ABSTRACT
The prime architect of the Free South Africa Movement (FSAM) was Randall Robinson, executive director of Transafrica, a Washington, DC-based lobbying agency. Robinson and two other supporters of last year's Jackson campaign, US Civil Rights Commissioner Mary Frances Berry and black Congressman Walter Fauntroy, decided to hold a nonviolent protest at the South African Embassy on 21 November. Although many black Americans in earlier generations retained a strong sense of cultural and social identity with Africa, during most of the twentieth century such expressions of solidarity were muted. Black American students and tourists in increasing numbers began to make pilgrimages to their "homeland"; US black cultural fashions and hairstyles began to consciously imitate African patterns. Ironically, it was only with the achievement of desegregation and the granting of democratic political rights in the 1960s that black Americans could fully revive their political and cultural relations with Africa.
