Rally Assails Investments in S. Africa

Anti-apartheid forces demonstrated Friday in front of the Federal Building and urged San Diegans to campaign against the reelection of local congressmen and Sen. Pete Wilson unless they agree to support disinvestment by American institutions in segregationist South Africa.

Rally organizers from the San Diego chapter of Transafrica, a nationwide anti-apartheid movement founded by the Congressional Black Caucus, distributed leaflets asking San Diegans to protest the City of San Diego’s ties to firms that invest in South Africa at the City Council Rules Commitee meeting at 9 a.m. Monday in room 2000 of City Hall.

Late Friday, about 100 protesters sang “We Shall Overcome” and marched with signs outside the Federal Building.

District of Columbia congressional delegate Walter E. Fauntroy--a longtime civil rights activist who was arrested in November for refusing to leave the South African embassy in Washington--called on San Diegans to demand that Reps. Bill Lowery and Duncan Hunter and Sen. Wilson vote to support the Anti-Apartheid Bill, HR 1460, or risk being thrown out of office at election time.

Also, Fauntroy said, “we need to pass a law in San Diego and the State of California that says there will be no more (state and local) support for this vicious system (apartheid) of exploitation.”

Afterwards, in a brief, emotional address, Rep. Jim Bates (D-San Diego) told the demonstrators that “in my heart I’ve always known that what was happening in South Africa was wrong. But now, after listening to this man (Fauntroy), one of the original leaders of the civil rights movement, I know in my head what my heart was telling me all along.” Then Bates held Fauntroy’s arm aloft as the crowd roared approval.

The bill, offered by Rep. William H. Gray (D-Pa), would ban new bank loans to the government of South Africa, forbid new investment in South Africa by U.S. firms, bar Americans from purchasing gold South African coins, and prohibit the sale of computers that would help the government track political dissidents and enforce racial laws. On May 2, the bill was approved by the House Foreign Affairs Committee by a vote of 29 to 6. It is expected to face a House vote late this month, and to possibly come before the Senate in June.

Apartheid--the South African system of segregation--is nourished by billions of dollars worth of investments from U.S. corporations attracted by the cheap, largely black labor in South Africa, Fauntroy charged in his speeches outside the Federal Building and at a meeting of the San Diego Black Forum at the San Diego Hilton earlier Friday.

“When companies go over there (South Africa) we lose jobs over here,” said protester Annette Wilkins, an eligibility worker for the San Diego Department of Health Services who carried a sign urging San Diegans not to buy South African gold coins.

Bates and about 80 leading black citizens, including Leon Williams, chairman of the county Board of Supervisors, attended Fauntroy’s speech at a luncheon at the San Diego Hilton.

South African employers “are able to force blacks to work for $175 a month,” compared to a monthly wage of $500 in U.S. mining operations, Fauntroy said in the Hilton speech. The typical return on an investment in a South African mine is 25%, compared to an average of 13.7% elsewhere in the world, Fauntroy said.

“In Chicago last year, they were building office buildings with steel beams from South Africa, yet in the same city they were closing their steel facilities . . . (Firms have) invested millions in the Iron and Steel Corp. of South Africa, which has increased its steel exports to the U.S. by 5000% in the last 10 years,” Fauntroy said.

The shift of the labor market from the U.S. to South Africa has delivered American blacks a “double whammy” partly because it harms domestic U.S. industries, such as steel and mining, in which blacks have made major progress in recent decades, Fauntroy said. Also, the shift has been accompanied by a cutback in federal and state welfare programs that have benefited blacks, he said.

Even aides to Alabama Governor George Wallace, a former defender of racial segregation, told Fauntroy Wallace supports the Free South Africa movement because his state’s steel and coal industries have fled to the cheaper labor market in South Africa, Fauntroy said.