The Students Can Beat Apartheid Again

The movement to defend 7 LSE students suspended for pro-Palestine activism can take inspiration from the 1960s, when a wave of protests and occupations defeated the university’s attempt to crush opposition to white supremacist Rhodesia.

LSE students stage a sit-in in the Old Building, March 1967. (Beaver, LSE)

By Marral Shamshiri

TRIBUNE
26.11.2024

Students at the London School of Economics (LSE) recently launched a public campaign to challenge the suspensions of 7 students for participating in a protest opposing the university’s financial complicity in Israel’s genocide. Since July, the LSE 7 have been forced into an Islamophobic, management-driven disciplinary process for demonstrating with a megaphone at a summer school event — a protest that a statement in a letter sent by the university egregiously associated with the 7/7 London bombings. As reported in the Guardian last month, the suspensions prompted Gina Romero, the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of assembly and association, to criticise LSE for stifling legitimate protest.

But the targeting of the LSE 7 must be understood in a wider context. On 14 May this year, students and staff occupied LSE’s Marshall building for 35 days after publishing a 116-page report, ‘LSE: Assets in Apartheid’, which detailed the university’s investments in companies fuelling the genocide of Palestinian people. LSE engaged in negotiations but refused to meet the core demand on divestment, becoming instead the first British university to evict an encampment with a controversial court order. LSE argued that by engaging in protest, students became trespassers, and despite having told the judge that negotiations would continue after eviction, abandoned negotiations within 24 hours.

Two weeks before the protest, in clear opposition to a unified democratic voice and mandate across the LSE community, including a historic student union vote with 89 percent of 2,584 students in favour of divestment, and several thousand signatures from students, staff and alumni, LSE Council voted against a divestment proposal.

The LSE building occupied this year was renamed after Marshall Bloom, a student from LSE’s 1960s generation. At the height of the ’60s, international solidarity with anticolonial struggles across the world was central to student activism, including opposition to white supremacy in Zimbabwe (then-Rhodesia) and apartheid in South Africa. Marshall Bloom and another student, David Adelstein, were disciplined in March 1967 for writing a letter to the Times opposing the appointment of a new director, Walter Adams, for his complicity in the white supremacist regime in Rhodesia.

Ironically, LSE’s decision to suspend Bloom and Adelstein led to the first student occupation in British history — which sparked the ’60s student revolution at LSE and across Britain.
Britain’s First Student Occupation

In March 1967, hundreds of students took part in an 8-day sit-in, boycotting lectures and going on hunger strike to demand the lifting of Bloom and Adelstein’s suspensions. Singing protest songs such as ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’, students occupying the administration building were removed by police, and 102 were suspended. In solidarity with the ‘rebels’ of LSE, 3,000 students from across Britain marched through London.

Bloom and Adelstein were made scapegoats over the campaign against Adams, who was opposed for his collaboration with the regime in Rhodesia as principal of the University College in Salisbury, Rhodesia. In January 1967, Bloom, president of the graduate students’ association, was banned from holding a meeting to discuss Adams an hour before it was scheduled. Students refused the silencing, but the director instructed porters to prevent entry and remove light fuses from the hall. An elderly porter, Ted Poole, tragically died from a heart attack, and while his death was accidental, several students faced disciplinary proceedings.

The suspensions, which triggered a wave of protests and occupations called the ‘LSE Troubles’ (1966-69), came in response to this incident, but the core issue was LSE’s refusal to engage with students. The university had suppressed a mounting campaign following the publication of a Socialist Society Agitator report on Adams in October 1966. Basker Vashee was a student who arrived at LSE having been imprisoned and deported for protesting at Adams’ university. With Jewish South African students, including Adelstein and Richard Kuper, Vashee warned against Adams’ support for racial segregation and the brutality of apartheid, which shaped the report.

Like the calls for divestment at LSE today, the ’60s campaign did not happen overnight. Student mobilisation at LSE against racism and apartheid in southern Africa began in 1957, including boycotts, protests and teach-ins. On 11 November 1965, when Ian Smith’s white-minority regime made its unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) in Rhodesia, 300 students organised by LSE’s Socialist and African Societies marched to Rhodesia House. Twelve LSE students were arrested when police violently dispersed them. They later forced a Home Office inquiry into police brutality.

