In June 1955 some 3 000 delegates attended the Congress of the People (CoP) in Kliptown, Johannesburg, and endorsed the Freedom Charter, a statement of principle distilled (to a greater or lesser degree) from demands submitted by people across South Africa during a sixteen-month campaign sponsored by the Congress Alliance. According to Albert Luthuli, president-general of the African National Congress (ANC),

Perhaps. Others saw the CoP as a high point of malefic white influence over the ANC, reflected in the Freedom Charter's bold assertion that ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white’; and/or the influence of (particularly white) communists, reflected in the economic clauses of the charter calling for nationalisation of key sectors of the economy.

The campaign was an attempt by Congress to capitalise on a perceived receptivity in white liberal circles to new ideas and to draw whites from the cautious middle ground into co-operation with the Congress movement. Far from being asked merely to rubber stamp a Congress blueprint, liberals were invited to help co-ordinate the campaign, to participate in the creation of local committees, and to canvass black support for their ideals and programme. It was an invitation rejected by all white organisations except the South African Congress of Democrats (SACOD).

White influence in the Congress Alliance grew as post-Defiance Campaign ANC membership and energy dropped. While cause and effect were often a matter of opinion most agree that 1955/56 was a critical time for the Congress movement as it developed (in 1955) and then formally adopted (in 1956) non-racialism as a core principle – despite its multiracial organisational structuring – and never wavered, even when, in the late 1950s, the Africanists, ANC members who accused Congress leaders of betraying the principles of the ‘Programme of Action’, split off.