ABSTRACT
U.S. society displayed little concern for the institutionalized racial oppression that evolved into apartheid. Sporadic incidents in South Africa drove home the incompatibility between that nation’s racialist ideology and American democratic principles, but pro-apartheid interest groups dominated the foreign policymaking process. A political process approach that uses a set of multiple factors to explain the rise of activism must remain sensitive to how those factors shape movement decline. Popular movements capitalized on a series of favorable economic, social, and political trends that sustained and intensified the climate for questioning the dominant institutions that held sway over the relatively complacent 1950s. Enactment of the Congressional Anti-Apartheid Act shifted the frontier of South African-American relations to congressional-executive battles over implementation and extension of sanctions. Anti-apartheid activists sensitive to global trends attempted to synchronize accounts of how the world political economy was being restructured with explanations of the American role in southern Africa.
