It was called “Mandelamania,” and it took America by storm in the summer of 1990. Ostensibly an attempt to raise money for the African National Congress (ANC), Nelson Mandela’s eight-city tour of the United States linked the struggle for democracy in South Africa with the black freedom struggle in the United States while laying bare the persistence of right-wing anti-communism.

Hundreds of thousands turned out to see Mandela. Yet the trip came just three years after Congress had been forced to override then-President Ronald Reagan’s veto of a sanctions bill designed to pressure South Africa’s white minority government.

Fighting apartheid had long been a concern for US civil rights activists. Martin Luther King Jr supported the Appeal for Action Against Apartheid in 1962, and in 1965, members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee protested at Chase Manhattan Bank, calling on the institution to end its loans to South Africa. In the late 1970s, the struggle against apartheid became a national issue for the first time, as President Jimmy Carter spoke out, however tentatively, against South Africa’s racist government.