The Working Committee of the African National Congress has directed me to place on record our sincere appreciation of the moral and material support which our cause and the Campaign for the Defiance of the Unjust Laws in particular has received from the Negro people of the United States of America.
The African people are presently engaged in a life-and-death struggle against the barbarous policy of racial discrimination pursued by the Malan regime. During the last forty years, my organization has waged a relentless struggle against this policy and has always held the view that a system of government which permits human exploitation and the denial of fundamental human rights to its citizens must be condemned and eradicated from the face of the earth.
The policy of racial tyranny contravenes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and is a direct threat to world peace. It offends enlightened world opinion and condemns the Malan regime as a group of infamous renegades whose barbarous atrocities perpetrated on the sons and daughters of the soil have shamed humanity. Though we face severe odds, we are confident of our power to halt this brutal onslaught on our civil liberties.
The interest taken by the Negro people in the struggle of the oppressed people both in our country and other parts of the world, their sentimental and historical affiliations to the Continent of Africa, and their contribution in the campaign for world peace and international harmony are factors which make them our comrades-in-arms inspite of the considerable distance and space that separate us.
Walter Sisulu
Secretary-General
African National Congress
1 From William A. Hunton papers at Schomberg Center of the New York Public Library