Whites-Only Hospitals Treat Blacks : Start of S. Africa ‘Defiance Campaign’ Targets Facilities

More than 200 black and Indian patients, supported by throngs of protesters, were treated at segregated white hospitals today as the anti-apartheid movement launched the most ambitious civil disobedience campaign in 30 years.

Other major protests in the campaign are planned before and after next month’s segregated elections.

“The defiance campaign will be taken to every corner and every section of society until apartheid is unworkable,” said Jay Naidoo, leader of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the largest anti-apartheid labor federation, at a rally in Johannesburg.

At major hospitals in Johannesburg and Durban, patients ranging from babies to grandmothers in wheelchairs were admitted for treatment. Hospital officials, trying to avoid confrontations, said they would not turn away anyone who appeared in genuine need of medical care.

Twelve white women supporting the protest were arrested in Johannesburg, but no violence was reported at any of the eight hospitals targeted by the Mass Democratic Movement, a coalition of anti-apartheid groups that planned the defiance campaign.

‘A Major Victory’

Murphy Morobe, a leader of the United Democratic Front, South Africa’s main anti-apartheid alliance before it was banned last year, told reporters that the hospital protest is “a major victory” and praised doctors who cooperated.

In the port city of Durban, more than 1,000 protesters staged an illegal demonstration near Addington Hospital while 140 blacks and Indians, under the direction of senior anti-apartheid leaders, were admitted for outpatient care. “Apartheid Makes Us Sick,” said one of the posters carried at the rally.

The first protester to enter Addington was Mariam Jagga, an elderly Indian woman in a wheelchair.

By midday, 48 blacks were admitted to Johannesburg General Hospital, a spokesman said, and 100 supporters staged a rally at an adjoining medical school. Like Addington, Johannesburg General regularly admits some blacks for emergency care and specialized treatment, but it has a policy of transferring them to less well-equipped black hospitals as soon as feasible.

Dr. Reg Broekmann, superintendent of Johannesburg General, said about 11% of his 830 current patients are black.

Most Ambitious Since ‘50s

Blacks were admitted within an hour at Johannesburg General, much quicker than the normal processing time at badly overcrowded Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto, the region’s main facility for black patients.

The campaign that began today is widely viewed as the most ambitious in South Africa since a sporadic but long-running campaign in the 1950s to encourage defiance of apartheid laws.

Those protests ended in March, 1960, when police gunfire killed 69 blacks participating in a peaceful demonstration against the now-abolished pass laws that restricted blacks’ freedom of movement.

Anti-apartheid groups have organized several one- or two-day nationwide general strikes in recent years and a widespread hunger strike early this year by hundreds of detainees resulted in the release of virtually all of them.