The Sharpeville massacre was an incident on March 21, 1960, in Sharpeville, South Africa, where police fired on a crowd of Black South Africans, killing or wounding hundreds who were demonstrating against the country’s discriminatory pass laws. The incident took place during the country’s apartheid era, when the white minority government implemented policies that sanctioned racial discrimination and segregation against the nonwhite majority. Official reports indicated that 69 Black South Africans were killed and more than 180 wounded, but some scholars maintain that owing to deficiencies in the government’s accounting of the victims, those numbers are actually higher. For example, Nancy L. Clark and William H. Worger, in their 2023 book, Voices of Sharpeville: The Long History of Racial Injustice, assert that at least 91 people were killed and at least 238 were wounded. The Sharpeville massacre was an early and significant confrontation between anti-apartheid protesters and the South African state.
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