Freedom Charter

The Freedom Charter was a statement of core political principles adopted on June 26, 1955 at Kliptown, Soweto, by South Africa's Congress Alliance, a coalition including the African National Congress, at a mass gathering called the Congress of the People attended by about three thousand people. It declared that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and called for a non-racial democratic society with equal rights regardless of race, along with redistribution of land and wealth, protection for workers, and access to education, health care and housing. The Charter marked a decisive break from earlier, more accommodationist strands of South African resistance politics, demanding the wholesale transformation of society rather than inclusion within the existing racial order. It became a foundational text of the anti-apartheid movement, and after the African National Congress won South Africa's first democratic election in 1994, many of its demands were carried into the country's new constitution.