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s e v e n The Race for Sanctions During . . . my ¤rst year in Congress . . . I attended a meeting of the CBC that set me on a path toward what I consider to be my single most important legislative victory: The imposition of sanctions against the racist apartheid regime in South Africa. . . . I had not gone to Congress in 1971 to take up the banner of ending apartheid, but I had been swept into the ¤ght. More than two decades after introducing that ¤rst disinvestment resolution, I could see the worth of the long-distance run that had begun with that effort. —Rep. Ronald Dellums, D–California On 9 April 1986, Rep. Ron Dellums launched a new sanctions offensive by reintroducing his 1985 bill, which had received one hundred votes before being overtaken by a more moderate version sponsored by fellow black Democrat Rep. William Gray of Pennsylvania. Dellums had been trying to get a disinvestment bill passed for over a decade. This time around, however , Dellums was set for a spectacular victory in what he called a “longdistance run.” In his recent memoir of his years as a U.S. congressman, Dellums states that the sanctions bill was his proudest accomplishment. The so-called Dellums Bill had been thirteen years in the making. It had emerged during Dellums’s ¤rst year in Congress, when he had promised to support the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement in its struggle to get Polaroid Corporation to pull out of South Africa (see chapter 4). After receiving a petition from the PRWM activists, Dellums and the CBC urged President Nixon to discourage U.S. investment in South Africa, without success. Dellums then asked his staff to draft a disinvestment resolution, which he introduced for consideration by the House in February 1972. Fellow CBC member Rep. John Conyers co-sponsored the measure. Although the CBC did not expect the disinvestment resolution to pass overnight, the legislators felt that they had raised the issue before Congress and provided activists with an organizing tool with which to pressure their local and state representatives. According to Dellums, For me, the meeting with the Polaroid workers also drove home the point that while the Black Caucus as a group and I as an individual representative could provide such a rallying point for issues brought to us by constituents, above all I was—we were—now in a position to do something legislatively to advance their concerns. They were not coming to the CBC to ask us for help with community organizing; they were asking us to legislate on their behalf. In doing so, they helped us de¤ne our mission in those early days.1 Thus, the CBC was responding to pressure from radical grassroots antiapartheid organizations in proposing the ¤rst sanctions resolution in Congress . By taking on the cause of the PRWM, a radical black organization that was heavily in®uenced by the leftist and nationalist perspectives of the 1970s, Dellums was representing the interests of a group of people who had never before been considered in the formulation of foreign policy. Dellums was particularly suited to this role as “people’s representative.” He had been recruited into politics to represent what was known as the “people’s republic” of Berkeley and was immediately branded a “left-wing radical” by the southern barons of the Democratic-controlled Congress. Vice President Spiro Agnew called him “an out-and-out radical” who needed to be “purged from the body politic.”2 According to Dellums, When certain political leaders and much of the establishment press looked at me they did not see Ron Dellums, a member of Congress the equal of all others under our system, where districts grant mandates to representatives through the ballot—they saw Ron Dellums, representative of that “commiepinko leftwing community of ‘Berzerkely’” and a person whose ideas belonged outside the legislative chamber, if anywhere.3 Dellums’s experience in Congress was pathbreaking in many ways, but it was his sophisticated use of the legislative machinery and what Jesse Jackson referred to as “street heat” that demonstrated his vision as a longdistance runner. By 1980, Dellums had shifted his anti-apartheid strategy from submitting the disinvestment proposal for consideration of a resolution—largely a rhetorical device—to “crafting a bill that would impose statutory requirements for disinvestment, economic sanctions, and other prohibitions against doing business as usual with the regime.”4 After Reagan’s election in 1980, Dellums moved the issue of South Africa to the top...

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