Keith Richards met the legendary American musician Gram Parsons at a London club in 1968 when Parsons was touring with the Byrds. Parsons was then 21, Richards 24. From Richards’s 2010 book, Life.

They [the Byrds] were touring, on their way to South Africa….. I think we went back to [art dealer] Robert Fraser’s to hang out, do some stuff… At Fraser’s that night we started to talk about South Africa, and Gram asked me, “What’s this drift I’m getting since I got to England? When I say I’m going to South Africa, I get this cold stare.” He was not aware of apartheid or anything. He’d never been out of the United States. So when I explained it to him, about apartheid and sanctions and nobody goes there, they’re not being kind to the brothers, he said, “Oh, just like Mississippi?” And immediately, “Well, fuck that.” He quit that night. He was supposed to leave the next day for South Africa. So I said, You can stay here, and we lived with Gram for months and months, certainly the rest of that summer of 1968, mostly at Redlands.

Note to all ye of little faith. This was 18 years before the U.S. Senate voted for sanctions against South Africa, overriding President Ronald Reagan’s veto, and 22 years before apartheid collapsed.

“Life” was co-authored by James Fox. Full excerpt, including the drug bits, at google books. The Byrds went on to South Africa. The band had a different view of Parsons’s stance.