On November 8, 1985, more than five hundred student protesters rallied outside of a Brown University administration meeting, demanding the university divest from corporations operating in apartheid South Africa.

The protest organized by the group Brown Divest/Free South Africa was, as even members of the university’s Advisory and Executive Committee had to admit, “well-organized and impressive.” As a result of their broader campaign, which also involved a hunger strike, the Brown Corporation voted to divest from companies that did business in South Africa. When the divestment process stalled, student organizers kept up the pressure. They were harshly punished, with twenty students put on probation in 1987.

On November 8, 2023 — thirty-eight years to the day after that initial anti-apartheid protest — the Brown University administration moved to arrest a group of twenty Jewish students peacefully sitting in at the campus’s central building, University Hall. The students, part of the new group Jews for Ceasefire Now, echoed the calls of their predecessors, demanding that the university divest from “Israel and the military-industrial complex” and calling for a ceasefire in the besieged Gaza Strip.