 March 1902, that the treaty which ended the Anglo-Boer War was signed and the whites of South Africa - the British and the Afrikaners - patched up their differences in pursuit of a common objective to consolidate their position as the dominant racial group in the country at the expense of blacks and other non-whites.

Almost 60 years later, the same place became the scene of bloodshed and one of the worst racial incidents in South African history when powerless blacks protested against the inhuman treatment they endured everyday at the hands of their white oppressors. And the words "Sharpeville massacre" were indelibly etched on the consciences of many people around the world as a constant reminder of the brutal treatment black Africans suffered under the apartheid regime.

The government viewed the protest against the pass laws as a challenge to its authority and the legitimacy of the abominable institution of apartheid whose walls finally came tumbling down more than 40 years later in 1994 when the country held its first multu-racial democratic elections and Nelson Mandela, leader of the African National Congress (ANC), was elected president of a country that had been dominated by whites for more than 300 years.

The consistency of the reports from different sources and by different people of different backgrounds and political persuasions including news reporters lends credibility to the conclusion that the shooting of the protesters was unprovoked and the Sharpeville massacre could have been easily avoided had the police reacted with restraint and concern for the well-being of the demonstrators. But because the protesters were black, it was a different story, and their fate was sealed simply because of who and what they were. As the assistant editor of Drum magazine, Humphrey Tyler, who was at the scene described what happened:

"Protestors were chanting 'Izwe Lethu' which means 'Our land' or gave the thumbs up 'freedom' salute, and shouted 'Afrika.,' nobody were afraid, in actual fact they were in a cheerful mood. There were plenty of police and more ammunition than uniforms.

A Pan Africanist leader approached us and said his organization and the marches were against violence and were demonstrating peacefully. Suddenly I heard chilling cries of 'Izwe Lethu' it sounded mainly like the voices of women. Hands went up in the famous black power salute. That is when the shooting started.

We heard the clatter of machine guns one after the other. The protestors thought they were firing blanks or warning shots. One woman was hit about 10 yards away from our car, as she fell to the ground her companion went back to assist, he thought she had stumbled.

Then he tried to pick her up, as he turned her around he saw her chest had been blown away from the hail of bullets. He looked at the blood on his hand and screamed 'God she had been shot.'

Hundreds of kids were running like wild rabbits, some of them were gunned down. Shooting only stooped when no living protestor was in sight.”

The protesters were told by the leaders of the Pan-Africanist Congress to leave their passes at home and to offer no bail, seek no defence, and pay no fine, if arrested. About 5,000 people - some reports say 7,000 or more - are said to have participated in the protest that morning, marching through Sharpeville to the municipal offices at the entrance of the township.

Before the protests Sobukwe wrote the police commissioner on 16 March 1960, stating that the Pan-Africanist Congress would hold a five-day, disciplined, peaceful protest against the pass laws starting on March 21^st. And he further stated at a press conference on March 18^th that he was sure the protesters would conduct themselves in a peaceful manner. As he put it:

“I have appealed to the African people to make sure that this campaign is conducted in a spirit of absolute non-violence, and I am quite certain they will heed my call. If the other side so desires, we will provide them with an opportunity to demonstrate to the world how brutal they can be.”

And they did.

Sobukwe was sentenced to three years in prison for leading the demonstrations against the paw law. He was released on 3 May 1963, but was immediately rearrested and sent to Robben Island where he spent six years in detention and solitary confinement without trial. The provision of the law which empowered the government to continue detaining anyone found guilty of "incitement" came to be known as the "Sobukwe clause."

He was released from Robben Island on 8 May 1969 but was not really free. He was placed under house arrest in Kimberley until his death on 27 February 1978. He was 54.

Born to poor Xhosa parents on 5 December 1924, he was an excellent student and a gifted orator. He also earned more degrees, in econmics and law, from the University of London after he was released from Robben Island and will always be remembered for the Shapervelle massacre and as the most prominent black leader in South Africa besides Mandela. He was also a man of peace. Had the apartheid regime agreed to talk to him, and with Mandela and other anti-apartheid leaders, there would have been no Shaperville and other bloody incidents including the Soweto uprising.

The Sharpeville massacre was one of the most significant events in the struggle against apartheid and was not even eclipsed years later by the events in Soweto when hundreds of school children were massacred by the South African police and security forces in June 1976, an event that is widely acknowledged as having signalled the beginning of the end of apartheid. As Ambrose Reeves, a minister in South Africa, stated in "The Sharpeville Massace: A Watershed in South Africa":

“History records that on May 13, 1902, the treaty which ended the Anglo-Boer war was signed at Vereeniging, then a small town some thirty miles from Johannesburg. Nobody could then have realised that some fifty-eight years later the whole world would learn of another event occurring in that part of the Transvaal; this time in the African township of Sharpeville.

As with most towns on the Reef, as the white population of Vereeniging grew so did the township for Africans on the outskirts of the town....

The events at Sharpeville on March 21, 1960,... shocked the world and...are still remembered with shame by civilised men everywhere.

Early that morning a crowd of Africans estimated at between 5,000 and 7,000 marched through Sharpeville to the municipal offices at the entrance to the township.

It appears that much earlier that day members of the Pan Africanist Congress had gone around Sharpeville waking up people and urging them to take part in this demonstration. Other members of the PAC prevented the bus drivers going on duty with the result that there were no buses to take the people to work in Vereeniging. Many of them set out on bicycles or on foot to their places of work, but some were met by Pan Africanists who threatened to burn their passes or "lay hands on them" if they did not turn back. However, many Africans joined the procession to the municipal offices quite willingly.

Eventually this demonstration was dispersed by the police, using tear gas bombs and then a baton charge, some sixty police following them into the side streets. Stones were flung and one policeman was slightly injured. It was alleged that several shots were fired by Africans and that only then some policemen opened fire without an order from their officer to do so. Fortunately nobody was hurt.

I was not at Sharpeville when the shooting occurred but it was familiar territory to me. Time and again I officiated at the large African Anglican church there and knew intimately many of the congregation, some of whom were to be involved in the events of that tragic day. I could so well visualise the scene.

Near my home in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg was a large zoo situated in acres of parkland. By a curious anomaly the lake near the zoo was the meeting place for Africans working in the northern suburbs on a Sunday afternoon.

Work finished for the day they would leisurely make their way there in small groups - a gay, colourful, jostling crowd - families and individuals - some political, some not, chatting, laughing, singing, gesticulating and occasionally fighting. The thud of home-made drums could be heard shattering the Sunday calm, and over all the plaintive notes of the penny whistle - shrill and penetrating. It could so easily have been like that on that crisp autumn morning in Sharpeville. Like that, but so very different.

