On March 21, 1960, a large crowd of demonstrators assembled outside the local police station in the segregated township of Sharpeville, South Africa. They had come to protest a recent tightening of the so-called pass laws requiring most South Africans to carry an identity document detailing their official race classification, residence, employment, and police records. The ratcheting up of the pass laws was a central element in the effort by the National Party (NP) to consolidate and strengthen the country's already thoroughgoing system of racial hierarchy. For those race-classified as “African” deference to the pass laws meant severe constriction of movement, residence rights, and employment, while violation of them meant risking arrest, deportation to a distant rural area, or a term of forced labor on a prison farm.

Eyewitnesses estimated the size of the crowd at between three and ten thousand. Police reinforcements had arrived throughout the morning, and by early afternoon a line of officers armed with assault rifles stood between the protestors and the police station's fence. Without warning, the police opened fire. Sixty-nine people were killed and one hundred eighty wounded-most of them hit in the back as they fled. Newspaper photographers had been on the scene and images of the massacre found their way into the international press, provoking levels of scrutiny, criticism, and sanction that South Africa's government had previously been spared. Foreign investors briefly withdrew from the country's economy and, for the first time, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution encouraging member states to take action against what the NP now referred to as apartheid.