The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting. It was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson during the height of the civil rights movement on August 6, 1965, and Congress later amended the Act five times to expand its protections. Designed to enforce the voting rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, the Act secured the right to vote for racial minorities throughout the country, especially in the South. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the Act is considered to be the most effective piece of federal civil rights legislation ever enacted in the country.
Inkosi Albert John Luthuli, also known by his Zulu name Mvumbi, was a South African teacher, activist, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and politician. Luthuli was elected president of the African National Congress (ANC) in 1952. At this time, an umbrella organisation that led opposition to the white minority government in South Africa. Luthuli ended up serving until his accidental death. He was awarded the 1960 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the non-violent struggle against apartheid. He was the first person of African heritage to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Luthuli was a lay preacher of the United Congregational Church of Southern Africa (UCCSA) based at its Groutville Congregational Church in Stanger, KwaZulu-Natal, where Luthuli was laid to rest upon his passing in 1967.
{{infobox ethnic group | group = Asian South Africans | pop = c. 1,274,867(2011)
2.5% of South Africa's population | popplace = KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng | langs = South African English, other languages of South Africa, Gujarati,dialects, Hindi, Tamil, Mandarin Chinese, Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Telugu, [[Urdu | rels = Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity and nonreligious | related = Asian, Cape Malays and British Asian | native_name = | native_name_lang= }}
The Separate Representation of Voters Act No. 46 was introduced in South Africa on 18 June 1951. Part of the legislation during the apartheid era, the National Party introduced it to enforce racial segregation, and was part of a deliberate process to remove all non-white people from the voters' roll and revoke the Cape Qualified Franchise system.
Elections in South Africa are held for the National Assembly, provincial legislatures and municipal councils. Elections follow a five-year cycle, with national and provincial elections held simultaneously and municipal elections held two years later. The electoral system is based on party-list proportional representation, which means that parties are represented in proportion to their electoral support. For municipal councils there is a mixed-member system in which wards elect individual councillors alongside those named from party lists.
Fatima Meer was a South African writer, academic, screenwriter, and prominent anti-apartheid activist.
The Story of My Experiments with Truth is the autobiography of Mohandas K. Gandhi, covering his life from early childhood through to 1921. It was written in weekly installments and published in his journal Navjivan from 1925 to 1929. Its English translation also appeared in installments in his other journal Young India. It was initiated at the insistence of Swami Anand and other close co-workers of Gandhi, who encouraged him to explain the background of his public campaigns. In 1998, the book was designated as one of the "100 Best Spiritual Books of the 20th Century" by a committee of global spiritual and religious authorities.
Apartheid was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa from 1948 until the early 1990s. Apartheid was characterised by an authoritarian political culture based on baasskap, which ensured that South Africa was dominated politically, socially, and economically by the nation's minority white population. According to this system of social stratification, white citizens had the highest status, followed by Asians and Coloureds, then black Africans. The economic legacy and social effects of apartheid continue to the present day.
Yusuf Mohamed Dadoo was a South African Communist and an anti-apartheid activist. During his life, he was chair of both the South African Indian Congress and the South African Communist Party, as well as being a major proponent of co-operation between those organisations and the African National Congress. He was a leader of the Defiance Campaign and a defendant at the Treason Trial in 1956. His last days were spent in exile in London, where he is buried at Highgate Cemetery; a few metres away from the Tomb of Karl Marx.
The Natal Indian Congress (NIC) was an organisation that aimed to fight discrimination against Indians in South Africa.
The National Indian Congress (NIC) submitted petitions and organized protests against legislation introduced that was discriminatory. Many of the earliest petitions are readily available as they were authored when Gandhi was the secretary of the organization and all of his works are available in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi.
The South Africa Act 1909 was an Act of the British Parliament which created the Union of South Africa from the British colonies of the Cape of Good Hope, Natal, Orange River Colony, and Transvaal. The Act also made provisions for admitting Rhodesia as a fifth province of the Union in the future, but Rhodesian colonists rejected this option in a referendum held in 1922. The South Africa Act was the third major piece of legislation passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom with the intent of uniting various British colonies and granting them some degree of autonomy. Earlier, the British North America Act, 1867 had united three colonies and the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act, 1900 had united the Australian colonies.
The Colony of Natal was a British colony in south-eastern Africa. It was proclaimed a British colony on 4 May 1843 after the British government had annexed the Boer Republic of Natalia, and on 31 May 1910 combined with three other colonies to form the Union of South Africa, as one of its provinces. It is now the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa.
The Indian Opinion was a newspaper established by Indian leader Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. The publication was an important tool for the political movement led by Gandhi and the Natal Indian Congress to fight racial discrimination and win civil rights for the Indian immigrant community in South Africa. It existed between 1904 and 1915.
The system of racial segregation in South Africa known as apartheid was implemented and enforced by many acts and other laws. This legislation served to institutionalise racial discrimination and the dominance by white people over people of other races. While the bulk of this legislation was enacted after the election of the National Party government in 1948, it was preceded by discriminatory legislation enacted under earlier British and Afrikaner governments. Apartheid is distinguished from segregation in other countries by the systematic way in which it was formalised in law.
Indian South Africans are citizens and residents of South Africa of South Asian descent. The majority live in and around the city of Durban, making it "the largest 'Indian' city outside India". Many Indians in South Africa are descendants of migrants from colonial India during late 19th-century through early 20th-century. At times Indians were subsumed in the broader geographical category "Asians".
The African National Congress (ANC) is the current governing party of the Republic of South Africa. The ANC was founded in 1912 in Bloemfontein and is the oldest liberation movement in Africa.
The Franchise and Ballot Act (1892) was an act of the Cape Colony Parliament, driven by Prime Minister Cecil Rhodes, which raised the property franchise qualification, thus disenfranchising a large proportion of the Cape's non-white voters, and a number of poor white voters.
The Natal Indian Ambulance Corps was created by Mahatma Gandhi for use by the British as stretcher bearers during the Second Boer War, with expenses met by the local Indian community. Gandhi and the corps served at the Battle of Spion Kop. It consisted of 300 free Indians and 800 indentured labourers. Gandhi was bestowed with the 'Kaiser-i-Hind' and other medals by the British for his work in Boer war. This was given up by Gandhi after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919.
Rustomjee Jivanji Ghorkhodu, commonly known as Parsee Rustomjee, and by various orthographic variations including Parsi Rustomji and affectionately referred to as Kakaji, was an Indian-South African philanthropist and businessman, well known for his close mentorship, guidance and financial sponsorship of Mahatma Gandhi during his time in South Africa from 1893–1914.