During the morning news spread through the township that a statement concerning passes would be made by an important person at the police station later that day. The result was that many who had been concerned in the earlier demonstration drifted to the police station where they waited patiently for the expected announcement. And all the time the crowd grew.

Reading from the police report on what subsequently happened the Prime Minister told the House of Assembly that evening that the police estimated that 20,000 people were in that crowd. This seems to have been a serious exaggeration. From photographs taken at the time it is doubtful if there were ever more than 5,000 present at any particular moment, though it may well be that more than this number were involved at one time or another as people were coming and going throughout the morning.

They were drawn to the crowd by a variety of reasons. Some wanted to protest against the pass laws; some were present because they had been coerced; some were there out of idle curiosity; some had heard that a statement would be made about passes.

But whatever may have brought them to the police station, I was unable to discover that any policeman ever tried either to find out why they were there or make any request for them to disperse. And this in spite of the fact that the presence of this crowd seems to have caused a good deal of alarm to the police. So much so that at ten o`clock that morning a squadron of aircraft dived low over the crowd, presumably to intimidate them and encourage them to disperse. This was surely a most expensive way of trying to disperse a crowd.

The police claimed that the people in the crowd were shouting and brandishing weapons and the Prime Minister told the Assembly that the crowd was in a riotous and aggressive mood and stoned the police. There is no evidence to support this.

On the contrary, while the crowd was noisy and excitable, singing and occasionally shouting slogans it was not a hostile crowd. Their purpose was not to fight the police but to show by their presence their hostility to the pass system, expecting that someone would make a statement about passes.

Photographs taken that morning show clearly that this was no crowd spoiling for a fight with the police. Not only was the crowd unarmed, but a large proportion of those present were women and children. All through the morning no attack on the police was attempted.

Even as late as one p.m. the Superintendent in charge of the township was able to walk through the crowd, being greeted by them in a friendly manner and chatting with some of them. Similarly, the drivers of two of the Saracen tanks stated subsequently that they had no difficulty in driving their vehicles into the grounds surrounding the police station. And their testimony was borne out by photographs taken of their progress.

As the hours passed the increasing number of people in the crowd was matched by police reinforcements. Earlier there had only been twelve policemen in the police station: six white and six non-white. But during the morning a series of reinforcements arrived until by lunch time there was a force of nearly 300 armed and uniformed men in addition to five Saracens.

Yet in spite of the increased force that was then available, no one asked the crowd to disperse and no action was taken to arrange for the defence of the police station. The police just strolled around the compound with rifles slung over their shoulders, smoking and chatting with one another.

Scene was set for explosive situation

So the scene was set. Anyone who has lived in the Republic of South Africa knows how explosive that situation had already become. On the one side the ever-growing crowd of noisy Africans - the despised Natives - the Kaffirs who, at all costs, must be kept down lest they step outside the place allotted to them. On the other side the South African police.

Every African fears them, whether they be traffic police, ordinary constables or members of the dreaded Special Branch. Most policemen expect unquestioning deference from Africans. If this is not forthcoming they immediately interpret it as riot and rebellion. In part this is due to the widespread prejudice of white people the world over to those who happen to have a different coloured skin than their own. But in South Africa it is underpinned by the hatred, fear and contempt that so many white police have for all non-white people.

The only action taken during that morning appears to have come not from the police but from two Pan Africanist leaders who urged the crowd to stay away from the fence around the perimeter of the compound so that they did not damage it. Then Lieutenant Colonel Pienaar arrived in the compound. He appears to have accepted that he had come into a dangerous situation and therefore made no attempt either to use methods of persuasion on the crowd or to attempt to discover what the crowd was waiting for.

Instead, about a quarter of an hour after his arrival he gave the order for his men to fall in. A little later he said, "Load five rounds". But he said no more to any of his officers, or to the men. Later, Colonel Pienaar stated that he thought his order would frighten the crowd and that his men would understand that if they had to fire they would not fire more than five rounds. Unfortunately, this was not understood by the policemen under his command.

During this time Colonel Spengler, then head of the Special Branch, was arresting two of the leaders of the Pan Africanist Congress. Afterwards he arrested a third man. Colonel Spengler said subsequently that he was able to carry out his arrests because while the crowd was noisy it was not in a violent mood.

It is extremely difficult to know what happened next. Some of the crowd near the gate of the police station compound said later that they heard a shot. Some said that they heard a policeman say, "Fire". Others suddenly became aware that the police were firing in their midst. But all agreed that practically all of them turned and ran away once they realised what was happening.

A few, it is true, stood their ground for some seconds, unable to understand that the police were not firing blanks. Lieutenant Colonel Pienaar was quite clear that he did not give the order to fire. Moreover, he declared that he would not have fired in that situation. It was stated later that two white policemen opened fire and that about fifty others followed suit, using service revolvers, rifles and sten guns.

Police action caused devastating consequences

But whatever doubts there may be of the sequence of events in those fateful minutes, there can be no argument over the devastating consequences of the action of the police on March 21, 1960, in Sharpeville. Sixty-nine people were killed, including eight women and ten children, and of the 180 people who were wounded, thirty-one were women and nineteen were children.

According to the evidence of medical practitioners it is clear that the police continued firing after the people began to flee: for, while thirty shots had entered the wounded or killed from the front of their bodies no less than 155 bullets had entered the bodies of the injured and killed from their backs. All this happened in forty seconds, during which time 705 rounds were fired from revolvers and sten guns.

But whatever weapons were used the massacre was horrible. Visiting the wounded the next day in Baragwanath Hospital near Johannesburg, I discovered youngsters, women and elderly men among the injured. These could not be described as agitators by any stretch of the imagination. For the most part they were ordinary citizens who had merely gone to the Sharpeville police station to see what was going on. Talking with the wounded I found that everyone was stunned and mystified by what had taken place. They had certainly not expected that anything like this would happen.

All agreed that there was no provocation for such savage action by the police. Indeed, they insisted that the political organisers who had called for the demonstration had constantly insisted that there should be no violence or fighting.

Arrests follow massacre

To make matters worse, some of the wounded with whom I spoke in hospital stated that they were taunted by the police as they lay on the ground, being told to get up and be off. Others who tried to help were told to mind their own business.

