NELSON MANDELA & MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. OUR PROFOUND WORLD LEADERS By Heather Gray
As one who has been involved in both the civil rights movement in the United States and the South African anti-apartheid movement, I am invariably intrigued by the remarkable leadership of both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela. The challenge for both these renowned leaders was to seek the end of white supremacy and discriminatory, racist and often violent policies and actions by those in power. I might add importantly that in his biography Mandela notes that he was inspired by great Americans such as W.E.B Dubois and Martin Luther King, Jr. with the inference that there was a kinship in the missions of South African and United States activists. 1994 - Election of Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa In 1994, I was fortunate to be an observer for the election of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa. Given this experience and my involvement in the anti-apartheid movement since the 1980s, and given the US elections in 2020, I thought how wonderful it would be to have someone like Nelson Mandela as president of the United States. I recently shared this thought with Prexy Nesbitt, one of the leading anti-apartheid activists in the United States who was also very close to Mandela. While Mandela was, indeed, the president of South Af-
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