Nelson Mandela Born: July 18, 1918 Age: 94 years old Birthplace: Transkei, South AfricaOccupation: World Leader, Journalist
On February 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela was freed after 27 years in captivity.
“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” – Nelson Mandela
Today, the Mandela archive has become a reality. Along with historians, educationalists, researchers, activists and many others around the world, you can access a wealth of information and knowledge about the life and legacy of this extraordinary African leader. The new online multimedia archive includes Mandela’s correspondence with family, comrades and friends, diaries written during his 27 years of imprisonment, and notes he made while leading the negotiations that ended apartheid in South Africa. The archive will also include the earliest-known photo of Mr. Mandela and never-before seen drafts of Mr. Mandela’s manuscripts for the sequel to his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom.
We’ve worked closely with the NMCM to create an interactive online experience which we hope will inspire you as much as us. You can search and browse the archives to explore different parts of Mandela’s life and work in depth: Early Life, Prison Years, Presidential Years, Retirement, Books for Mandela, Young People and My Moments with a Legend.
For example, you might be interested in Nelson Mandela’s personal memories of the time he was incarcerated and click into the Prison Years exhibit. You can immediately see a curated set of materials threaded together into a broader narrative. These include handwritten notes on his desk calendars, which show, for example, that he met PresidentF.W. De Klerk for the first time on December 13, 1989 for two and a half hours in prison; the Warrants of Committal issued by the Supreme Court which sent him to prison; the earliest known photo of Nelson Mandela’s prison cell on Robben Island circa 1971; and a personal letterwritten from prison in 1963 to his daughters, Zeni and Zindzi, after their mother was arrested, complete with transcript.
From there, you might want to see all the letters held by the archive, and click “See more” in the letters category, where you can discover all personal letters or use the time filter to explore his diaries and calendars written between 1988 and 1998, where you can see that in the last page of the last diary, he met with President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni of Uganda to exchange ideas about the situation in northern Uganda. If you were a researcher, you can search through various fragments of Madiba’s memory that relate to Ahmed Kathrada, his long-time comrade, politician and anti-apartheid activist, where you can find photos, videos, manuscripts and letters that relate to him.
Finally, by clicking into the exhibit, My Moments with a Legend, you can go beyond Madiba’s personal materials to get a diverse perspective through photos, videos and stories, via the memories of people like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, F.W. De Klerk and Nomfundo Walaza, a community worker.
The Nelson Mandela Digital Archive project is an initiative by the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory and the Google Cultural Institute, which helps to preserve and promote our diverse cultural and historical heritage. Some of our other initiatives include the Art Project, digitizing the Dead Sea Scrolls and bringing the Yad Vashem Holocaust materials online.
You can start exploring the Nelson Mandela archive right now at archive.nelsonmandela.org. We hope you’ll be inspired by this influential leader—the face of South Africa’s transition to democracy.
Posted by Mark Yoshitake, Product Manager, Google’s Cultural Institute
1752 – The Pennsylvania Hospital opened as the very first hospital in America.
1808 – Judge Jesse Fell experimented by burning anthracite coal to keep his house warm. He successfully showed how clean the coal burned and how cheaply it could be used as a heating fuel.
1812 – The term “gerrymandering” had its beginning when the governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, signed a redistricting law that favored his party.
1858 – A French girl, Bernadette Soubirous, claimed to have seen a vision of the Virgin Mary near Lourdes.
1878 – The first U.S. bicycle club, Boston Bicycle Club, was formed.
1929 – The Lateran Treaty was signed. Italy now recognized the independence and sovereignty of Vatican City.
1936 – Pumping began the process to build San Francisco’s Treasure Island.
1937 – General Motors agreed to recognize the United Automobile Workers Union, which ended the current sit-down strike against them.
1938 – “The Big Broadcast of 1938” was released.
1940 – NBC radio presented “The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street” for the first time.
1957 – The NHL Players Association was formed in New York City.
1958 – Ruth Carol Taylor was the first black woman to become a stewardess by making her initial flight.
1960 – Jack Paar walked off while live on the air on the “Tonight Show” with four minutes left. He did this in response to censors cutting out a joke from the show the night before.
1968 – The new 20,000 seat Madison Square Garden officially opened in New York. This was the fourth Garden.
1972 – McGraw-Hill Publishing Co. and Life magazine canceled plans to publish an autobiography of Howard Hughes. The work turned out to be fake.
