Interview Segment

Prexy Nesbitt interviewed by Julie Frederikse
October 12, 2004 Durban, South Africa.
..."the effectiveness of the work that we've done has often been based on how much it could be linked to people's lives and their issues in the United States." [3:22]

Long-time activist Prexy Nesbitt describes one of the many campaigns he was involved in regarding bank loans to South Africa, with the slogan "Red Line Apartheid, Not New York." He mentions Samora Machel, a leader of the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) and the first President of that country.

Prexy Nesbitt was born in Chicago in 1944 and grew up there. He went to Antioch College in Ohio from 1962-1967, where he first did organizing on South Africa. Beginning in the late 1960s, he worked at the Mozambique Institute in Tanzania, beginning a long relationship with Mozambique and Frelimo. He later worked in Geneva at the World Council of Churches Program to Combat Racism. Nesbitt was involved in many anti-apartheid and anti-racism campaigns in the United States, including the national bank campaign that linked banks’ loans to South African and their redlining of poor and black neighborhoods in the U.S.

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