10 Martyrs That Furthered The Civil Rights Cause

Everyone remembers where they were when they heard that South Africa’s first democratically elected president had died. Indeed, as Orson Welles said, if you want a happy ending, that depends on where you end the story, and the truth is Mandela’s ending was a happy one, considering where it could have ended.

Mandela was by no means ‘born to rule’, but his political fate was sealed when the National Party’s white-only government established racial apartheid in 1948, at which point he and his African National Congress party committed themselves to the regime’s overthrow. Initially his methods were nonviolent, but in 1961 he founded a militant group and led a sabotage campaign against the government. For this, he would lose his name for a number: 466/64, a prisoner’s identification he would hold for 27 years.

Mandela may have been silenced during this period but the movement he and his arrest had ignited was not. Over the next three decades, racial tensions would rise and with fears of civil war, President Klerk released Nelson Mandela, who had miraculously survived 27 years of malicious imprisonment. Representing the oppressed masses, Mandela then negotiated an end to apartheid and the country’s first ever election, which saw his democratic ANC party win 63% of the vote. He had given three decades of his life for the liberation of millions. That he was ever given his freedom back was certainly not something he could have expected.

Today, his party has yet to lose an election.