NEWS
March 18, 1991
Welcome as South Africa's decision to scrap its apartheid land and housing laws may be, mere repeal of noxious laws does not compensate for years of dispossession. Millions of blacks were deprived of their homes and forcibly moved to segregated locations in the past four decades. Many were denied home ownership. There will have to be some system of reparation and redress before the country can really become a non-racial democracy.The situation in South Africa today can be compared, perhaps fancifully, with the demolition of the Berlin Wall.
NEWS
October 19, 1994
A federal panel of three judges overturned Georgia's congressional districting scheme last month on the grounds that a district was an unconstitutional "racial gerrymander," drawn with the sole purpose of creating a black majority. Earlier, another federal panel ruled that three Texas districts drawn to facilitate the elections of minority candidates "bear the odious imprint of racial apartheid."Both panels were inspired by the Supreme Court's 1993 decision in a North Carolina case in which Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote that a district whose residents have "little in common with one another but the color of their skin bears an uncomfortable resemblance to political apartheid."
NEWS
By Mona Eltahawy | November 28, 2007
NEW YORK -- Once upon a time, in a country called South Africa, the color of your skin determined where you lived, what jobs you were allowed to have and whether you could vote. Decent countries around the world fought the evil of racial apartheid by turning South Africa into a pariah state. They barred it from global events such as the Olympics. Businesses and universities boycotted South Africa, damaging its economy and adding to the isolation of the white-minority government, which finally repealed apartheid laws in 1991.
NEWS
By JONATHAN POWER | April 29, 1994
I was 18. I had been at college only a week and there was this poster asking us not to buy South African oranges. It seemed so obvious and so compelling that I wrote immediately to my parish priest at home demanding that he preach on the topic that Sunday. I truly believed that if enough of us students did as I did, the walls of Jericho would soon come tumbling down.That was 34 years ago. I have since learned not only that it takes more than the marching feet of students to change South Africa, but that South Africa is only one of many terrible examples of man's bestiality to man. Yet to me, as to many of my generation, South Africa remains the special case that affected us more intimately and emotionally than Guatemala, Afghanistan, Iraq or Rwanda.
NEWS
By ELLEN GOODMAN | July 12, 1994
On a radio show a black woman insists that few would care if the victims were black. By fax comes an update of an elaborate O.J. frame-up fantasy signed, ''An African-American.'' On the phone, a black professor recalls his visit to Seattle where two hotel employees told him, ''They're cutting us down one by one.''A Gallup Poll solidifies these amorphous racial feelings into numbers. Sixty percent of black Americans but only 15 percent of white Americans think O.J. is innocent. Sixty-eight percent of white Americans but 24 percent of black Americans think the charges against him are true.
NEWS
By ODETTE GELDENHUYS | March 17, 1995
As a housing lawyer on leave from my public-interest practice in Johannesburg, I came to Baltimore last October, enthusiastic to learn how to ''undo'' racial segregation. I was anxious for lessons about integrated neighborhoods, the constitutional right to choose where to live and the role of government in ensuring equal opportunities and fair housing practices.My own Afrikaner ancestors, after all, had developed a national social system -- apartheid -- upon the foundation of racial residential segregation.