U.S. Churches Will Launch Campaign Against Apartheid

Leaders of the nation’s major Protestant, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches decided Monday to organize a coordinated anti-apartheid campaign comparable to their drives for civil rights in the 1960s and against the Vietnam War in the early 1970s.

The group, to be known as the Churches’ Emergency Committee on South Africa, pledged to press for comprehensive government economic sanctions, divestiture of U.S. holdings, boycotts against those American companies that refuse to divest and an end to continued bank credit for the South African government.

“This is a historic gathering,” said the Rev. M. Lorenzo Shepard, president of the Progressive National Baptist Church. “It is an emergency gathering. We can no longer stand idly by and allow our government to casually throw away a moral prerogative that it can exercise.”

The group includes 24 major churches and 12 interchurch agencies ranging across the political spectrum, but excluding some fundamentalist churches. Among those who pledged to participate are the Roman Catholic Church, the Presbyterian Church, the United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church, several Lutheran denominations, the Southern Baptists, the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese.

Although many of these churches have been active in the anti-apartheid movement, officials said that some, including many of the black denominations, previously have done little more than adopt resolutions opposing South Africa’s racial policy.

Joan Campbell, executive director of the U.S. office of the World Council of Churches, said the churches have not attempted any such coordinated effort since the end of the Vietnam War. “We are comparing this to our work in the past for the civil rights bill and the major effort we made on Vietnam,” she said.

Bishop Reuben Speaks of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church said that the civil rights movement came alive “when Christian churches in America became convinced that civil rights ought to be, and started moving together in that direction.”

The Rev. Avery Post, president of the United Church of Christ and co-chairman of the committee with Shepard, said the group intends to convene its first meeting shortly so it can gear up opposition to the rescheduling in March of South Africa’s $14-billion foreign debt.

Policy Unchanged

Post also disclosed that members of the group recently met at the White House with Chester A. Crocker, assistant secretary of state for African affairs. He said they came away “discouraged that the essential policy stance of the Administration has not changed.”

“Apartheid is an unmitigated evil, the product of sin and the work of the devil,” a resolution adopted by the group said. “We have heard the cries of anguish from our brothers and sisters in South Africa, and they have asked us to take this action.”

Among other things, the group vowed to take part in a postcard-writing campaign aimed at discouraging U.S. corporations from continuing to do business in South Africa and to establish a national day of prayer on June 16, the 10th anniversary of the bloody uprising in the black township of Soweto.

The impetus for formation of the committee was a recent meeting of international church leaders in Harare, Zimbabwe, which called for the resignation of the South African government, the release of black leader Nelson Mandela, and the abolition of all apartheid laws. The U.S. group endorsed the Harare declaration.