Adelstein and Bloom’s suspensions triggered student outrage, leading to the March 1967 occupation, ‘unprecedented in British university history’. At the time, John Griffith, LSE’s renowned professor of public law, argued that university procedures violated the norms of natural justice — the fundamental principles of fair treatment — an argument that the LSE 7 have made in other words today. Later that year LSE quietly backed down, dropping the 102 suspensions and exonerating Adelstein and Bloom.
LSE’s ‘Suitcase Carriers’

After the March 1967 occupation, protests continued, and students faced a variety of repressive tactics — arrests, court and even prison — for upholding their rights to protest and expression. In January 1969, 282 students voted to remove metal gates installed at LSE to restrict student protest after the October 1968 Vietnam occupation. With workers from the Barbican building site, they dismantled the gates using pickaxes and crowbars. Adams called 100 police officers on his students, 13 alleged ‘ringleaders’ were given High Court injunctions, and two professors were sacked for supporting students. LSE eventually dropped the disciplinary cases after widespread outrage — in an extraordinary meeting of 2000 students, a motion to support the disciplined students proposed by Martin Shaw, vice president of external affairs in the student’s union and member of the Socialist Society, passed.

John Griffith repeatedly questioned how punishing students promoted justice. In 1969, LSE enforced the injunctions and tried to send Paul Hoch, John Rose and David Slaney to prison for entering campus. Hoch was subsequently one of three students on trial for protesting the University of London’s ties to South Africa and Rhodesia in Senate House in October 1969. Peter Brayshaw avoided a prison sentence, but Hoch and Gordon Gillespie were jailed, Hoch for six months, and deported for unlawful assembly and assault, a ‘disgraceful’ sentence according to Griffith. The students claimed they were framed by the university following a 30-person sit-in earlier that year against the colour bar in the University of London’s housing policy, which kept separate listings for white and non-white students.

In 2000, ten years after liberation in South Africa, Nelson Mandela delivered a speech at LSE, referring to the African National Congress’s (ANC) call in 1959:


‘LSE, as part of the University of London, was in the vanguard of the great army of men and women across the world who responded to the call to isolate the apartheid regime. They insisted that human rights are the rights of all people everywhere.’

Mandela was praising the role of students. But he was hinting at something else. LSE students’ activism extended beyond protests in Britain. LSE was a main source for the London Recruits — young men and women who carried out secret ANC missions in the ’60s and ’70s. While Mandela was imprisoned on ‘terrorism’ charges, Ronnie Kasrils, an LSE student, identified committed ‘suitcase carriers’ in London: international volunteers who smuggled ANC leaflets and banned literature into South Africa.

Ted Parker was the first student Kasrils approached in May 1967 for his ‘vocal opposition to racial oppression in southern Africa’. In fact, Parker had started the March 1967 sit-in for Bloom and Adelstein, as he explains in an LSE-produced film commemorating the 40th anniversary of the ‘LSE Troubles’.

In 1967, Parker and fellow student Sarah Griffith, the daughter of the aforementioned law professor, travelled to Johannesburg pretending to be an engaged couple, where they unfurled ANC banners and exploded ‘leaflet bombs’ from high-rise buildings. The leaflet bomb was a small amount of gunpowder charge placed under a piece of wood at the bottom of a leaflet-filled bucket. On detonation, the wood was lifted twenty metres into the air, scattering leaflets everywhere. Many disciplined students made the journey, including John Rose, a Jewish student and lifelong anti-Zionist campaigner for Palestinian liberation. Their clandestine activities helped the ANC keep the flame of resistance alive, at a time when the apartheid regime banned the organisation and had thrown its leadership into prison or exile.

Last month, 16 students from this generation wrote to Larry Kramer, present president of LSE, asking the university to avoid repeating the mistakes of 1967. Among the signatories are Steve Jefferys, editor of the 1966 Agitator Adams report, Martin Shaw, now a professor and expert in genocide, Richard Kuper, a founding member of Jews for Justice for Palestinians and Pluto Press, and several London Recruits. They know well that disciplinary proceedings are leveraged disproportionately, against natural justice, to suppress political protest.

But beyond this, the ’60s generation reveal what is really at stake — the fight for a world free of imperial domination, whether against white supremacy in Rhodesia, apartheid in South Africa or the Zionist colonisation of Palestine. There are no universities left in Gaza. British universities have failed to respond to their colleagues’ calls. Instead, they punish students confronting administrations.

The legacy of the activism of the ’60s speaks for itself. Those students were on the right side of history. LSE must honour this legacy. It cannot wait for history to judge the present moment — it is already too late.
About the Author

Marral Shamshiri is a historian and doctoral researcher at LSE. She is an editorial fellow at History Workshop digital magazine and co-editor of the book She Who Struggles.