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When Nelson Mandela told kids at Madison Park to stay in school
By adamg on Thu, 12/05/2013 - 5:09pm
Also see: He lunches with the Kennedys and is cheered at a mass rally.
Mandela's speech at Harvard in 1998:
RIP, Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013.
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Mandela, MA 02118
Another Boston-Mandela connection:
Almost 7 years ago, I submitted a UHub post about a secession movement in the 80's where predominately black neighborhoods wanted to leave Boston and form a new city named Mandela.
The links on my old post are dead; the Wikipedia article is no more and WGBH moved the video of the news report on the referendum to create Mandela, MA here.
RIP to a man of great principle.
Mandela, MA
More like Soweto, MA - what do you think would happen if a bunch of poor neighborhoods secede from the city and lose the rich, predominantly white tax base? Those schools, police cars, firetrucks and garbagemen don't appear out of thin air, someone's paying for them.
Thanks, Adam. Sad day, even
Thanks, Adam. Sad day, even though inevitable. They don't make leaders like that anymore. I vividly remember waiting for Mandela with the throngs on the Esplanade, my newborn daughter in my arms. What an exciting day!
So how did our illustrious local "pundit" pay tribute?
Howie Carr, everyone's crazy bigoted uncle, paid tribute to Mandela on his show today by;
Calling Barack Obama "ignorant" and having "no clue".
Saying with no evidence whatsoever that Bill Ayers wrote Obama's first book.
Going on a long rant about the "black kids" who are engaged in the "knockout game" and then reading Ann Coulter's column about the subject aloud.
Can someone in this city tell me why this unrepentant bigot is still allowed to spread his racist nonsense on the public airwaves?
"Nobody ever went broke
"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public." - H. L. Mencken
A living symbol of change
Several years ago, when my boys were in the lower grades, we were in the car when "Free Nelson Mandela" came on the radio.
The chorus from the back seat: "Mimo, WHAT are they talking about??? Free Nelson Mandela???"
By the mid-'00s, it had already been long enough that my kids knew of Mandela only as a Head of State - not as prisoner #46664. (they would, of course, know that part of the story in time - they watched Invictus at least three times each)
Our eye doctor is a South African expat who left rather than deal with the Botha regime. He has a framed, signed photo of Mandela in his exam room. When I told him how the boys reacted, he burst into tears. He couldn't believe that it had been long enough that children would not remember those many years of incarceration, and would only know President Mandela.
I had known Mandela was a great man, but that really drilled into me how much he meant to so many people.