Microforms: Major Sets by Subject: African, Asian, & French Studies

Microfilm.
Part 1: ACOA Executive Committee Minutes and National Office Memoranda, 1952-1975

The American Committee on Africa (ACOA) was formed in 1953 as successor to Americans for South African Resistance, then a two-year-old group formed to support the campaign of nonviolent protests against apartheid led by the African National Congress. ACOA broadened the original scope to include anticolonial struggles throughout the continent. Records in this series summarize the entire range of ACOA activities in America and abroad, including its lobbying, educational work and foreign student exchange programs, organization of boycotts, sponsoring of conferences, and development of an antiapartheid network within America. Researchers can follow the evolution of Africa Today's editorial policies, the campaigns against banks doing business with South Africa, the 1968 Olympics boycott, and the growing alliance between ACOA and others such as the NAACP, Americans for Democratic Action, the ACLU, labor leaders, academicians, and performing artists.

Part 2: Correspondence and Subject Files on South Africa, 1952-1985

Complementing one another, these correspondence and subject files of ACOA, covering more than 30 years, constitute one of the most valuable sources anywhere for the study of the antiapartheid struggle. There are scores of letters, often written in critical moments, from African National Congress (ANC) leaders such as Chief Albert Luthuli, Z. K. Matthews, and Walter Sisulu. Also in regular correspondence were leaders of "colored" and Indian South African communities such as the ethnic Indians Manilal Gandhi and Yusuf Cachalia. Alan Paton and other writers, clerics, and academicians are amply represented. Letters discuss the practicality of nonviolent tactics in South Africa, the role of the Communist Party in the ANC, the effects of government repression, and the impact of international actions against the minority regime. Subject files focus on events and programs. Some were in the headlines of the day: the bank boycott, the expulsion of South Africa from the UN, the revocation of South African Airlines permits in the United States, and the expulsion of South African athletes from the Olympics. Other significant programs were less well known: student exchange programs and the building of an antiapartheid coalition among U.S. civil rights organizations.