At first there was only one African minister of the Presbyterian Church of South Africa who tried to help the wounded and the dying. It is true that later the police assisted in tending the wounded and summoned ambulances which conveyed the injured to Vereeniging and Baragwanath Hospitals. Later still, 77 Africans were arrested in connection with the Sharpeville demonstration, in some cases while they were still in hospital.

In fact, it was clear on my visits to the wards of Baragwanath Hospital that many of the injured feared what would happen to them when they left hospital. This wasn`t surprising, for Baragwanath Hospital was an extraordinary sight. Outside each of the wards to which the wounded were taken were a number of African police, some white policemen, and members of the Special Branch in civilian clothes. The attitude of the South African Government to the event at Sharpeville can be seen from its reaction to the civil claims lodged the following September by 224 persons for damages amounting to around 400,000 arising from the Sharpeville killings.

The following month the Minister of Justice announced that during the next parliamentary session the Government would introduce legislation to indemnify itself and its officials retrospectively against claims resulting from action taken during the disturbances earlier that year. This was done in the Indemnity Act, No. 61 of 1961. Not that money could ever compensate adequately for the loss of a breadwinner to a family or make up for lost limbs or permanent incapacity. But it would have been some assistance.

It is true that in February 1961 the Government set up a committee to examine the claims for compensation and to recommend ex gratia payments in deserving cases. But this is not the same thing, and in fact by October 1962 no payments had been made.

Failure of police to communicate with the people

Few commentators since Sharpeville have attempted to justify the action of the police that day. In fact, many of them have drawn special attention to the complete failure of the police to attempt to communicate with the crowd at the police station. If it had been a white crowd the police would have tried to find out why they were there and what they wanted.

Surely their failure to do so was due to the fact that it never occurred to them, as the custodians of public order, either to negotiate with the African leaders or to try to persuade the crowd to disperse. Their attitude was summed up by the statement of Lieutenant Colonel Pienaar that "the Native mentality does not allow them to gather for a peaceful demonstration. For them to gather means violence."

The same point was demonstrated even more graphically by one of his answers at the Court of Enquiry under Mr. Justice Vessels. When he was asked if he had learnt any useful lesson from the events in Sharpeville, he replied, 'Well, we may get better equipment.'

Not that all members of the South African Police Force are cruel or callous. No doubt many of them were shocked by what happened. At the same time what happened at Sharpeville emphasises how far the police in South Africa are cut off from sympathy with or even understanding of Africans. And this is underlined by the fact that at no time did the police express regret for this tragic happening.

Yet it would be folly to attempt to fasten the whole blame for the events at Sharpeville on the police. By the mass of repressive legislation which has been enacted every year since 1948, the South African Government has given the police a task which ever becomes more difficult to fulfill.

The pass laws

It was this legislation which was indirectly responsible for the tragedy of Sharpeville, and in particular the "pass laws". Indeed, the immediate cause of many in the crowd assembling at the police station was the growing resentment of Africans to the system of passes.

This system originated in 1760 in the Cape Colony to regulate the movement of slaves between the urban and the rural areas. The slaves had to carry passes from their masters. Subsequently, the system was extended in various forms to the whole country and was eventually collated in the Native (Urban Areas) Consolidation Act of 1945.

This Act made provision for a variety of passes including registered service contracts and for passes permitting men to seek work in particular areas. But through the years an increasing number of Africans had been given exemption from these laws.

This was the situation which obtained until 1952 when a new act ironically called 'The Abolition of Passes Act' made it compulsory for every African male, whether he had previously had to carry passes or no, to carry a reference book. If the holder had previously been exempted from the pass laws he was now privileged to carry a reference book with a green instead of a brown cover! But the contents were identical.

The advent of the reference books meant that technically there were no longer any such things as passes. But, as will be understood, to the Africans reference books are passes for they contain all the details which were previously entered on the various pass documents. They contain the holder`s name, his tax receipt, his permit to be in an urban area and to seek work there, permits from the Labour Bureau, the signature each month of his employer to show that he is still in the employment he was given permission to take, as well as other particulars.

Even more objectionable than having to possess a reference book is the fact that this book must be produced on demand to any policeman or any of the fifteen different classes of officials who may require to see it. Failure to produce it on demand constitutes an offence for which an African may be detained up to thirty days while inquiries are being made about him.

What this means in practice can be seen from the fact that in the twelve months ending June 30, 1966 no less than 479,114 Africans were prosecuted for offences against the "pass laws". At the time of Sharpeville there were 1,000 prosecutions a day for these offences. By 1966, this had risen to over l,300 a day. These figures speak for themselves.

In 1960 a new development occurred when the Government of South Africa decided for the first time in South African history to extend the pass laws to African women. In their case another fear was added that they might be subjected to manhandling by the police with a further loss of human dignity. In fact, by the time of Sharpeville it was estimated that three-quarters of African women were in possession of reference books.

But many of the women who had not obtained reference books were strenuously opposed both to the pass system and to its extension to themselves. To them reference books stood for racial identification, and therefore for racial discrimination.

Intolerable economic situation

But this was by no means the only reason for unrest in Sharpeville. Anyone who knew the township at that time was aware that there had been increasing tension among the inhabitants because in that area wages were too low and rents were too high. Prior to March of that year rent had been increased in Sharpeville and this had added to the burdens of Africans living there.

The previous year (1959) a study of the economic position of Africans in Johannesburg had shown that 80 per cent of Africans were living at or below the poverty datum line. The probability is that the lot of Africans in Sharpeville was worse than in Johannesburg.

A survey carried out by the Johannesburg Non-European Affairs Department in 1962 in Soweto showed that 68 per cent of families there had an income below the estimated living costs. A subsequent study in 1966 showed that this figure remained the same. So in spite of the increased prosperity of South Africa the economic position of a high percentage of Africans does not seem to have improved much since Sharpeville.

African wages in Sharpeville in 1960 were low, partly because African trade unions were not (and still are not) recognised for the purpose of bargaining with employers. But also, the continuing colour bar in commerce and industry meant, and still means, high minimum wages for white workers and low maximum wages for the black workers who make up the great majority of the labour force. All this means two wage structures in South Africa which have no relation to one another: in the fixing of the black wage structure the workers frequently have no say at all.

Several months before the tragic events at Sharpeville it was becoming obvious that those living in the township were facing an intolerable economic situation. It is too easy to dismiss the Sharpeville demonstration at the police station as the work of agitators and the result of intimidation. A11 that those who led the demonstration did was to use a situation which, for political and economic reasons, was already highly explosive.

