On March 7, 1969, Princeton’s “super-psychedelic party weekend” began with a love-themed Junior Prom. Couples were handed love beads and lush flowers as they strolled into Dillon Gym, where they danced the night away in front of a massive 60-foot stage constructed for the event. Eating clubs hosted their usual parties after the JP as well as the following night. The weekend became rowdier than expected, but not unreasonably so. A Princeton High School student was shot in the foot in the basement of Murray-Dodge, then called “the Womb.” A group of students burned a pile of newspapers in Gauss Hall (eventually part of First College), triggering a fire alarm at 2:38 a.m. on Sunday. Six trucks and one ambulance rushed to the scene.
The events of this “party weekend” occurred amidst growing rumors that the Association of Black Collegians (ABC) and the Third World Liberation Front were preparing for a militant disruption on campus. These groups fought for full University divestment from companies that enabled the oppressive South African apartheid government.
The week before, the United Front of South Africa, a multi-racial coalition, held a rally and called on President Robert Goheen ’40 to divest stock in 39 companies. Goheen responded with a set of steps to divest from South Africa’s apartheid government. His outlined policy stopped far short of committing Princeton to full South African divestment. Goheen’s proposal, which included moves to refuse financial support and stop investing in companies doing “primary business” in South Africa, was insufficient to the ABC and Liberation Front. Rumors circulated that the organizations were planning something, but no one was quite sure what. Even Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the predominantly-white radical anti-war organization, was not clued in.
It was 7 a.m. on a frigid March morning when a student hurried into the delivery entrance on the south side of New South, just as the janitor was opening the doors for the day. He held the door open, and, with “clockwork precision,” roughly fifty more students from the two groups stormed the building after him, chaining the north doors and securing the east doors with a mop. This was how the ABC and Liberation Front began their 11-hour occupation of New South.
SDS, unaware of the occupation until it began, scrambled its members and hosted a demonstration in the afternoon outside New South to support the occupiers. 500 students showed up in support, huddling together on the snow-covered green outside the hulking former administrative building, and listening to rally speakers. A contingent uprooted a bike rack and barricaded the front entrance with its metal frame. Counter protestors, bundled in coats, some wearing green sweaters of Cannon Club, screamed “Get the hell out!” at the demonstrators and sang Old Nassau, at times drowning out SDS speakers. Protestors chanted “Fight racism” and “Divest now” in retaliation. The atmosphere was charged; conflict could have broken out at a moment’s notice.
The occupation of New South was only one action in a long history of the anti-apartheid divestment movement at Princeton that began in the mid-sixties and ended at the same time as the apartheid regime fell in 1994. Bob Herbst ’69 participated in this first wave of the divestment movement as a member of the Daily Princetonian’s editorial board. Herbst said that the late sixties was a time “of great ferment” both on-campus and off. The Vietnam War raged on, civil rights battles persisted, and Princeton was moving towards coeducation.
During Herbst’s time as a student, in addition to participating in the anti-war struggle, activists fought for self-government and protested against selective eating clubs, as nonselective clubs did not exist. They opposed parietal hours—a University policy that dictated that women (overwhelmingly from outside of Princeton, as the University remained single-sex until the fall of 1969) were only permitted in eating clubs and dorms before certain times each night—and fought against a requirement that students attend chapel services. “Divestment in terms of South Africa was part and parcel of this great progressive movement both on the campus and off,” Herbst said. In this period the anti-apartheid movement was in its early stages, not yet the major focus of demonstration that it would become.
“[Apartheid] was… a really systematic, persistent way that the [white] settler colonialists dominated the Indigenous Black people in the country,” Herbst said. “There was vast agreement that it was an apartheid society that could not change itself; it needed outside pressure in order to do so.”
As a member of the editorial board of the Daily Princetonian, Herbst wrote an editorial criticizing the University’s continued investment in apartheid. His editorial, titled “South Africa: Divest With Deliberate Speed,” asserted, “If the community retains its ownership, it makes a simple statement. It says that it will continue to profit from the labor of enslaved men because the profits are so important to this university and its members, that the university will continue to exploit others for those profits.”
Herbst and fellow activists encountered an administration that, according to Herbst, “thought [divestment] was nuts. They thought it was crazy.” Students, too, had mixed feelings about divestment. A survey conducted by an ad hoc polling group the day of the occupation found that almost 60 percent of student respondents supported Goheen’s limited and vague South Africa divestment policy, with 29 percent in disapproval. This reflected an overall campus climate where “not everyone thought that the Vietnam War was wrong, that segregation was wrong, that apartheid was wrong, or if it was wrong, that they wanted to spend a lot of time and effort thinking about it and talking about it and protesting about it,” Herbst said. “The whole thing was contested.”
On another cold spring morning nearly a decade later, 210 activists from the People’s Front for the Liberation of South Africa marched into Nassau Hall to begin a 27-hour sit-in, one of the longest occupations of an administrative building in Princeton’s history. The People’s Front was created in 1977 by Larry Hamm ’78, nicknamed Adhimu Changa while at Princeton, as a multi-racial coalition calling for divestment. Its actions helped shake Princeton out of a “lull that came after a period of significant activism the decade before,” according to Cory Alperstein ’78, People’s Front member and among the fifth co-ed cohort at Princeton.
