As word rapidly spread of Nelson Mandela’s death, people around the world begin to respond quickly. From the White House to individuals who were inspired by Mandela’s journey from an activist to prisoner to president and Nobel Peace Prize winner, as President Barack Obama said Thursday afternoon, Mandela was a “moral giant.”
Jonathan P. Hicks wrote for BET.com:
“There are few leaders on the international stage who symbolized nobility and integrity as spectacularly as Nelson Mandela.
By now, his accolades are a part of world history. He was the freedom fighter who, after 27 years of imprisonment for his work to tear down South Africa’s laws of rigid racial segregation, rose to lead his country in negotiations that led to a multi-racial democracy.
He would eventually become president of the very country that had imprisoned him, all while speaking passionately about the need for reconciliation and for initiatives to combat poverty and inequality. For the role he played in leading South Africa’s transition, always with a passion for forgiveness and reconciliation, Mandela received the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize.”
USAToday.com shares the comments from each man who has served a President of the United States:
“Former president Bill Clinton said, “The world has lost one of its most important leaders and one of its finest human beings … History will remember Nelson Mandela as a champion for human dignity and freedom, for peace and reconciliation.”
Former president George H.W. Bush said he and wife Barbara “mourn the passing of one of the greatest believers in freedom we have had the privilege to know.”
The elder Bush said he “watched in wonder” as Mandela “had the remarkable capacity to forgive his jailers following 26 years of wrongful imprisonment — setting a powerful example of redemption and grace for us all.”
Former president Jimmy Carter said Mandela’s “passion for freedom and justice created new hope for generations of oppressed people worldwide, and because of him, South Africa is today one of the world’s leading democracies.”
In his remarks at the White House, Obama described Mandela as “a man who took history in his hands, and bent the arc of the moral universe toward justice.”
