Investments that can shape world affairs.

I'm David Brancaccio in New York, starting with the history of leveraging investment decisions to serve a cause.

At Columbia University, there's news overnight that

pro-Palestinian student protesters have taken over a campus building and put up

barricades. At Columbia and other campuses students have been pushing for colleges and universities to sell off investments in Israeli companies or companies they say profit from the Israel-Hamass War.

The tactic is a long history, including more than 50 years ago, pressure

for divestment in apartheid South Africa. Marketplace is Stephanie Hughes has more.

Back in the 70s and 80s, lots of college students demanded their universities cut ties with any company

that did business in South Africa.

The idea of a global disinvestment movement was to make it impossible for South Africa to function.

Sociologist David S Meyer is author of the book How Social Movements Sometimes Matter.

He says divestment caught on because it was something tangible that students

could ask for.

You gave people who were very, very, very distant from the conflict in South Africa something

to do that connected with their lives.

The student protests fill it over to trade unions and religious groups, says Maddie Christine Webb,

a social and political historian at Yale.

It wasn't just limited to university campuses. It very much drew in the local

community. The student protests were also part of a larger cultural movement,

including musicians who said they were boycotting playing in the South African

resort Sun City, and put that into a song.

Despite the pressure, the whole effort to end apartheid took place over decades, not months.

...