#blackhistory: On July 18, 1918, Nelson Mandela was born in Mvezo, South Africa

Any man or institution that tries to rob me of my dignity will lose - Nelson Mandela

President and prisoner, peaceful protestor and armed revolutionary, international icon and human rights activist. Rolihlahla Mandela was born on July 18, 1918 to South African royalty, the child of a chief in the Xhosa-speaking Thembu tribe.

He was the first in his family to receive formal schooling, an avid student who balanced his studies with boxing and track. A missionary teacher gave him the English name the world would know him by - Nelson - and, as Nelson, he moved swiftly through the schools available to South African blacks at the time: Clarkebury Boarding, Healdtown (a Methodist secondary school), and the University of Fort Hare.  In 1939, he and a classmate named Oliver Tambo were sent home from Fort Hare for boycotting university policies, beginning a lifelong professional and political partnership.

When he learned a marriage had been arranged for him he escaped to Johannesburg to work as a night watchman. He finished his undergraduate studies by correspondence and went on to law school at the University of Witwatersrand.  There the pace of what ultimately became his life picked up.  He joined the fight against apartheid, becoming a full a member of the African National Congress in 1943.  He founded the ANC's Youth League in 1944 and also married his first wife, Evelyn Ntoko Mase (1922-2004), with whom he would have four children. He became President of the ANC's Transvaal branch, where he worked on key initiatives like the 1952 Defiance Campaign Against Unjust Laws and the 1955 Congress of the People.  He and Tambo also opened South Africa’s first black law firm, taking the cases of apartheid’s victims.

In 1956, Mandela and 155 other activists were arrested and tried for treason. They were acquitted, but the experience further radicalized him. His outlook would also be shaped by Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela, or Winnie, who would meet at a bus stop in 1957.  She was only 22 but would change his life. They would marry in 1958, and during his long years in prison and beyond she would be his partner and public face until an ugly divorce in 1996.

The 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, where 69 people were killed by South African police cemented Mandela's conviction that the fight against apartheid would require violent resistance. He would later argue that it would have been "wrong and unrealistic for African leaders to continue preaching peace and nonviolence at a time when the government met our peaceful demands with force. It was only when all else had failed, when all channels of peaceful protest had been barred to us, that the decision was made to embark on violent forms of political struggle.”

In 1961, Mandela helped found the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe or Spear of the Nation.  Umkhonto we Sizwe conducted campaigns of sabotage and violent resistance, Mandela receiving guerilla training in Algeria. On August 5, 1962, he was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison for leaving the country and inciting a 1961 workers’ strike. A subsequent trial for sabotage, treason, and violent conspiracy would make him perhaps the world’s most famous political prisoner. Mandela spent 27 years in various South African prisons, most famously Robben Island.

At his trial, he would reassert the right of the oppressed to violent struggle and his permanent opposition to apartheid. “I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society,” he said, "in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

Bowing to internal and international pressure, South Africa would release Mandela from prison in 1990 and he would go on to become a double-first, the nation’s first black president, and its first freely elected president. He came to Los Angeles for 24 hours in 1990, just four months after his release. The Los Angeles Times would recall that “[o]nce he landed at LAX (two hours late), local television stations covered him live."

Imagine -- no freeway chase, no sirens, just an elderly man shaking hands and talking. The L.A. Times printed eight stories about his one-day visit. Take a look at the number on my press credential from the State Department for covering Mandela: No. 7,035. Even if they started numbering at 6,000, that’s more than 1,000 reporters, producers, photographers, all covering a 10-day visit.

Times staffers could stand at the newsroom windows and look across the street to the crowds at City Hall, where the future first black president of South Africa met privately with the first black mayor of Los Angeles.

Men standing on the roof of a bus shelter unrolled a banner reading “Greetings Mandela From the Homeless.” At the Biltmore Hotel, he met with former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky. Mandela filled the Coliseum, filled the streets, filled the Exposition Park armory, with glamorous guests paying as much as $50,000.

Even case-hardened reporters felt there was something out of the ordinary about this man. In the middle of the hubbub, he was self-possessed -- not aloof but not hail-fellow-well-met in the manner of some politicians. This man five months out of prison acknowledged us ink-stained wretches gaggling along with him with the composure of someone who had been doing it for a lifetime.

If he carried himself like a king, well, he was born into a princely African clan. A teenaged boy who saw him here said wonderingly: “You sort of felt like you were in medieval times, seeing a king.”

At the concert at the Coliseum, Mandela would share that Los Angeles held particular resonance for him.

“We could not have left the United States without visiting the city which daily nourished the dreams of millions of people the world over,” Mandela told an estimated 70,000 people who filled the Coliseum, many waving fists and chanting his name. “Many would know Los Angeles as the unchallenged capital of motion pictures, many would regard your city as the city of glamour and splendor.

“We who have suffered and continue to suffer the pain of oppression know that underneath that face of Los Angeles lies the great and noble spirit of the citizenry. We who fight for human rights know the depths of the human spirit running through the hills and valleys of the state of California.”

Nelson Mandela died on December 5, 2013.