On March 21, 1960, thousands gathered peacefully outside the Sharpeville police station to protest the pass laws requiring Black South Africans to carry internal passports. Police opened fire without warning, killing 69 people, many shot in the back while fleeing. The massacre galvanized international condemnation of apartheid, led the United Nations to establish March 21 as the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, and pushed the African National Congress toward armed resistance.
The crowd outside the Sharpeville police station, roughly thirty miles south of Johannesburg, numbered somewhere between 5,000 and 20,000 by midday, organized largely by the Pan Africanist Congress as part of a coordinated national campaign urging Black men to surrender their passbooks and invite arrest, overwhelming the jails and the pass system itself. The mood, by most accounts, was tense but not violent.
When a scuffle broke out near the station gates, nervous police officers, some armed with Saracen armored cars, opened fire into the crowd without any order to do so, according to later inquiries. The shooting lasted less than a minute. Many of the 69 dead, including eight women and ten children, were shot in the back as they turned to run; nearly 180 more were wounded, several maimed for life.
Photographs of bodies strewn across the dusty square circulated worldwide, transforming apartheid from a domestic South African matter into a global human rights crisis. The African National Congress and PAC were banned days later, pushing both organizations underground and toward armed struggle. Decades afterward, the United Nations designated March 21 the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, and post-apartheid South Africa made it a permanent public holiday, Human Rights Day.