Mainstreaming movements: The U.S. anti-apartheid movement and civil rights memory

By the time of Nelson Mandela's release from prison, in 1990, television and film had brought South Africa's history of racial injustice and human rights violations into living rooms and cinemas across the United States. New media formats such as satellite and cable television widened mobilization efforts for international opposition to apartheid. But at stake for the U.S. based anti-apartheid movement was avoiding the problems of media misrepresentation that previous transnational movements had experienced in previous decades. Movement participants and supporters needed to connect the liberation struggles in South Africa to the historical domestic struggles for racial justice. What resulted was the romanticizing of a domestic civil rights memory through the mediated images of the anti-apartheid struggle which appeared between 1968 and 1994. Ultimately, both the anti-apartheid and civil rights movements were sanitized of their radical roots, which threatened the ongoing struggles for black economic advancement in both countries.