Pipe Dream is celebrating its 60th year as Binghamton University’s independent student newspaper. It started as the Colonial News in the fall of 1946 and has been going strong twice a week ever since. So we’re taking a look back into the paper’s archives, at the people and events that have made the news over BU’s past 60 years.

Friday, Oct. 11, 1985:

SUNY-B Activists Plan Boycott Today

Students at Binghamton University — then called SUNY-Binghamton — prepared to join their peers at colleges across the country in “a national day of protest” against apartheid in South Africa.

The focus of the boycott was companies that had financial interests in South Africa. At SUNY-B, the campus dining services provider, Marriott (the company that would eventually be known as Sodexho), was at the center of the protest because it then operated airplane flight kitchens on two flights to Johannesburg, South Africa.

Apartheid, the system of classification based on race that segregated citizens into several groups, afforded South African non-whites different or no rights and inferior basic services like medical care and education. The system continued in South Africa from 1948 to 1994. Marriott’s indirect involvement agitated campus activists.

The Student Association passed a resolution declaring its support of the boycott.

“We want to send a message to the Marriott Corp.,” said then SA President Fred Azcarate. “Either continue to do business in South Africa or continue to do business on the campus.”

The article also mentioned a previous protest held in Downtown Binghamton, where students demanded that a SUNY trustee divest any SUNY stocks related to South Africa.

Nationally, the Oct. 11 boycott included a moment of silence for the South Africans who had been killed or arrested protesting apartheid.

The SA also had to take over the catering for a barbeque scheduled for that day, which Marriott was meant to provide food for.

Azcarate and other SA members were working on a referendum to urge the discontinuation of Marriott’s contract with the University, which at that point was in its second of three years.