HOW TO DRIVE ELON MUSK DOWN

If you think mass protests can't combat evil, remember what we did in the 1980s.

- CLARA JEFFERY

IN THE FALL OF 1984, when I was a high school senior in Washington, DC, protests at the South African embassy began. Civil rights leaders met with the ambassador. That meeting became a sit-in, and that sit-in launched a movement. Soon, there were demonstrations at consulates across the country, College students held rallies, built "shantytowns," and pushed their schools to divest.

Area kids like me got in on protesting the embassy, too. And we had a soundtrack. "Free Nelson Mandela" had been released by the Special AKA in March. The leader of that British ska band, Jerry Dammers, later admitted that he didn't know much about Mandela before he went to an anti-apartheid concert in the UK, where a long-simmering boycott movement was roiling to a boil. Then in 1985, a month after I started college, Artists Against Apartheid recorded Steven Van Zandt's "(I Ain't Going to Play) Sun City"essentially the music world launching its own boycott. The wild cross-genre supergroup-DJ Kool Herc, Lou Reed, Bonnie Raitt, Gil Scott-Heron, Pat Benatar, Bono, and Miles Davis, to name a very few-guaranteed continual rotation on a relatively new cultural phenomenon: MTV.

We were getting a collective education: Because South Africa was so dependent on Black labor and exports, if industrialized nations withheld trade and investments, we could backstop Black South Africans who'd been resisting the Afrikaner regime for decades. So suddenly, amazingly, we did. By 1986, Congress had imposed sanctions and banned direct flights. Coca-Cola pulled out, and athletes joined musicians in refusing to play there. Divestment battles raged on campuses and in boardrooms for the rest of the '80s. And they worked. South Africa's economy ground to a near halt. Mandela was freed in 1990, and negotiations to end apartheid began. In 1994, free elections made him president.