The Population Registration Act becomes law

The programme called for boycotts, strikes, civil disobedience and non-cooperation. It marked a shift from petitions toward mass mobilization against white minority rule.

The ANC, Communist Party and trade unions called workers to stay home for political rights and against repression. Police killed at least eighteen people in clashes on the Witwatersrand.

Facing the Suppression of Communism Act, the CPSA dissolved publicly. Members later reorganized underground as the South African Communist Party.

The ANC and allied organizations organized a stay-at-home and day of mourning following the May Day killings and in protest against apartheid laws.

The act authorized compulsory residential and business segregation and became a major legal instrument for mass forced removals from multiracial neighbourhoods.

The law created state-controlled tribal, regional and territorial authorities. It laid administrative foundations for the Bantustan system and excluded Africans from common citizenship.

While the state celebrated three centuries of white settlement, the ANC and SAIC held mass meetings and called for defiance of six discriminatory laws.

Thousands attended the Day of the Volunteers shortly before civil disobedience began. Participants committed themselves to disciplined, nonviolent defiance of apartheid laws.

Multiracial groups deliberately violated curfews, pass laws and segregation regulations. More than 8,000 volunteers were arrested during the country's largest civil-disobedience campaign to that date.

Authorities arrested campaign leaders under the Suppression of Communism Act in an attempt to disrupt the expanding civil-disobedience movement.