In 1985, Atlanta, Georgia, was one of the nerve centers of opposition to apartheid South Africa in the United States. The branch of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) was coordinating a national boycott against Coca-Cola, led by Thandi Gcabashe, the daughter of African National Congress (ANC) leader Albert Luthuli. Activists in the city and at Georgia’s universities were fighting for divestment, while the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was working with mine unions to picket investor meetings. And progressive civil rights leaders like Georgia state legislator Julian Bond, the founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, were locking horns over divestment with moderate counterparts like Andrew Young, the mayor of Atlanta.

The history of the anti-apartheid movement in the United States has gained a certain cachet with organizers and policymakers. Divestment, pioneered and popularized by liberation activists to weaken the South African apartheid regime, is now being applied to climate change and Israel. The South frequently gets left out of this history — yet in Georgia and elsewhere below the Mason-Dixon line, anti-apartheid activism was a vital issue.

Within unions, workers were worried about deindustrialization and the role multinational corporations played in South African apartheid; in progressive churches, the violence of apartheid amplified fears of war; for people of color, South African apartheid highlighted both the fight against white supremacy and the unmet demands of the civil rights movement. All of these found expression in the South and especially in Atlanta.