“African American Athletes, Actors, Singers, Performers and the Anti-Apartheid Movement, 1948-1994” is the first study to explore the multiple roles African American artists and athletes in the global struggle against apartheid in South Africa. As a transnational study, this dissertation pays attention to the multiple trans-Atlantic dialogues that occurred for over a century between African American entertainers and the people of South Africa. Based on archival sources in the United States and South Africa, it argues that many Black Americans in the popular culture industry used their celebrity status to galvanize support for a free South Africa, while others chose paths of accommodation, and, in some cases, collaborated with the Pretoria regime. African American singers, actors, musicians, boxers, golfers, and tennis players were often motivated, both intrinsically and extrinsically, by pan-African connections forged by an empathetic sense of a shared history of racial oppression endured by blacks in both the United States and South Africa during similar time periods. This study addresses questions about the African Diaspora that have not fully been addressed in previous studies. What factors prompted black American entertainers to join the anti-apartheid movement? Did anti-apartheid activists in South Africa consider the support of black American entertainers an essential component of the struggle? Why did some black American entertainers elect to ignore the cultural boycott and tour South Africa?
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