Growing resistance

Not that Sharpeville was an isolated incident. The ten years before Sharpeville had seen feverish activity by the opponents of apartheid. By means of boycotts, mass demonstrations, strikes and protests, the non-white majority had attempted by non-violent means to compel those in power to modify their racist policies. For example, on June 26, 1952, the Campaign of Defiance against Unjust Laws had been launched.

The same day three years later (June 26, 1955) 3,000 delegates had adopted the Freedom Charter which had been drafted by the Congress Alliance. This took place at a massive gathering at Kliptown, Johannesburg.

The following year the Federation of South African Women held a series of spectacular demonstrations against the extension of the pass system to African women. These culminated in a mass demonstration at the Union Buildings, Pretoria, on August 9, 1956. Some 10,000 women gathered there in an orderly fashion to present 7,000 individually signed protest forms.

Again, from January 7, 1957, many thousand African men and women for months walked eighteen to twenty miles a day to and from work in Johannesburg in a boycott of the buses. Although in this particular case they gained their objective, a11 the various endeavours by Africans to secure change by peaceful means brought little tangible result.

The surprising thing was that in a11 this activity there was very little violence on the part of boycotters, demonstrators and strikers. In spite of great and frequent provocation by the police, Africans remained orderly and disciplined. They were in truth non-violent. As could be expected there were, however, occasions when the resentment and frustration of Africans spilled over into violence.

One such occasion was at Cato Manor near Durban on June 17, 1959. On that day a demonstration of African women at the beer hall destroyed beer and drinking utensils and was dispersed by the police. Several days later the Director of the Bantu Administration Department met 2,000 women at the beer hall. Once they had stated their grievances they were ordered to disperse. When they failed to do so the police made a baton charge. General disorder and rioting followed, with the result that damage estimated at 100,000 (Rands) was done to vehicles and buildings. Later that day Africans attacked a police picket and were driven off with sten guns.

After this, things remained comparatively quiet in Cato Manor until a Sunday afternoon in February, 1960, when the smouldering resentment of Africans there again burst into flame. An ugly situation developed in which nine policemen lost their lives. This was a deplorable business. Whatever may be said of the actions of the South African police these men died while carrying out their duties. The blame for their deaths must in the first instance lie on those who murdered them.

The fact that these deaths occurred in Cato Manor only a few weeks before the demonstration at Sharpeville must have been well known to the police gathered at the police station in Sharpeville that morning. Certainly more than one spokesman of the South African Government linked these two affairs together. There is not the slightest evidence, however, that there was in this sense any connection between the tragedies of Cato Manor and Sharpeville.

But in another sense they were both intimately connected because more indirectly they both arose out of the action of those in power during the previous decade, who had taken every possible step to ensure that the whole life of the millions of Africans was encased within the strait-jacket of compulsory segregation.

Civilisation without mercy

Yet there the similarity ended. The crowd at Sharpeville was not attacking anything or anyone. Further, there is abundant evidence to show that they were unarmed. While nothing can justify the killing of police at Cato Manor, that incident cannot in any way exonerate the vicious action of the police at Sharpeville. As the late Sir Winston Churchill pointed out in a debate in the British House of Commons on July 8, 1920:

"There is surely one general prohibition which we can make. I mean the prohibition against what is called `frightfulness'. What I mean by frightfulness is the inflicting of great slaughter or massacre upon a particular crowd of people with the intention of terrorising not merely the rest of the crowd, but the whole district or the whole country." (This is precisely what the police did at Sharpeville).

On that occasion Sir Winston concluded his speech with some words of Macaulay - "... and then was seen what we believe to be the most frightful of spectacles, the strength of civilisation without mercy." These are words which aptly summarise a11 that happened at Sharpeville that March morning.

Many people inside South Africa, though shocked for a time by the events at Sharpeville, ended by dismissing them as just one incident in the long and growing succession of disturbances that down the years have marked the implementation of apartheid. Certainly the Government of South Africa, though badly shaken in the days immediately following Sharpeville, soon regained control of the situation.

On March 24, the Government banned all public meetings in twenty-four magisterial districts. On April 8, the Governor-General signed a proclamation banning the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress as unlawful organisations, the result being that they were both driven underground. But neither of them became dormant.

At the same time the Government mobilised the entire Citizen Force, the Permanent Force Reserve, the Citizen Force Reserve and the Reserve of Officers, and the whole of the Commando Force was placed on stand-by. Already on March 30, in Proclamation No. 90, the Governor-General had declared a state of emergency which lasted until August 31, 1960. During that time a large number of prominent opponents of government policy of a11 races were arrested and detained without being brought to trial. In addition some 20,000 Africans were rounded up, many of whom were released after screening.

So after some months eventually, at least superficially, life in South Africa became at least relatively normal. But underneath the external calm dangerous fires continue to smoulder: fires that can never be extinguished by repressive measures coupled with a constant and growing show of force.

Outside South Africa there were widespread reactions to Sharpeville in many countries which in many cases led to positive action against South Africa: action which still continues. But here, too, most people, even if they have heard of Sharpeville, have relegated what happened there to the archives of history, just one of the too many dark pages in the human story.

Sharpeville marked a watershed in South Africa

Yet it is my personal belief that history will recognise that Sharpeville marked a watershed in South African affairs. Until Sharpeville, violence for the most part had been used in South Africa by those who were committed to the maintenance of the economic and political domination of the white minority in the Republic. Down the years they had always been ready to use force to maintain the status quo whenever they judged it necessary to do so. When the occasion arose they did not hesitate to use it. Over and over again, non-white civilians were injured by police action or by assaults on them when in prison.

Until Sharpeville the movements opposed to apartheid were pledged to a policy of non-violence. But on March 21, 1960, when an unarmed African crowd was confronted by 300 heavily armed police supported by five Saracen armoured vehicles, an agonising reappraisal of the situation was inevitable. Small wonder is it that, having tried every peaceful method open to them to secure change without avail, the African leadership decided that violence was the only alternative left to them.

Never again would they expose their people to another Sharpeville. As Nelson Mandela said in court at his trial in October l962:

"Government violence can do only one thing and that is to breed counter-violence. We have warned repeatedly that the Government, by resorting continually to violence, will breed in this country counter-violence among the people till ultimately if there is no dawning of sanity on the part of the Government, the dispute between the Government and my people will finish up by being settled in violence and by force."

Outwardly things may go on in South Africa much as before. Visitors may find a booming economy, the white minority may seem secure in their privileged position for any foreseeable future, some urban Africans may have higher living standard than formerly. But all this ought not to deceive anybody.

