Nelson Mandela, anti-apartheid icon, is dead at 95

Although Mandela had been frail and ailing for nearly a year, President Jacob Zuma’s announcement late Thursday of the death of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate shook South Africa.

Tributes began flooding in almost immediately for a man who was an iconic global symbol of struggle against injustice and of racial reconciliation.

President Barack Obama said the world had lost “one of the most influential, courageous and profoundly good human beings that any of us will share time with on this earth.”

New Yorkers praised the life of the civil rights legend who visited Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, who told the city during a Yankee Stadium event that the people “never abandoned us” in fighting South African apartheid, and came to Ground Zero after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“The tickertape parade Mayor [David] Dinkins organized for him in 1990 was a great moment for our city, and his visit here in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 helped give our city strength and hope — for which we will be forever grateful,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a statement.

Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio, who worked in the Dinkins administration, said “we came to believe in his fight for justice and democracy as if it were our own.”
“For so many of us, the fight for a free South Africa became the rallying cry of our generation,” de Blasio said in his statement.

Sarassie Little, a lifelong Harlem resident, paid her respects to Mandela after seeing a tribute to him on the Apollo Theater’s marquee.

“He was a great man, a great leader. He fought against apartheid,” Little said. “He’ll be surely missed.”

Rep. Charles Rangel of Harlem called Mandela his personal hero.

“I hope we can take this period of mourning to reflect on the powerful lessons Nelson Mandela has taught us,” Rangel said in a statement.

Mandela was among the first to advocate armed resistance to apartheid in 1960, but was quick to preach reconciliation and forgiveness when the country’s white minority began easing its grip on power 30 years later.

Mandela was elected president in landmark all-race elections in 1994 and retired in 1999. (With Andrei Berman)

Nelson Mandela made a handful of trips to New York after his release from a South African prison in 1990. Here are some of his more notable visits: