Amnesty International, 1987, and the Books That Stayed

Sometime in 1987, I walked into a room full of people who read. Not casually, but the way you read when something in the news has made you feel responsible for knowing more. Every table had a book on it. Every conversation circled back to another book, another article, another pamphlet somebody had marked up and passed around. I had expected to show up, help out, and learn something at the margins. I had not expected to walk into one of the most demanding intellectual stretches of my life.

That is what working alongside Amnesty International in 1987 turned out to be.

Amnesty International and the Power of the Letter

Amnesty International was founded in 1961 by British lawyer Peter Benenson, after he read a newspaper account of two Portuguese students jailed for raising their glasses in a toast to freedom. That single act of witness, one lawyer’s refusal to ignore what he had read, became an organization that would mobilize millions of ordinary people to write letters on behalf of people they had never met and likely never would.

The logic was straightforward: a handwritten letter from a stranger in another country, arriving in the office of a government official, carried a specific moral weight that a distant protest could not. It said that someone had taken the time to learn a name, write it down, and ask for justice. The Urgent Action Network, which issued its first documented action in 1973, built on this idea. When someone faced imprisonment, torture, or execution, the network flooded the responsible authorities with letters from across the world, telling those authorities that the world was watching.

By the mid to late 1980s, Write for Rights had not yet been named as such. The campaign that would eventually carry that name formally launched in 2001. But in 1987, the infrastructure was already in place: volunteers in church halls and university offices and living rooms, writing to governments on behalf of prisoners whose cases had landed on a desk, and whose names deserved to be said out loud.

What I Remember

What I carry out of 1987 is not a campaign outcome or an organizational milestone. It is a texture: the quality of the people in those rooms, and the seriousness with which they moved through the world.

They were smart, passionate, and curious, and they cared about what was happening in the world in a way that shaped how they spent their days. I wrote letters on behalf of political prisoners. I started learning, more seriously than I had before, about apartheid in South Africa and about the man whose name kept surfacing in those conversations: Steve Biko.

My background in hospitality and event work had caught somebody’s attention. My resume at that point probably overstated things, and I will own that. But it was enough. I helped behind the scenes at an Amnesty event in Washington, and I want to be accurate about what that means: I was one of the people helping out. At that event I got to meet Joan Baez and Sting.

Meeting Sting was pretty cool. But nearly forty years later, that is not the part that stayed. What stayed is the people, the conversations, the arguments, and the stacks of books.

The Music That Traveled the World for Human Rights

What Amnesty was doing publicly in those same years is on the record, and it is worth setting beside my own small corner of it.

In June 1986, A Conspiracy of Hope brought together U2, Sting, Peter Gabriel, Joan Baez, Bryan Adams, Lou Reed, and the Neville Brothers for a series of six concerts across the United States over ten days, organized to mark Amnesty International’s 25th anniversary. The final concert, held in New Jersey, ran all day and aired on MTV. Both Joan Baez and Sting were among the core artists who performed at all six dates.

Two years later, in 1988, Human Rights Now! expanded the model into a worldwide tour: twenty concerts in fifteen countries across six weeks, with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Sting, Peter Gabriel, Tracy Chapman, and Youssou N’Dour as the headline acts. Joan Baez joined the tour as a guest at several dates. The concerts were held to mark the 40th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. More than one million people attended over those six weeks.

These concerts are part of the documented public record. They place Joan Baez and Sting among the most visible artists in Amnesty’s history in exactly the years I was working alongside the organization, which is how two people that famous ended up in a room I was also standing in.

Steve Biko and the Education That Apartheid Required

Of everything I was taking in that year, apartheid in South Africa demanded the most real effort to understand. The system was entrenched in law and justified by an ideology built up over decades. I had not understood it nearly well enough before those conversations started, and I say that plainly because it is true.

Steve Biko was central to those conversations. Biko helped found the South African Students Organisation in 1969, which gave shape to the Black Consciousness Movement, a political and intellectual force that insisted Black South Africans must ground their resistance in the affirmation of their own identity and worth rather than in any accommodation with the structures that oppressed them. The movement energized resistance to apartheid through the 1970s and produced a generation of organizers and thinkers who paid for that work with their freedom and often their lives.

Biko was arrested in August 1977 under the Terrorism Act. On September 12, 1977, he died in a police cell in Pretoria from injuries sustained during interrogation. He was thirty years old. The international outcry that followed his death brought the realities of apartheid into sharper focus for audiences around the world, and eventually it reached a room full of books in 1987 where I was sitting, a decade late, trying to understand what I had not understood before.

Four Books That Keep Returning

Joining a book club recently sent me back to titles I had not opened in years. Four of them keep surfacing, and each one carries a question that does not age.

The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s 1953 play about the Salem witch trials, was always also about something else. Miller wrote it in direct response to the McCarthyism of his own era, and the machinery it describes, accusation, fear, the impossibility of defending yourself once a crowd has decided, is not difficult to recognize in other times and other places.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s novel published in 1949, follows a man in a totalitarian state where history is continuously rewritten to match the needs of those in power, and where the capacity for private thought is itself treated as a crime. The word “Orwellian” became the adjective people reach for when surveillance and the deliberate manipulation of truth become too familiar. Orwell wrote the book while dying of tuberculosis on a remote Scottish island, aware that time was running out, and the urgency is on every page.

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s 1960 novel, won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. Narrated by a young girl in the American South, it follows her father, a lawyer who defends a Black man falsely accused of a crime. The book has sold tens of millions of copies. The question it poses, what does moral courage look like when the crowd has already decided, is not one that a single reading resolves.

The Turn of the Screw, Henry James’s 1898 novella, is the outlier in that list: a ghost story about a governess who becomes convinced that the two children in her care are being influenced by malevolent presences. James built deliberate ambiguity into the story, and the central question of whether the hauntings are real or only in the governess’s imagination has generated more than a century of critical debate. Coming back to it after years reads differently because the reader has changed.

That applies to all four. What draws any of us back to a book we first read long ago is the experience of finding that the text has stayed exactly where we left it while we did not.

What a Book Club Reopened

The book club was, in one sense, a simple thing: a group of people meeting to talk about what they had read. For me it turned into something else. It reopened a stretch of 1987 I had not looked at closely in a long time.

I had told myself, when I stepped away from formal education, that I was taking a break from learning. What I found that year, inside the rooms of an organization that wrote letters for strangers, inside conversations about apartheid and Steve Biko and what governments were willing to do when nobody was watching, inside the stacks of books everyone was reading and passing along, was a different kind of instruction altogether.

The classroom had walls. They were just not the ones I had expected.