In the decade that passed since Herbst was a student, Princeton had not radically changed its position on investment in South Africa. The University made investment decisions on the basis of the Sullivan Principles, a set of protocols that demanded equal treatment of employees in South Africa regardless of race. Princeton would invest in companies that followed the principles. Princeton claimed it was using its shares in companies as leverage to push them to make responsible decisions in South Africa. “It’s like greenwashing today,” Alperstein said. “If you continue to provide the financial support that these companies provide and you’re invested in them, they’ll continue to do business.”
The People’s Front was not satisfied with this policy. Their sit-in culminated in a series of escalating actions organized over the previous month. For 34 days, students picketed behind Nassau Hall every day, sometimes drawing crowds of 200. The People’s Front brought together 600 students for a protest on Cannon Green. That same day, 500 students crammed into McCosh 50 to listen to African National Congress member Johnny Makitini speak. Some activists went on a week-long hunger strike, too.
Organizers planned the details of the sit-in in secret, communicating via written messages instead of by telephone because they suspected their lines were tapped. Cell groups of four to five hand-picked activists met nightly the week preceding the action, learning how to respond to threats of removal or arrest.
The sit-in began the morning of April 14, when the occupiers gathered and entered Nassau Hall. While inside the building, activists were tense but determined and dispersed in their cell groups. Many worried about how the sit-in would affect their future employment prospects. “It was senior thesis time; people were applying to law school. There was a lot of nervousness about what would happen individually for students who got reprimanded,” Alperstein said.
Nevertheless, as the sun sank below the horizon and the night’s chill set in, the activists hunkered down. They read books, played cards, and talked quietly amongst themselves. One group on the third floor danced late into the night. Outside, students organized an overnight supporter’s vigil. A band played rock music and people danced by candlelight. 65 students stayed throughout the night, braving the elements, though many more left before morning came.
The occupation concluded at 11:20 a.m. the next day. The students, waking up in sleeping bags that were thrown through windows by People’s Front members, cleaned up after themselves and left through the front door.
They found themselves in front of a cheering and applauding crowd of more than 300 people. Chanting and singing, the united crowd set off in the direction of Corwin Hall, where the Board of Trustees was voting on divestment proposals made by the Resource Committee. They arrived 600 strong, having accumulated more supporters on the walk.
The University did not fully accept the demands of the People’s Front. In the very meeting those protestors marched to, the Board rejected a student University Council Resource Committee recommendation to vote in favor of shareholder proxies that would have limited activities of Union Carbide (a chemical company) and Kodak in South Africa. “I remember coming out of the building and feeling like we had to somehow grab victory from the experience, which was discouraging to say the least,” Alperstain said. “The Board of Trustees said ‘we’re not going to do this.’”
The University continued to follow the Sullivan Principles, with little major change. Trustee Stephen Ailes ’33, chair of the subcommittee that drafted South African investment policy, said soon after the protest, “the day that my decision-making process is affected by demonstrations and what not, I’ve got to quit.”
Even though Princeton refused to budge, to Alperstein, the most significant result of the protest was its effect on students’ lives and careers following the sit-in. “It was a lesson learned by a lot of us about what it means to take a stand,” she added. After a 40-year reunion of the sit-in, Alperstein remarked that alumni participants continued to be activists. “They were organizers, they were in healthcare, they were professors in universities talking about the history of Civil Rights,” she said. “There was a coming together of people who understood back then what was at stake… and this understanding of a protracted struggle, which is what we came to realize was the reality.” Today, Alperstein engages in climate activism work in Massachusetts at the municipal and state level in grassroots and local environmental organizations. Herbst is a lawyer specializing in issues including civil rights and employment and housing discrimination. Both are active alumni members of Divest Princeton.
Princeton University never fully divested from apartheid South Africa. But all the activists who fought for divestment gained what Alperstein calls an “activist perspective” through their changemaking. To Alperstein, this perspective is the most important outcome of an activist movement, setting people on a lifelong mission of “protracted struggle” to fight for change.
I am a first-year who is just entering Princeton’s fossil fuel divestment movement, joining a fight for endowment justice that spans fifty years. Outside a core group of dedicated activists, I find myself amidst a student body that accepts a climate of political apathy. Both Herbst and Alperstein found this to be true during their time at Princeton: a large number of students outside of the activist community did not want to involve themselves in University issues. Alperstein went so far as to say that some students operated “in a different universe” when it came to engagement.
But today, that apathy is far more widespread. For instance, Divest Princeton’s biggest annual event, the Global Youth Climate Strike, turned out just 20 people this year, a drop in the water compared to the hundreds of students the People’s Front regularly assembled.
Global changes have certainly contributed to this dramatic decline in direct action. For one, we aren’t mobilized by anything like the Vietnam War: our friends aren’t at risk of getting drafted and dying overseas. COVID’s devastation dramatically reduced activist involvement. Job insecurity, particularly among young people, has exploded and made it more difficult for people to take extra time to fight for change.
University policy also encourages apathy. Princeton directs students towards service at the expense of activism, chooses how many activists get accepted into Princeton, and creates the perfect conditions for student complacency. Princeton can legitimately present itself as a “benevolent” institution, one which accommodates student demands about campus life and increases resources devoted to students. They adopt a rhetoric that tells students and faculty that the administration will take care of them. Why would you want to critique an administration that gives you so many resources? Why would you bite the hand that feeds you?
The history of the anti-apartheid movement on campus proves that we can break free from the current apathetic climate. Even despite University resistance, we see what students are capable of when we join together en masse. Understanding this history broadens the horizon for how student activists can organize, what strategies we can use, and what we can change during our time at Princeton. With this understanding, we can join the ranks of all who fought before us and engage in the protracted struggle for justice for the rest of our lives.
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