1975 – Margaret Thatcher became the first woman to head a major party in Britain when she was elected leader of the Conservative Party.
1979 – Nine days after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran (after 15 years in exile) power was seized by his followers.
1982 – ABC-TV’s presentation of “The Winds of War” concluded. The 18-hour miniseries cost $40 million to produce and was the most-watched television program in history at the time.
1982 – France nationalized five groups of major industries and 39 banks.
1984 – The tenth Space Shuttle mission returned to Earth safely.
1989 – Rev. Barbara C. Harris became the first woman to be consecrated as a bishop in the Episcopal Church.
1990 – Nelson Mandela was freed after 27 years in captivity.
1990 – In Tokyo, Japan, James “Buster” Douglas knocked out Mike Tyson in the tenth round to win the heavyweight championship.
1993 – Janet Reno was appointed to the position of attorney general by U.S. President Clinton. She was the first female to hold the position.
2000 – The space shuttle Endeavor took off. The mission was to gather information for the most detailed map of the earth ever made.
2000 – Great Britain suspended self-rule in Northern Ireland after the Irish Republican Army (IRA) failed to begin decommissioning (disarming) by a February deadline.
2002 – The six stars on NBC’s “Friends” signed a deal for $24 million each for the ninth and final season of the series.
2006 – In Texas, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and wounded a companion during a quail hunt.
2016 – It was reported that scientists had detected gravitational waves. The waves had been detected on September 14, 2015 by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors in Livingston, LA, and Hanford, WA.
Michael Brown, an unarmed African American teenager, was fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, resulting in days of civil unrest and protests fueled by tensions between Ferguson’s predominantly Black population and its predominantly white government and police department.
On this day in 1964, the Senate was involved in an epic fight over the Civil Right Act, after a group of Southern senators started a record-setting filibuster in March.
The Act was signed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson on July 2, 1964, but not before a lengthy, protracted fight in Washington. In fact, no full-featured Civil Rights Act proposal had ever survived a filibuster attempt on the Senate floor. Under the old Senate rules, two-thirds of the Senate would need to vote for cloture, or limiting debate time on the floor. (Today, the cloture barrier stands at 60 votes.)
The Act had been approved by the House of Representatives in February 1964, and Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield made the unusual move of bypassing the Judiciary Committee (which was chaired by an anti-bill Senator) and placing the Act directly on the Senate’s main calendar.
But when Mansfield made the first motion about the bill in the Senate, the well-organized filibuster attempt started. And had it been successful, the Civil Rights Act would have been finished for that Senate session.
A year earlier, President John F. Kennedy told a nationwide audience that the Act was a necessity. A prior bill, the Civil Rights Act of 1957, was important but it had a limited impact and it was difficult to enforce. It also had survived a 24-hour filibuster from Senator Strom Thurmond. As Senate Majority Leader, Lyndon Johnson has been involved heavily in the fight for the Civil Rights Act of 1957, and as President, he was committed to honoring his own values and Kennedy’s legacy in the fight for the much-more comprehensive 1964 act.
Committed to the filibuster effort were the powerful Senators Richard Russell, Thurmond, Robert Byrd, William Fulbright and Sam Ervin. Russell started the filibuster in late March 1964, and it would last for 60 working days in the Senate.
Behind the scenes, two opposing leaders were working to find a way to get 67 votes: the Democratic Senate whip, Hubert Humphrey and the Senate Minority Leader, Everett Dirksen of Illinois.
At first, Dirksen opposed the House version of the bill because of certain passages, even though he was a long-time civil rights supporter. Humphrey, a Democrat, worked together with his Republican colleague to make the bill more acceptable to Republicans, while not weakening its powers.
On June 10, 1964, Dirksen made a powerful speech that served to bring more Republicans onto his side in the fight.
Dirksen made his case and then quoted the author Victor Hugo: “Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come.” The Senator then reminded his colleagues that the Republican Party stood for equality since its founding in the years before the Civil War.
That same day, the Humphrey-Dirksen group got 71 votes to end the filibuster, four more than needed, as 27 Republicans had decided to support the Act.
During the vote, the terminally ill Senator from California, Clair Engle, was brought to the floor in a wheelchair. Unable to speak because of a brain tumor, Engle pointed to his eye to signify his Yes vote.
President Johnson signed the bill on July 2 in a nationally televised ceremony.
The new law prohibited discrimination in public places. It also provided for the integration of schools and other public facilities, and it made employment discrimination illegal.
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