ABSTRACT
In 1975 the author was invited to South Africa as an expert witness for the defense in the political trial of nine members of the Black People's Convention (BPC) and the closely linked South African Student Organisation (SASO). The Black Consciousness movement provided an alternative channel for political action after the banning of both the African National Congress and the Pan-Africanist Congress. He based his interpretation in part on the essays and evidence presented in Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, a report that Hugh Davis Graham and he prepared in 1969 for the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. The essential argument of the Why Men Rebel model is that to understand protest and rebellion in general, and in specific instances. When he met the SASO defendants in the holding area in the Supreme Court building in Pretoria, they wanted to know above all about the current state of the American civil rights movement.