The fact is that for the first time both sides in the racial struggle in South Africa are now committed to violence; the white minority to preserve the status quo; the non-white majority to change: change from society dominated by apartheid to one that is non-racial in character. Already there are clear indications that the opponents of apartheid are turning deliberately to violence.

The fact that at the moment this is being expressed through small bands of guerillas who may be neither very well trained nor well-equipped does not mean that they ought therefore to be dismissed as having little significance. After a11, we have the examples of Algeria, Cuba and Viet Nam before us as powerful reminders of what may result from very small and weak beginnings.

In spite of the present calm in South Africa and a prosperity unparallelled in its history, within the Republic the seeds of violence have already been sown. Unless there is a radical change in the present political and economic structures of South Africa, that which has already been sown will be harvested in a terrible and brutal civil war which might easily involve the whole African continent in conflict before it ends.

Indeed it may be that in the present situation in the Republic of South Africa are hidden forces which will involve humanity in a global racial conflict unless the present racist policies there are changed radically. The choice before the international community has been a clear one ever since Sharpeville. Either it takes every possible step to secure the abandonment of the present policies in South Africa or the coming years will bring increasing sorrow and strife both for South Africa and for the world.

Sharpeville was a tragedy showing most plainly that the ideology of apartheid is a way of death and not of life. Can the nations recognise this before it is too late?”

The apartheid regime obviously did not recognize that and was reinforced in its belief that it would survive because some of the most powerful countries in the world, especially the industrialized nations in the West, continued to support it.

It did not take the massacre seriously. It believed that the white power structure was invincible, virtually an impregnable fortress that could withstand the most sustained assault even by its fiercest opponents. And it invoked the inspired canon of scripture to justify its diabolical policies as if they had been sanctioned by God and white people had divine mandate to rule members of "the lesser breed": black people and other non-whites.

Shortly after the massacre, the apartheid regime declared a state emergency which lasted from March 30 to August 31, 1960. The emergency declaration was prompted by widespread demonstrations, protests ans strikes across the country in condemnation of the massacre and what the apartheid regime perceived to be a threat to the nation's security and white domination of the country.

More than 18,000 people including most of the country's leading anti-apartheid politicians of all races were arrested when the emergency was declared. And on April 8, both the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) were declared illegal, forcing them to go underground and resort to other means to try and bring about change.

The establishment of Umkhonto we Sizwe (The Spear of the Nation), the military wing of the African National Congress; and of Poqo, PAC's armed wing, was largely inspired by the massacre and by the government's refusal to negotiate with the opponents of apartheid and find ways to achieve racial equality in the country without resorting to violence.

Although both the ANC and the PAC were banned in South Africa, they remained active in the country and from their operational bases in other countries such as Tanzania and Zambia. It was not until 40 years later, in 1990, that they were unbanned.

Thus, instead of bringing about fundamental change, the government became even more repressive following the Sharpeville massacre. And in October 1960, the white electorate voted for a republican form of government under the leadership of the National Party dominated by Afrikaners and which instituted apartheid in 1948. South Africa withdrew from the Commonwealth in March 1961 and on May 31 the same year, it became republic.

The withdrawal of South Africa from the Commonwealth was a result of a concerted effort by African leaders to keep the apartheid regime out of this community of nations, once former British colonies. The campaign was led by Julius Nyerere who made it clear that if South Africa remained a member, his country Tanganyika would not join the Commonwealth once it became independent. As he stated: "To vote South Africa in, is to vote us out."

There is no question that the Shaperville massacre galvanized the anti-apartheid movement worldwide. It drew worldwide condemnation and played a critical role in changing the attitude of many African leaders who had earlier embraced non-violence as a means to achieving racial justice in the land of apartheid. After the massacre, armed struggle was seen a viable alternative that could be used to compel the apartheid regime to accept fundamental change and was effectively used through the years as a complementary strategy, along with diplomacy, to achieve this goal.

In the United States, the year 1960 was also a turning point in the struggle for racial equality for blacks as much as it was for their brethren thousands of miles across the Atlantic in Africa.

The civil rights movement gained momentum, galvanized by a series of historic events in the fifties. These included the May 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision by the US Supreme Court outlawing segregation in public schools; the August 1955 lynching of a 14-year-old black boy Emmett Till in Mississippi and subsequent acquittal of his white killers by an all-white jury. Later after the trial, his killers boasted about committing the murder in an interview with Look magazine, and the case became one of the most important battle cries in the struggle against racial injustice.

Other events which provided impetus to the civil rights movement were the December 1955 bus boycott by blacks in Montgomery, Alabama, to end segregation on the city buses - the boycott lasted for more than a year - an even which thrust Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King into prominence in the struggle for racial equality; and the 1957 integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in compliance with the 1954 Brown vs. Board Education US Supreme Court ruling which outlawed segregation in public schools not only in Topeka, Kansas, where Brown's case took place, but in the country as a whole.

The Supreme Court ruled against the separate-but-equal doctrine and declared segregation unconstitutional. As Chief Justice Earl Warren said: "...the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place."

Desegregation of the schools was met with stiff opposition, but its supporters remained resolute, further galvanizing the civil rights movement. The impact of the Supreme Court ruling was not limited to public schools. It paved the way for large-scale desegregation in the American society. Supporters of integration cited it as a precedent in other cases to fight segregation.

While racial equality and integration were some of the main goals of the civil rights movement which embraced people of all races but which was mainly led by blacks especially Dr. Martin Luther King, racial separation was another goal that was being pursued by some blacks because of the failure of racial integration and the unwillingness probably by most whites to accept blacks as equals.

The doctrine of racial separation was being forcefully articulated by a black separatist group called the Nation of Islam, also known as Black Muslims, led by Elijah Muhammad. Founded in Detroit, Michigan, in 1930 by W. Fard, the group observed its 30^th anniversary in 1960, a year that was also the turning point in the history of the members and supporters of this organization. Elijah Muhammad led the Nation of Islam from 1934 until his death in 1975.

In a speech in New York in 1960, Elijah Muhammad demanded a separate independent state for blacks, arguing that integration was not going to work. The Nation of Islam identified five southern states which would constitute an independent homeland for blacks where they would be able to establish a black nation in their own country and enjoy freedom they had always been denied by whites.

The Black Muslims chose the southern states because that is where the largest number of blacks lived; and that is also where African slaves were taken in largest numbers to work on the plantations and helped lay the foundation of what became the richest and most powerful country in history. The southern states the Nation of Islam wanted were Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana.

