Milton King (d. March 4 or 5, 1951) was a Barbadian seaman who was beaten and killed by South African police in March 1951 after he intervened on behalf of Coloured patrons being harassed by two police officers in a café in Cape Town. King was arrested and died within the next two days, likely from a brain hemorrhage that occurred after a severe beating fractured his skull.[1][2] One of the two policemen who arrested King, Johannes Visser, was charged with culpable homicide and put on trial, while the other, Constable J. Groenewald, was interrogated.[3][4] The homicide trial magistrate ruled that since it could not be determined which of the two men struck the ultimately-fatal blow, neither could be found guilty of any serious charge.[4] The only publicly-known punishment resulting from the King trial was Visser being fined £10 (equivalent to £397 in 2023).[1]
King's murder and his killers' light sentences made international headlines, mostly in the Caribbean and the United Kingdom.[1] Reactions including protest meetings, rallies, marches, and boycotts took place in the British Isles, Barbados, British Guiana, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis, and other parts of the Lesser Antilles, often led by labour unions and civil rights organisations.[5] According to some historians, these protests and boycotts were one of the origins of the international anti-apartheid movement.[1][6] In 1959, fellow Caribbean nation Jamaica became the first country in the world to impose broad government economic sanctions against apartheid South Africa since India in 1946. Trade ministers in Barbados, alongside those of three other British colonies in the West Indies, threatened to follow suit, though they later backed down.[5]
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