![]() “If it wasn’t for some of the activities that happened here, I might not be involved in politics and might not be doing what I am doing in the United States,″ Obama said, adding that he had wept when he saw the pictures of the children shot to death, including Hector. Barack Obama visited it, with Hector’s sister Antoinette as his guide, in 2006. A museum commemorating the uprising is named for him. Hector Pieterson, who was only twelve, was among the first of some two dozen protesters to die that day. ![]() The children’s courage, amid poverty and political depravity embedded in national laws, was stunning. As a young foreign correspondent, I covered the chaos as police fired noxious plumes of tear gas and then live bullets at the kids in Soweto, an impoverished Black township outside Johannesburg. On June 16, 1976, thousands of Black South African children poured out of their classrooms to peacefully protest the government’s decision to forcibly teach them in Afrikaans, the language of Dutch settlers.
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