Most of my friends spent part
of yesterday remembering Nelson Mandela. Sometime during my early teens he
became Uncle Eddie’s new hero. Uncle Eddie called him a man of strength and
vision like Dr. King and Kwame Nekruma. Mandela and the anti- apartheid movement was a frequent topic of
conversation at his table.
Yesterday I got tidbits of
new information. I hadn’t know that it was Maxine Waters who’d led the divestment from South Africa crusade
when she was a California Assembly Woman. Or that the CIA had been complicit in
Mandela’s arrest and imprisonment, that Miami’s elected officials refused him
an official welcome when he visited after his release from prison because he
would not renounce Fidel Castro.
Mandela’s first stop on his
1990 US tour was New York. We gave him a tickertape parade. Later that night, I
joined the crowd that welcomed him at Yankee Stadium. He was stalwart, upright,
like men of granddaddy’s generation, radiant, without a trace of anger. He epitomized
grace.
A friend posted a picture on
FB from the Atlanta leg of this trip, Mandela visiting my hometown. Winnie,
Nelson, Maynard Jackson, Atlanta’s first Black mayor, and Coretta Scott King are
standing in the forefront of a crowd, fists raised. This one brought back a
flood of memories—growing up in Atlanta, being in the heart of the Civil Rights
Movement, the honor of living in same city as Dr. King.
Humanity, inclusiveness, dignity,
honor, compassion—Mandela continued King’s leagacy.
A friend summed up best how I
feel in her emailed:
just happy to have been alive at the same time as a true human
being...sadly,..so rare.
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