The world mourns the passing of Nelson Mandela, and today's roundup brings you tributes from coast to coast. First up,
The New York Times editors reflect:
Nelson Mandela, who died on Thursday at age 95, fully deserved the legendary stature he enjoyed around the world for the last quarter-century of his life.
He was one of the most extraordinary liberation leaders Africa, or any other continent, ever produced. Not only did he lead his people to triumph over the deeply entrenched system of apartheid that enforced racial segregation in every area of South African life; he achieved this victory without the blood bath so many had predicted and feared.
Over at CNN, guest columnist
Kennedy Odede explains how Nelson Mandela saved his life:
I had many conversations with Nelson Mandela, although I had not met him.
In my family's tiny shack in Nairobi's Kibera slum, my one-way exchanges with the great man kept me going. Mandela survived 27 years of prison; maybe I would make it out, too. [...] Our lives in the slums seemed to take a friend every day. Police shot my friend Boi; they thought he looked like a criminal. My childhood friend Calvin hanged himself. His suicide note said what I felt: "I just can't take it anymore." Both of my sisters were raped and impregnated as teenagers. People seemed to fade and disappear. To live was the exception. I am now 29, and all but two of my closest childhood friends are dead.
It was Mandela who saved my life.
Much more on Mandela's legacy below the fold.
The Los Angeles Times:
The main focus of the countless Mandela obituaries will rightly be the remarkable trajectory of the leader's life — from rural villager to resistance leader and from longtime prisoner to president. It even seemed that he'd staged a triumphal end to a triumphant life. One prominent South African editor wrote that he'd managed his own departure brilliantly, consciously "weaning" his people "like a good parent." Of course, the young people he influenced, directly and indirectly, make up his living legacy.
Certainly, had Mandela died 20 years ago, or 10, or even in 2007 — when the homeless boy named Jonathan labored under the misimpression that he still served as president — the impact would have been far more devastating. In the last two years of repeated health scares, Mandela seemed to have been testing the waters and preparing people for his departure.
The Denver Post:
He was one of the titans of the 20th century, a man who will be remembered not only for the aspirations he so stubbornly and eloquently voiced but also for virtues that many revolutionaries of his era tragically lacked. [...]
In the largest sense, Mandela's story is another timeless demonstration of the irrepressible nature of the human spirit. Born into a society in which he was considered a second-class citizen, Mandela rebelled at the idea that this was the natural state of affairs.
And, after a lifetime of ceaseless effort, he proved that it wasn't.
The Statesman Journal:
It would be unfair to say Nelson Mandela was to South Africa what Martin Luther King Jr. was to America. That would diminish each man’s contributions, for they were unique individuals, in unique settings, fighting a common foe: racial injustice.
It is the world’s good fortune that Mandela was able to pursue his fight for a complete lifetime, dying Thursday at age 95.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer:
The world could use more leaders in the mold of former South Africa President Nelson Mandela, the awe-inspiring icon and 1993 Nobel Peace Prize winner who died Thursday at the age of 95.
USA Today calls Mandela one of the 20th century's "most extraordinary" men:
Like King and Gandhi, Mandela led his people to freedom, ending the apartheid rule of South Africa's brutal white-minority regime. But neither of those men, nor the others mentioned here, was put to such an extraordinary personal test.
All you need to know to grasp the uniqueness of Mandela is this: He spent 27 years in prison, most of them in solitary confinement pounding rocks at the notorious Robben Island prison. He was given no hope and allowed little contact with the outside world. Yet instead of yielding to his plight — or betraying his cause by speaking a few words that could have set him free — he persevered, leading in absentia against all odds and emerging victorious, a leader of such stature that his oppressors could not stand against him.
And then, at his moment of triumph, with the presidency of South Africa in his hands, he sought not revenge for all that had been done to him but racial peace for his people, black and white, which — incredibly — he achieved.
The Chicago Sun-Times called Mandela "a moral force for the ages":
Yes, Mandela was imperfect, which is to say he was human. His married life could get messy, he arguably was overly appeasing, and his ANC — the nation’s ruling party — was later beset by incompetence.
As if any of that matters. [...] Nelson Mandela, who died Thursday at age 95, was a moral force for the ages.
May our troubled world continue to learn from his example.
The Times-Picayune:
Trying to change a racist society wasn't his most difficult challenge, he told the audience at the Baton Rouge banquet where he received the honorary degrees.
"The most difficult issue is not so much to change the people around you; it is to change yourself, " he said. "I had to change myself first."
The Chicago Tribune says Mandela was the "conscience of the world":
Despite his enormous impact, Mandela was a self-deprecating man who would have rejected attempts to portray him as martyr or saint. Modest to a fault, he often disarmed opponents and amused friends with his puckish sense of humor. While in prison, he played soccer with other inmates and his entire life he remained a proud and passionate soccer fan. He helped South Africa obtain the 2010 World Cup and was photographed beaming at the cup finale. [...]
If one person could be called the conscience of the world, it would be Nelson Mandela. Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer and Nobel laureate for literature, once said of her fellow countryman, "He is at the epicenter of our time, ours in South Africa, and yours, wherever you are."
The best way for us to truly honor his life, his suffering, and his memory is to uphold the values he embodied and fight the injustices he forced the world to confront. His inspiration is universal, his legacy timeless.
Richard Stengel at TIME:
Nelson Mandela was always uncomfortable talking about his own death. But not because he was afraid or in doubt. He was uncomfortable because he understood that people wanted him to offer homilies about death and he had none to give. He was an utterly unsentimental man. I once asked him about his mortality while we were out walking one morning in the Transkei, the remote area of South Africa where he was born. He looked around at the green and tranquil landscape and said something about how he would be joining his “ancestors.” “Men come and men go,” he later said. “I have come and I will go when my time comes.” And he seemed satisfied by that. I never once heard him mention God or heaven or any kind of afterlife. Nelson Mandela believed in justice in this lifetime. [...]
He famously said, “The struggle is my life,” but his life was also a struggle. This man who loved children spent 27 years without holding a baby. Before he went to prison, he lived underground and was unable to be the father and the husband he wanted to be. I remember his telling me that when he was being pursued by thousands of police, he secretly went to tuck his son into bed. His son asked why he couldn’t be with him every night, and Mandela told him that millions of other South African children needed him too. [...]
His legacy is that he expanded human freedom. He was tolerant of everything but intolerance. He deserves to rest in peace.
Finally, in case you missed it, our own
Meteor Blades penned his own tribute to a great man:
[...] Mandela will remain a charismatic model of profound humanitarian instincts honed by study and experience, a man who had nearly three decades stolen from him simply because he sought equality for all South Africans. He refused to let go of that dream even when the white supremacists offered him his freedom if he would just stop the fighting the struggle that had stuck him behind bars in the first place. He was a man who emerged from prison seemingly without any rancor. A leader by necessity, by personal choice and by the people's will.
Each of us should consider ourselves lucky to succeed in creating within ourselves just a little bit of Mandela.