Local NAACP President mourns Mandela’s passing

The world is mourning the loss of South African leader Nelson Mandela. The country’s first black president has died at 95 after a long illness.  Beverly Jenkins, the president of the Oconee County Branch of the NAACP shared these thoughts on a true humanitarian.  “I think he was a kind of leader for the freedom of people and he was willing to give his life for the people of South Africa, not just for the blacks but the whites but for everyone.  As General Collin Powell stated on the news, ‘he was a leader that was willing to give his life for a cause and then he spent 27 years in prison and he came out a loving and forgiving man.  I just say he was just an extraordinary man.” Mandela, a former boxer, attorney and freedom fighter, spent nearly one-third of his life as a political prisoner of apartheid, the legalized racist system of oppression controlled by South Africa’s white minority. Amazingly, he emerged advocating forgiveness, even acceptance of the minority Afrikaans culture to form a democratic non-racial government.