The group had always believed in racial separation as the best solution to the race problem in America. But it was not until 1960 that its leader, Elijah Muhammad, made a formal announcement demanding a separate, independent state for blacks.

It was very secretive of its membership but by 1960, it was estimated that the Nation of Islam had between 65,000 and 100,000 members. If you included sympathizers, the number of blacks who supported at least some of the goals of the Nation of Islam was probably higher than whatever estimate was given back in 1960 or at any other time through the years before and since then.

Just the year before, the Nation of Islam came to the attention of millions of Americans when its national spokesman, Malcolm X, was interviewed by a black journalist Louis Lomax and by Mike Wallace, a white, on CBS, an American national television network.

The interview took place in New York as part of a documentary called "The Hate That Hate Produced." It also featured the group's leader, Elijah Muhammad, and was broadcast in five segments from July 13 to 17, 1959. Several ministers of the Nation of Islam, besides Malcolm X, were also interviewed for the documentary.

This was the first time millions of Americans, especially whites, came to know not only about the Nation of Islam but its eloquent spokesman Malcolm X and his unsurpassed oratorical skills and sharp wit and intelligence. It was when he was the national spokesman of the National Islam that the group had the largest increase in its membership in its entire history.

But the documentary was heavily edited to produce shock effect on the American audience, especially whites who came to view Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam with apprehension as if the group's intention was to undermine America. As stated on the web site of the Malcolm X Project at Columbia University:

“Despite its lurid presentation of NOI (Nation of Islam) culture, the documentary included excerpts from strident speeches by Elijah Muhammad and various ministers, and ultimately served as a valuable recruiting tool for the NOI, swelling the ranks with new converts.

However, the documentary’s title nevertheless linked the Nation of Islam with 'hate' in the public mind, playing on white fear and contrasting the “Black racists” of the NOI with more moderate, “sober-minded Negroes”-a binary that was subsequently reinforced in countless media portrayals.”

And as the Nation of Islam was articulating demands for a separate black nation which would no longer be a part of the United States once independence was achieved, however utopian the ideal, the mainstream black civil rights movement was also pressing its demands for racial equality within the confines of the United States and with more vigour. It was a struggle which had its counterpart in Africa in the southern part of the continent. And 1960 was a critical year for both in many fundamental respects.

And however impractical the demands were, by the Nation of Islam for a separate homeland, a desire also expressed by the Republic of New Afrika, another black separatist group founded in Detroit in 1968 in the same city where the Nation if Islam was founded almost 40 years earlier, they did dramatize and highlight the plight of black people in the United States, and not just those of the Black Muslims, as victims of racial injustice whose demands for racial equality were either being ignored or not being taken seriously by the government and the majority of whites in a predominantly white nation.

The plight of black people in the United States, especially in the southern states where the struggle for racial equality was most intense, was very much similar to the suffering of blacks in South Africa who were also being oppressed by whites simply because of what they were: black, hence inferior to whites.

While black people were groaning under apartheid in South Africa, blacks in the southern states of the United States were also suffering oppression under segregation laws which had been passed to separate them from whites and ensure a privileged lifestyle for whites. And just as blacks in South Africa had their plight highlighted by the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, blacks in the United States also had the racial inequalities and brutalities they suffered in the southern states highlighted by an incident which involved black students in the state of North Carolina in the same year, 1960, and which had a multiplier effect throughout the south and other parts of the country in the following months and years.

The incident involved four black students from the segregated North Carolina A&T (Agricultural and Technical) College in Greensboro in the state of North Carolina. And it took place in the same city of Greensboro on 1 February 1960. It was the beginning of what came to be known as the Greensboro sit-ins, igniting a protest that last for six months throughout the south and other parts of the country.

The four students went into town and entered Woolworth's store in downtown Greensbsoro where they sat on the stools at a lunch counter in defiance of the segregation laws which barred blacks from using facilities used by whites.

It was the beginning of what came to be known as the sit-in campaigns of 1960 which contributed to the establishment of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC - popularly known and pronounced as sneek), an influential organization of students that later came to be led by Stokely Carmichael from 1966 - 1967, and also by H. Rap Brown, some of the most prominent leaders of the Black Power movement in the United States in the sixties. The first president of SNCC in 1960 was Marion Barry who years later was elected mayor of Washington, D.C.

Other prominent members of SNCC included John Lewis who once served as president of the organization and who in that capacity gave a speech during the March on Washington in August 1963 when Dr. Marting Luther King gave his famous "I Have A Dream" speech. He later became a US congressman representing a district in Atlanta, Georgia. Another prominent SNCC member was Julian Bond who more than 30 years later became president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

The four black students who sat down at the Woolworth's lunch counter in downtown Greensboro were Joseph McNeil, Ezell Blair, Jr., Franklin McCain, and David Richmond. They bought several items in the store before sitting down at the counter reserved for whites customers.

A waitress asked them to leave but they politely refused to do so. And surprisingly, they were not arrested. They stayed there for an hour until the store closed.

It was not until six months later, after the victory had been won following other sit-ins and protests throughout the south and elsewhere, that the four original protesters were served lunch at the same Woolworth's counter.

Earlier in January the same year in which they started the protest, Blair was denied service at a Union Bus terminal station restaurant because he was black, an incident that helped start the sit-ins the following month.

The protests in Greensboro started a chain reaction that spread throughout the country. The following morning, on February 2, 25 black male students and 4 female students went to the same store and sat at the lunch counter to continue the protests. On February 3, students occupied 63 of the 65 seats available at the Woolworth's lunch counter. On February 4, the black students were joined by white female students from the North Carolina Women's College in the sit-in.

On February 5, more than 300 students took part in the protests, and on February 6, hundreds of students including the A&T North Carolina College football team descended on the downtown area of Greensboro in protest. The day came to be known as "Black Saturday," and the sit-ins had become a major weapon in the struggle for racial equality. Black students in other parts of North Carolina followed suit as did thousands of others throughout the south in the following months.

It is significant that when the protests first started at Woolworth, there was no confrontation with the store management or with the police. But the second sit-in drew the attention of the local media and the word was out.

When the third sit-in took place, the students had formed what they called the Student Executive Committee for Justice to coordinate the campaign. The campaign culminated in a march of several thousand students. The mayor of Greensboro asked the protesters to stop the campaign while the city sought "a just and honourable solution" but black students in other parts of North Carolina and elsewhere across the country organized their sit-in protests at lunch counters reserved for whites.

