Apartheid, an Afrikaans word meaning literally "apartness," was first used in a political sense in 1948 by Daniel François Malan (1874–1959), prime minister of South Africa from 1948 to 1954. It refers to a political system in which different races are kept apart, or segregated, by law. Unlike forms of racial segregation practiced in the United States, however, the doctrine of apartheid called for each race to develop autonomously and almost entirely separately from one another. South Africa, which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968), described as "the classic example of organized and institutionalized racism," officially implemented such a policy over the course of fifty years (1949–1989). Eventually, with growing internal resistance from an increasingly restive and oppressed majority population of blacks, deepening opposition to apartheid by whites, and strong international pressure, the policy of apartheid was discontinued by South African President F. W. de Klerk (b. 1936) in 1989.

Ideological History and Meaning

Apartheid...