South African athletes must endure, and raised money to support the ACOA's Africa Defense and Aid Fund to support the defence of those charged under the apartheid laws. The Supreme Council for Sport in Africa which represented the independent African nations at the IOC threatened to boycott if South Africa was included in the 1968 Games. In co-operation with SANROC, the ACOA organised a boycott of American athletes in February 1968. Jackie Robinson, the first African American athlete to break the colour barrier in major league baseball, published a statement calling for continued suspension of South Africa from the Olympic Games. As a result of the international pressure, the IOC relented and kept South Africa out of the Olympic Games from 1968 until 1992. Life in the United States Brutus settled in the United States in 1971 where he would serve as professor of African Literature at Northwestern University. When his British passport was cancelled in the wake of Zimbabwe's independence in 1980, he was threatened with deportation and fought a protracted and highly publicized legal battle until 1983 when he was granted asylum in the United States. He continued to participate in protests against the apartheid government while teaching in the United States. He was eventually "unbanned" by the South African government in 1990 and in 1991 he became one of the sponsors of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa. Brutus taught at Amherst College, Cornell University, and Swarthmore College before heading, in 1986, to the University of Pittsburgh, where he served a professor of African Literature until his retirement. Return to South Africa, poetry and activism He returned to South Africa and was based at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where he often contributed to the annual Poetry Africa Festival hosted by the university and supported activism against neo-liberal policies in contemporary South Africa through working with NGOs. In December 2007, Brutus was to be inducted into the South African Sports Hall of Fame. At the induction ceremony, he publicly turned down his nomination, stating: According to fellow writer Olu Oguibe, interim Director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Connecticut, "Brutus was arguably Africa's greatest and most influential modern poet after Leopold Sedar Senghor and Christopher Okigbo, certainly the most widely-read, and no doubt among the world's finest poets of all time. More than that, he was a fearless campaigner for justice, a