By the end of February 1960, the protests had taken place at more than 30 locations in seven states in the southern part of the United States where segregation was entrenched, upheld by law and sanctioned by custom. They also spread in some parts of the northern states where picketing took place against Woolworth's and other chain stores in a number of cities.

The protests in the south targeted not only "whites only" lunch counters but other segregated public institutions which excluded blacks from their facilities including recreation such as swimming and other activities.

Quite often, the students encountered mobs of angry whites who physically assaulted them and hostile owners or managers who refused to serve them coffee or even a glass of water. But the students did not react violently and they maintained their position until they forced the stores and other businesses to close doors earlier than they normally would. As Franklin McCain, one of the four teenagers who took part in the first sit-in protest in Greensboro, said when he was interviewed by Howard Raines for Raine's book My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered:

“The planning process was on a Sunday night, I remember it quite well. I think it was Joseph McNeil who said, 'It's time that we take some action now. We've been getting together, and we've been, up to this point, still like most people we've talked about for the past few weeks or so - that is, people who talk a lot but, in fact, make very little action.'

After selecting the technique, then we said, 'Let's go down and just ask for service.'

It certainly wasn't titled a 'sit-in' or 'sit-down' at that time. 'Let's just go down to Woolworth's tomorrow and ask for service, and the tactic is going to be simply this: we'll just stay there.'

We never anticipated being served, certainly, the first day anyway. 'We'll stay until we get served.' And I think Ezell Blair said, 'Well, you know that might be weeks, that might be months, that might be never.' And I think it was the consensus of the group, we said, 'Well, that's just the chance we'll have to take.'

Once getting there we did make purchases of school supplies and took the patience and time to get receipts for our purchases, and Joseph McNeil and myself went over to the counter and asked to be served coffee and doughnuts. As anticipated, the reply was, 'I'm sorry, we don't serve you here.' And of course we said, 'We just beg to disagree with you. We've in fact already been served.'

The attendant or waitress was a little bit dumbfounded, just didn't know what to say under circumstances like that. And we said, 'We wonder why you'd invite us in to serve us at one counter and deny service at another. If this is a private club or private concern, then we believe you ought to sell membership cards.'

That didn't go over too well, simply because I don't really think she understood what we were talking about, and for the second reason, she had no logical response to a statement like that.

At that point there was a policeman who had walked in off the street, who was pacing the aisle behind us, where we were seated, with his club in his hand, just sort of knocking it in his hand, and just looking mean and red and a little bit upset and a little bit disgusted. And you had the feeling that he didn't know what the hell to do.

You had the feeling that this is the first time that this big bad man with the gun and the club has been pushed in a corner, and he's got absolutely no defense, and the thing that's killing him more than anything else - he doesn't know what he can or what he cannot do. He's defenseless.

Usually his defense is offense, and we've provoked him, yes, but we haven't provoked him outwardly enough for him to resort to violence. And I think this is just killing him; you can see it all over him.”

Franklin McCain was also interviewed by another writer, Gary Younge and is quoted in Younge's book, No Place Like Home, stating:

“On the day that I sat at that counter I had the most tremendous feeling of elation and celebration.

I felt that in this life nothing else mattered. I felt like one of those wise men who sits cross-legged and cross-armed and has reached a natural high. Nothing else has ever come close. Not the birth of my first son nor my marriage.

People go through their whole lives and they don't get that to happen to them. And here it was being visited on me as a 17-year-old. It was wonderful but it was sad also, because I know that I will never have that again. I'm just sorry it was when I was 17.

I was brought up with a major myth. I was told that if I worked hard, believed in the constitution, the 10 commandments and the bill of rights, and got a good education, I would be successful.

For a long time, I held it against my parents and my grandparents as well. I felt they had lied to me and I felt suicidal. I felt that if that is what this life was all about then it wasn't worth it. There seemed no prospect for dignity or respect as a young black man.

So we decided to do something. When we sat down, and the waitress refused to take our orders, there was a policeman behind us slapping his night-stick on his hand. I thought, I guess this is it. But then it occurred to me the policeman really didn't know what he was doing, and I must say I was relieved.

Some way through, an old white lady, who must have been 75 or 85, came over and put her hands on my shoulders and said: "Boys I am so proud of you. You should have done this 10 years ago." That is exactly the sort of person you didn't expect to hear anything from.

It was only 15 or 20 years later that I learnt to forgive them and understand them. I was threatening their livelihood. And it was around that time I realised that my parents weren't naive in the cruel lie that they had told me. They lied to me be cause they loved me.”

Stokely Carmichael also recalled the Greensboro sit-in protests when he was interviewed by Gordon Parks for Life magazine and had this to say:

“When I first heard about the Negroes sitting in at lunch counters down South, I thought they were just a bunch of publicity hounds.

But one night when I saw those young kids on TV, getting back up on the lunch counter stools after being knocked off them, sugar in their eyes, ketchup in their hair - well, something happened to me. Suddenly I was burning.”

Although the protesters were mostly black, integrated groups of students with a significant number of whites also took part in the protests.

By the end of 1960, about 70,000 black students had participated in the sit-ins in segregated facilities or marched in support of the protesters. And their effort led to the integration of seventeen school districts and countless public arenas in the south.

Within six months, restaurants and lunch counters were desegregated in 26 cities in the south. The sit-in protests also succeeded in desegregating public parks, swimming pools, theatres, churches, libraries, museums, beaches and other facilities.

The student sit-ins and protest movement played a major role in galvanizing and transforming the entire civil rights movement into a more potent force.

They attracted more people, especially the young, to the struggle for civil rights which in many cases involved direct action more than the strategy of older civil rights organizers did. Older civil rights activists preferred litigation to achieve their goals but many now also supported direct action by the students.

The rationale for the protests was legal and moral. And as a moral imperative, it was a searing indictment against the nation supposedly founded on the twin ideals of liberty and equality. But it also an economic dimension.

Many blacks in the southern states could not participate in the protests or in any other civil rights activities because they feared that they would lose their jobs.

By contrast, students had fewer financial responsibilities and could take such risks without fear of being sanctioned or penalized by whites. And they were, of course, interested in bringing about immediate change instead of waiting for legal reform to take its course as advocated by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Even Dr. Martin Luther King supported immediate change. That is why he led protest marches in the south and other parts of the country and made his position clear in many of his speeches including one of his books appropriately entitled, Why We Can't Wait published in 1963. But even he was not radical enough for the students, although his tactics and strategy were closer to theirs than those of the NAACP.

