Students involved in Black Consciousness focused on black townships and made critical contributions to community-based protest. White students, shut out of black-consciousness organizations and the black townships where they organized, were like prophets outcast, searching for a constituency. They found it in migrant worker hostels and the township fringes. Radical white students played a catalytic role in the development of independent unions that did much to nurture the crisis that brought down apartheid, as I discuss below.
