The 1950s were a contentious and tumultuous decade in South Africa. When the Nationalist Party came to power in 1948, it formalized apartheid, marking a new era of South African history. Though segregation had previously existed in South Africa, it was now emboldened and codified. In the first decade of the apartheid era, black populations, particularly Africans, saw their rights stripped away by the NP-led government and its initiatives. The decade witnessed a flurry of legislation that restricted black life, curbed anti-apartheid activism, and limited the rights of non-Europeans to organize, protest, or freely move about. These laws included the Suppression of Communism Act of 1950 (banning the Communist Party and allowing the government to label groups as “communist” in order to ban them), the Group Areas Act of 1950 (allowing the segregation of residential areas according to race and providing the impetus for the mass removal of black populations from “white” urban spaces), the Immorality Amendment Act of 1950 (building upon the Mixed Marriages Act of 1949, which banned interracial marriage, criminalizing all sexual relations between whites and non-Europeans), the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1953 (curbing anti-apartheid activism by criminalizing “resistance campaign offences” as well as the reception or provision of financial assistance to anti-apartheid movements), the Bantu Education Act of 1955 (effectively dismantling schools deemed too progressive that served Africans by transferring “control of Bantu education” to the government’s Native Affairs Department, which was further amended to force them to register with the Department of Native Affairs, who determined whether a school's curriculum was “not in the interest of the Bantu people”), the Customs Act of 1955 (banning certain books and media deemed objectionable by the government), and the Natives (Urban Areas) Amendment Act of 1956 (giving the government the authority to forcibly relocate individual Africans it deemed “detrimental to the maintenance of peace and order,” in effect silencing activists by shipping them out to remote rural areas). Taken together, black South Africans found themselves increasingly vulnerable to systematic oppression and exploitation as the decade progressed.

With the era of de facto (as opposed to legislated) segregation over, the state used its power to silence dissent, crush resistance, police black communities, and prevent interracial cooperation. In 1956, 156 political dissidents of all races from various organizations across South Africa were charged with high treason by the state.