The Alexander Defense Committee (ADC) was an international organization which was established to protest South African apartheid and to assist South African political prisoners and their families. The event that spurred the formation of the ADC was the arrest in July 1963 in Cape Town of Dr. Neville Alexander, a young black literary scholar with a degree from Tubingen University in West Germany, and ten other South Africans. Among them were Alexander's sister Dorothy, a teacher, and Fikele Bam, a law student. All were charged with the crime of opposition to the government and its policy of apartheid, and with membership in the National Liberation Front. After a trial in November 1963, Alexander and four other defendents were sentenced to ten years in the notorious Robben Island prison.
Protest against the treatment of Alexander and the others first began in Germany, among Alexander's friends from his university days. Franz J. T. Lee, a fellow South African student, conducted a drive that collected over 5000 signatures on a petition presented to the United Nations. In September 1964, the Alexander Defense Committee was formed in London.
Liberals in the United States established the American branch of the Committee on February 6, 1965 in New York City. Paul Boutelle, a black socialist leader, was chairman of the group, Berta Green Langston and Robert Langston were its corresponding and executive secretaries, and David Dellinger was treasurer. Original sponsors included Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Carl and Anne Braden, and Staughton Lynd. In the summer of 1965 regional chapters of the ADC were formed to organize local fund-raising and publicity. The first of two major fund-raising events was a tour of the United States by I. B. Tabata, president of the Unity Movement of South Africa, an anti-apartheid group. Tabata toured the country from October 25 to December 15, 1965. From August 31 to November 7, 1966, Franz J. T. Lee toured the United States as European representative of the African People's Democratic Union of Southern Africa. The money collected from these tours and speeches was donated to the families of the prisoners, and used to defray legal expenses of court appeals. Another goal of the fund-raising tours was the publicizing of the evils of apartheid.
In May 1966 the United States Department of Justice attempted to have the ADC register as an agent of a foreign principal under the Foreign Agents Act of 1938. A letter writing campaign sponsored by the ADC and the efforts of New York Senators Robert F. Kennedy and William Ryan ended the government's action. In November of the following year, the ADC helped stop the deportation of W. M. Tsotsi, vice-president of the Unity Movement of South Africa, from Zambia to South Africa. The organization was disbanded in 1968.
