Columbia University 1968 protesting the Vietnam War.

[LeftInTX]

21. How today's antiwar protests stack up against major student movements in history

But protesters also didn’t face much pushback in the ’80s because there was a “certain embarrassment among elites in the United States that there was complicity with South Africa’s white government,” Farber said.

“It was kind of pushing against an open door,” he said. “It wasn’t really a polarizing issue.”

That differs from today, when the war in Gaza has revealed a major generational divide and there doesn’t exist the same kind of consensus among Americans.

The divestment movement against the apartheid government — which started with universities and then was adopted by the US federal government — also arguably packed a bigger punch due to vulnerabilities in South Africa’s economy, including the fact that many of its goods could be substituted with products from elsewhere.

https://www.vox.com/politics/24141636/campus-protest-columbia-israel-kent-state-history