Noted: Nearly 12,000 people gathered in the University of Wisconsin Field House to hear Desmond Tutu in 1998 and gave him a “thunderous standing ovation,” according to a Milwaukee Sentinel article from the time.
Speaking about racism toward Wisconsin’s Native American population, Tutu urged the crowd to “be committed to racial justice here as you are committed to racial justice in South Africa.”
Tutu, who had won the Nobel Peace Prize four years earlier, also detailed why Americans should not support apartheid, calling it “as evil, as unacceptable, as immoral as Nazism.” He encouraged people to see each other as brothers and sisters and to find strength in diversity.
“Brothers and sisters sometimes disagree, and disagree violently, but they still remain brothers and sisters,” he said, according to the Milwaukee Journal.