Me and Nelson Mandella-Part One

Difficulties break some men but make others. No axe is sharp enough to cut the soul of a sinner who keeps on trying, one armed with the hope he will rise in the end-Mandela
I guess it comes as no shock to anyone that knows me to know that I would have a Nelson Mandella Story.
I'm afraid that mine is not worth much relatively speaking, but I'll go ahead and share it for what it's worth.
I'm a big Nelson Mandella fan because he shows what people are capable of when it comes to suffering and doing the right thing.  I also really like the quote (above).
Back when I saw Mandella, I understood the fear of white South Africa in the face of the "One man One vote" concept.  I also understood the fear of black South Africa,
being effectively enslaved by colonial White Europe.  And, yes, I wrote a book on this subject (colonialism) some years back entitled "Sam-The first battle of World War II" (available on Amazon) set in Ethiopia during the Second Absynthian war; soon to be released in a second edition "The first battlefield of WWII" which is a better name for it, but what can you do (For those of you who read my blog you know that I might be able to travel back in time and make myself give it the right name, but who has time for that?"
But back to Mandella:
I can't even tell you when this was, but it was a long time ago.  I was in San Francisco visiting a friend who happened to be much more cultured than I was and who also had a better grasp than I had of the terrors of Apartheid and even racism in our country.  While I do write on the topic, that doesn't mean that I am as sensitive as I need to be.
Recently, I happened to get hold of a newspaper for the Sunday after John F. Kennedy was shot.  While the stories about Kennedy would draw the average reader, more telling was the story datelined from Atlanta which discussed the position of the relative groups in the United States on segregation.  That's right, when Kennedy was shot in 1964 the Southern states were still largely segregated under the idea "Equal but separate" which they were not.  A discussion of the need to desegreate and the horrible way in which it was accomplished is worthy of a lengthy discussion, I digress.  Suffice it to say that these were the times I grew up in.  The article in question referred to the fact that the black positions were "requests" and not "demands" which tells you a lot about how things have changed, and how strange and inflamable they were back then.
Back to Mandella again: See Part two for the continuing saga