The 1960s saw an increase in student activism around the world. In South Africa, Black Consciousness (See: Index of Terms) originated in the mid-1960s at the University of Natal in Durban, the country’s third largest city. Spearheaded by Biko and other Black student leaders, the BCM was a grassroots antiapartheid movement that emerged out of the political vacuum left by the 1960 banning of the African National Congress and Pan Africanist Congress, part of a government response to demonstrations that resulted in the police massacre of 69 Black protesters in the township of Sharpeville on March 21, 1960 (McRae, Matthew. “The Sharpeville Massacre.” Canadian Museum for Human Rights, 2019).

Under Biko’s leadership, the BCM sought to empower Black people by restoring Black pride after centuries of erosion under white rule. Critical of the paternalistic attitudes of white liberals, advocates of Black Consciousness held that the psychological liberation of Black people was a necessary step to emancipation. As a prime tenet of SASO, Black Consciousness spread across South Africa’s college campuses and beyond, from its foundation under Biko until the arrest of several BCM leaders under the Terrorism Act in 1976.

The BCM is of a piece with roughly contemporary student movements around the globe.