In fact, the non-violent tactics of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), headed by Dr. King and which spearheaded the civil rights movement, were initially adopted by the Student Non-Volent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) before this predominantly black student organization adopted a more militant posture after young black leaders such as Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown - and many other black students - found out that the authorities had no respect for non-violence and continued to brutalize blacks.

Dr. King himself supported the sit-ins and on October 1960, he and about 280 college students staged a sit-in at a lunch counter at Rich's Department Store in his hometown, Atlanta, Georgia.

He did not start this demonstration but was asked by the students to join them. And they were all arrested and taken to jail, including Dr. King himself.

The students made a commitment: they would not post bail and would serve time in jail. Dr. King supported them, saying it would be wrong to post bail and made it clear that he would not change his mind even it meant remaining in a jail for a year or for ten years.

There was a lot of unrest in the community in Atlanta because of the arrests and on October 25^th Rich's Department Store dropped the charges and the demonstrators were released without posting bail.

But Dr. King was still in trouble. Even though the sit-in charges against him were dropped, he was still held for violating probation from a previous traffic offence and was transferred from Fulton County Jail to Reidsville State Prison on October 26^th.

The next day, Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, who was then US Senator from Massachusetts, called Dr. King's wife, Coretta Scott King, and offered to help her and her husband. John F. Kennedy's younger brother Robert Kennedy contacted the governor of Georgia and other state authorities to try to convince them to release Dr. King. He was successful and on October 27^th Dr. King was released fom prison.

After he was released, Dr. King thanked Senator Kennedy for his support during the ordeal.

Kennedy's support for Dr. King and his family boosted his popularity among blacks. And King's gratitude to Kennedy which he expressed publicly also helped Kennedy win support among blacks during the 1960 presidential campaign.

The black vote may have been one of the deciding factors in the outcome of the 1960 presidential election on November 8^th which Kennedy won by a razor-thin margin over his Republican rival Richard Nixon.

He won 34,226,731 votes, and Nixon won 34,108,157 votes. More than 70 percent of the black vote went to Kennedy, an overwhelming support which helped Kennedy to win several key states. And his victory changed the course of American history.

Kennedy won much of the south and the east because of his charisma, wit and direct support of Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement; a movement black students helped to galvanize as never before, especially with their sit-in protests, and in the same year one of the most important presidential elections in American history was held.

The year 1960 was the first time black students in the United States entered the political arena in large numbers. And they transformed the political landscape in a way that had not been anticipated even the year before.

In the same year, the protests began to show results. Walls of segregation began to crack and crumble in the upper south. Lunch counters were integrated in Tennessee and North Carolina. They were also integrated in Texas in the southwest. The reasons for the integration were both moral and economic. Many whites supported the protests for moral reasons. And many white owners did not want to lose customers including whites who supported the protesters.

But while there was remarkable success in the upper south - a region which covers Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky - it was a different story in the deep south.

The protesters met stiff resistance in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and South Carolina where white supremacy - including the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Council - was more entrenched than in the upper south. Cities such as Montgomery in Alabama and several others elsewhere including some in Mississippi outlawed the demonstrations. And white business owners flatly refused to serve black customers, contending that they could make their own rules because the businesses were their own private property.

The protesters were met with intimidation, arrest, and outright violence throughout the south and the authorities - including the FBI - did nothing to stop it because they themselves were a part of it. They worked hand in hand with white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan to attack blacks. There have been a number of reports documenting that. According to COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story:

“During the 1960's, the FBI's role was not to protect civil rights workers, but rather, through the use of informants, the Bureau actively assisted the Ku Klux Klan in their campaign of racist murder and terror.

[US Senator Frank] Church Committee hearings [in 1975] and internal FBI documents revealed that more than one quarter of all active Klan members during the period were FBI agents or informants. However, Bureau intelligence assets were neither neutral observers nor objective investigators, but active participants in beatings, bombings and murders that claimed the lives of some 50 civil rights activists by 1964.

Bureau spies were elected to top leadership posts in at least half of all Klan units. 45 Needless to say, the informants gained positions of organizational trust on the basis of promoting the Klan's fascist agenda. Incitement to violence and participation in terrorist acts would only confirm the infiltrator's loyalty and commitment.

Unlike slick Hollywood popularizations of the period, such as Alan Parker's film, 'Mississippi Burning,' the FBI was instrumental in building the Ku Klux Klan in the South, '...setting up dozens of Klaverns, sometimes being leaders and public spokespersons. Gary Rowe, an FBI informant, was involved in the Klan killing of Viola Liuzzo, a civil rights worker. He claimed that he had to fire shots at her rather than 'blow his cover.' One FBI agent, speaking at a rally organized by the Klavern he led, proclaimed to his followers, 'We will restore white rights if we have to kill every negro to do it.'' (quoted by Michael Novick, White Lies, White Power. The Fight Against White Supremacy and Reactionary Violence, pp.. 35-57)....

As anti-racist researcher Michael Novick warns: 'The KKK and its successor and fraternal organizations are deeply rooted in the actual white supremacist power relations of US society. They exist as a supplement to the armed power of the state, available to be used when the rulers and the state find it necessary.'

The Klan's 'supplemental' role, particularly as a private armed force sporadically deployed to arrest the development of movements for Black freedom, is best considered by comparison to other Bureau operations. Unlike other COINTELPROs, the 'Klan - White Hate Groups' program was of a different order entirely. Senior FBI management and a majority of agents in the field endorsed the Klan's values, if not the vigilante character of their tactics; from militaristic anti-communism to extreme racial hatred; from ultra-nationalism to misogynist puritanism.

This was evident during the civil rights struggles of the sixties, when Freedom Riders and local community activists directly confronted hostile police forces - many of whom were openly allied with the Klan. Despite clear jurisdictional authority to enforce federal law, the FBI consistently refused to protect civil rights workers under attack across the South. More than once, the Bureau refused to warn those under imminent threat of violence.

FBI inaction in the area of civil rights enforcement wasn't simply a matter of what the Pike Committee of the House of Representatives dubbed 'FBI racism.' Rather, FBI bureaucratic lethargy, when it came to protecting Black lives, underscored its mission against subversion for constituents whose privileges and power were threatened by a militant movement for Black rights.”

A number of white FBI agents police officers perpetrated some of the worst forms of violence against blacks and their white supporters during this period and when the civil rights movement was in full swing through the sixties. By the end of 1960, 36,000 students had been arrested and thousands were expelled from college in the south.

It was during this time that the students formed a permanent organization called the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC - sneek). It was formed between April 15 - 17, 1960, on the campus of Shaw University, a black school in Raleigh, North Carolina.

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