A Dusty Journal and a Ticket to History

Twenty-eight years, a $440 million stadium and cheering crowds might beautify a country, but it can't rewrite history completely.

In October 1982, the month before I was born, my grandfather, a part-time civil rights activist and full-time market researcher, flew to South Africa on business. He was struck by its jagged mountains, endless plains and spectacular cities, calling it “the most beautiful country I have ever seen.”

He was also horrified. The agony of Apartheid, the brutal, government-sponsored system of racial segregation, made my grandpa’s activism in the racially loose New York suburbs look like child’s play. At home, he partnered with blacks to expose racial discrimination in the housing market and, when successful, he’d get a door slammed in his face or a threat lobbed his way; when a South African activist overstepped her bounds, her house might get firebombed.

“I made my abhorrence known to one and all,” my grandfather, Bob Schreiber, wrote of his experience in South Africa, in a typewritten journal that was handed to me the day I arrived in Johannesburg to report on the 2010 FIFA World Cup. “At th…