1955 — South Africa's Non-Racial Trade Union Is Born

On March 5, 1955, the South African Congress of Trade Unions held its founding conference in Johannesburg. For the first time, African, Indian, coloured, and white workers stood under one roof, defying laws meant to divide them by race, and built a single union home together.

Though the apartheid state smashed SACTU and drove it into exile, the flame it lit never died. Decades later, COSATU carried that non-racial spirit onward and helped end apartheid. What began in one Johannesburg conference room, workers of every race standing together, became a thread running through the long struggle that followed in South Africa.