Human Rights and Humans Without Rights in Ethiopia

Momentary Reflection on My Youthful Activism at the U of M
Before I offer my remarks, I would like to ask you to bear with me for a minute as I reflect on
the great tradition of human rights advocacy at the University of Minnesota, when I was a
graduate student here in the second half of the 1970s.
Back then, there were two major issues that galvanized the campus activist community:
Apartheid in South Africa, and gross violations of human rights by military regimes in Latin
America.
In the late 1970s, many of us at this university, supported and guided by progressive faculty
members, formed a vanguard to advocate and mobilize for divestment of university assets in
corporations that did business in apartheid South Africa. That effort paid off in the early 1980s
when the University of Minnesota became one of first three major American universities to
divest its portfolio from corporations doing business in apartheid South Africa.