To understand what Nelson Mandela meant to Chicago, look back to the summer of 1981, when his anti-apartheid movement was just beginning to blossom here.
Word had spread quickly that the South African government planned to defy an international sports boycott by the United Nations and send its prized, all-white rugby team, the Springboks, to Chicago to play an exhibition game against an all-star team from the Midwest Rugby Football Union.
The visit, which also would take the team to New York and Los Angeles, was seen by some as a propaganda tour designed to soften South Africa’s racist image. So the Chicago City Council passed a resolution banning the team from playing in the city, forcing them to go underground.
A weekend of dogged detective work began, drawing together a diverse network of anti-apartheid activists from Chicago and the suburbs determined to find the location of the top-secret game and disrupt it with a demonstration.
Lisa Brock, then a 25-year-old doctoral student at Northwestern University, was among those working around the clock. The activists learned that a game was scheduled for Saturday, and a bus was waiting at Daley Plaza to take the protesters on a moment’s notice.
“We put a call out to everybody in the suburbs, ‘If you see people in a park drawing funny lines on the ground, call us.’ And a lot of people did,” said Brock, 57, a former Columbia College history professor who created an archive, the Chicago Anti-Apartheid Movement Collection, at the college.
The multicultural, multiracial group of students, civil rights activists, educators, union workers and ordinary citizens went into action, as had like-minded people in cities around the world. Two years later, many in the coalition worked to get Harold Washington elected as the city’s first black mayor, according to Rep. Danny Davis, a West Side alderman at the time.
“You could easily relate to what was going on in South Africa, and by helping to free Nelson Mandela, we also helped to free and open up Chicago,” Davis said.
For a decade, until Mandela was released from prison in 1990 and political power gradually transferred from the white minority to the black majority, Chicagoans fought to break the long-standing financial ties that Illinois governmental and educational institutions had with businesses in South Africa. They demanded that city, county and state pensions divest from South African-held companies. But there was lots of resistance.
“At the time, socially responsible investments were not on the radar,” said Dr. Rachel Rubin, 55, an internist with the Cook County Health and Hospitals System who joined the movement while in medical school. For companies and local governments, she said, “it was an economic issue. They wanted to know why they should make a political statement by dropping good investments. We had to convince them that divesting would be one method of forcing appropriate social change where there was oppression.”
Students at the University of Illinois built a makeshift shantytown on the Champaign-Urbana campus. At Northwestern University, students held sit-ins and vigils. Crowds gathered almost daily to protest at the South African Consulate, then in the 400 block of North Michigan Avenue.
“People were galvanized by the madness of apartheid,” said former Illinois state Sen. Alice Palmer, 74. “What if we had not had a civil rights movement in this country? Think of where it would have gone if we had not broken it up and stopped it.
“Apartheid is the ultimate of what can happen if you don’t fight against injustices.”
In 1984, on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, 500 people took to the street in front of the consulate, bringing Michigan Avenue to a halt.
Fifteen people, including Palmer’s husband, Edward, rushed through the doors of the consulate, which at the time was off-limits to African-Americans. They were arrested and later demanded a trial, gaining even more publicity.
Sen. Paul Simon testified to the heinousness of apartheid and the good character of the defendants. They also had the support of Mayor Washington. In the end, they were acquitted.
“When the trial was over,” Palmer said, “a white woman juror climbed over the rail and asked, ‘Where do I sign up?'”
Funeka Sihlali said she was surprised to find such strong support for the struggle when she moved to Chicago from Johannesburg in 1979. But mostly she was grateful to have the freedom that living in America brought.
“When I first came, I remember seeing graffiti on the walls criticizing President (Jimmy) Carter. I was shocked by that,” Sihlali said. “I was used to censorship. To be able to go to a meeting without fearing for your life or speaking openly about the situation without having things thrown at you was amazing.”
Sihlali, a trained nurse, worked as a nanny for an American family that lived in Johannesburg. When they returned to the United States, she came with them. Like most South Africans, she had friends and family members who had been jailed or killed fighting for freedom.
An uncle had served time at Robben Island, the prison where Mandela was held for 18 years. A brother was living in exile abroad. Cousins had mysteriously disappeared and were never seen again.
In Chicago, Sihlali connected easily with the activists and became a resource for those hungry to learn more about life for blacks in South Africa. She also helped run a pipeline for young South African women who wanted to come to the U.S.
“I was shocked by their passion and their knowledge of the situation in South Africa,” said Sihlali, 65, who went on to earn a master’s degree in health law at Loyola University. She taught for a while at the City Colleges of Chicago and nowserves on the ethics committee at Cook County’s Stroger Hospital.
At the time, President Ronald Reagan’s administration viewed Mandela and his African National Congress as terrorists. That is the reason, according to Brock, that South Africa decided to “test the waters” with a rugby tour.
It was up to Brock and others to make sure it didn’t happen in Chicago.
The night before the game was to be played, a call came in around 11 p.m. It was a young white man from Milwaukee, according to Brock, with a tip that participants were to show up at a Howard Johnson’s hotel on the Illinois-Wisconsin line at 6:30 a.m. Saturday and be escorted to the field. A former rugby player, he had turned down an invitation to play on the U.S. team, but he offered to go to the meeting and find the location.
The game was held in a public park in Racine, Wis. It was over by the time the Chicago bus arrived, but a group of Racine residents did manage to stop it for a while.
“This park was in the middle of a black neighborhood,” Brock said. “So when people looked out that morning and saw all these white people in their community park, they started calling each other. They ran out on the field and were arrested.”
Mandela’s only visit to Chicago was in 1993.
Escorted through the city by the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Mayor Richard M. Daley, he drew thousands of people to his speeches at Operation PUSH headquarters on the South Side, the downtown Palmer House Hilton and the Harold Washington Library. He was given a key to the city, and by the end of the two-day visit, he had raised $1 million in donations to help educate South African blacks, now able to vote for the first time, on the election process.
Mandela had bypassed Chicago on his initial freedom tour in 1990, but he said a visit to the city had always been on his life’s agenda.
“I’ve heard a lot about Chicago, both good and bad,” Mandela said. “And I have looked forward to the day that I could visit the city.”
He acknowledged that his freedom and the fall of apartheid occurred, in part, because of pressure from places like Chicago.
“The love you’ve shown us will drive us to a position where we will be able to take over the government of our country,” he said.
A year later, Mandela won the presidential election in South Africa by a landslide.
His death, Sihlali said, will leave a void.
“People (in South Africa) are going to be lost now because nobody knows what is going to happen with the change,” said Sihlali, who returned to her country briefly in January to attend her brother’s funeral.
“Even though he had not been directly involved politically, just the mention of his name evoked good feelings. Just knowing he was there was comforting.”
Tribune reporter Kim Geiger contributed.
