 with the opening words to Gaye's anti-violence anthem:
There's too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There's far too many of you dying"
Mandela wasn't talking about the ongoing violence in South Africa between supporters and opponents of apartheid, the pigmentocracy that country's white minority created to dominate the black majority. While he was committed to dismantling that morally corrupt system, Mandela was appealing that night for an end to the violence that wracked the Motor City.
As much as he wanted Americans to rally in support of his African National Congress' efforts to put the last nail in the coffin of South Africa's apartheid state, Mandela repeatedly found time during his first U.S. visit – especially in private conversations with me and other journalists – to agitate for a better life for blacks in this country.
His persistence in doing that in every city he visited moved me to acknowledge Mandela's American connection in a column I wrote July 2, 1990, after his speech to 78,000 people in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum:
"With rare exceptions, most African Americans have found their heroes closer to home – people such as Frederick Douglass, Mary McLeod Bethune, Malcolm X and (Martin Luther) King. Not since Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant, began rallying blacks to his Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1916 have so many African Americans linked their lives so closely to someone from abroad."
History, no doubt, will remember Nelson Mandela as the father of South Africa's majority-rule, democracy. But I'll remember him, first and foremost, as the towering figure of the unbreakable umbilical cord that connects blacks from Harlem to Johannesburg.
DeWayne Wickham, dean of Morgan State University's School of Global Journalism & Communication, writes on Tuesdays for USA TODAY.
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