Biography
Nelson
Rolihlahla Mandela was born in
Transkei, South Africa on July 18, 1918. His father was Chief Henry Mandela of
the Tembu Tribe. Mandela himself was educated at University College of Fort
Hare and the University of Witwatersrand and qualified in law in 1942. He
joined the African National Congress in 1944 and was engaged in resistance
against the ruling National Party's apartheid policies after 1948. He went on
trial for treason in 1956-1961 and was acquitted in 1961.After the banning of
the ANC in 1960, Nelson Mandela argued for the setting up of a military wing
within the ANC. In June 1961, the ANC executive considered his proposal on the
use of violent tactics and agreed that those members who wished to involve
themselves in Mandela's campaign would not be stopped from doing so by the
ANC. This led to the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe. Mandela was arrested in
1962 and sentenced to five years' imprisonment with hard labour. In 1963, when
many fellow leaders of the ANC and the Umkhonto we Sizwe were arrested,
Mandela was brought to stand trial with them for plotting to overthrow the
government by violence. His statement from the dock received considerable
international publicity. On June 12, 1964, eight of the accused, including
Mandela, were sentenced to life imprisonment. From 1964 to 1982, he was
incarcerated at Robben Island Prison, off Cape Town; thereafter, he was at
Pollsmoor Prison, nearby on the mainland.During his years in prison, Nelson
Mandela's reputation grew steadily. He was widely accepted as the most
significant black leader in South Africa and became a potent symbol of
resistance as the anti-apartheid movement gathered strength. He consistently
refused to compromise his political position to obtain his freedom.Nelson
Mandela was released on February 11, 1990. After his release, he plunged
himself wholeheartedly into his life's work, striving to attain the goals he
and others had set out almost four decades earlier. In 1991, at the first
national conference of the ANC held inside South Africa after the organization
had been banned in 1960, Mandela was elected President of the ANC while his
lifelong friend and colleague, Oliver Tambo, became the organisation's
National Chairperson.
Kofi Annan
Kofi Annan is a former diplomat of Ghana and was the seventh
Secretary-General of the United Nations serving from 1997 to 2006. As
Secretary-General Kofi Annan played a leading role in galvanizing global
action through the General Assembly and the Security Council to combat
terrorism and other political crisis especially in the Africa and Middle
East. In 2001, Annan issued the "call to nation", in order to address the
world spread pandemic HIV/AIDS, and put forward the establishment of a
Global AIDS and health Fund. In 2002, a little controversy erupted after
his term as Secretary General was renewed by the UNSC. In 2004, Annan
publicly stated that invasion of Iraq by the US and Britain sponsored
coalition forces was illegal. Kofi Annan was honored with numerous
honorary doctorates and was also a joint recipient of the Nobel Peace
Prize in 2001 with United Nations. |
Jimmy Carter
Biography
Jimmy
Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.), thirty-ninth president of the United
States, was born October 1, 1924, in the small farming town of Plains,
Georgia, and grew up in the nearby community of Archery. His father, James
Earl Carter, Sr., was a farmer and businessman; his mother, Lillian Gordy, a
registered nurse.
He was educated in the Plains public schools, attended Georgia Southwestern College and the Georgia Institute of Technology, and received a B.S. degree from the United States Naval Academy in 1946. In the Navy he became a submariner, serving in both the Atlantic and Pacific fleets and rising to the rank of lieutenant. Chosen by Admiral Hyman Rickover for the nuclear submarine program, he was assigned to Schenectady, N.Y., where he took graduate work at Union College in reactor technology and nuclear physics, and served as senior officer of the pre-commissioning crew of the Seawolf, the second nuclear submarine.
On July 7, 1946, he married Rosalynn Smith of Plains. When his father died in 1953, he resigned his naval commission and returned with his family to Georgia. He took over the Carter farms, and he and Rosalynn operated Carter's Warehouse in Plains, a general-purpose seed and farm supply company. He quickly became a leader of the community, serving on county boards supervising education, the hospital authority, and the library. In 1962 he won election to the Georgia Senate. He lost his first gubernatorial campaign in 1966, but won the next election, becoming Georgia's 76th governor on January 12, 1971. He was the Democratic National Committee campaign chairman for the 1974 congressional and gubernatorial elections.
On December 12, 1974, he announced his candidacy for president of the United States. He won his party's nomination on the first ballot at the 1976 Democratic National Convention, and was elected president on November 2, 1976.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Biography
Martin
Luther King, Jr., (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968) was born Michael
Luther King, Jr., but later had his name changed to Martin. His
grandfather began the family's long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer
Baptist Church in Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931; his father has
served from then until the present, and from 1960 until his death Martin
Luther acted as co-pastor. Martin Luther attended segregated public
schools in Georgia, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen; he
received the B. A. degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, a distinguished
Negro institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather
had graduated. After three years of theological study at Crozer
Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where he was elected president of a
predominantly white senior class, he was awarded the B.D. in 1951. With a
fellowship won at Crozer, he enrolled in graduate studies at Boston
University, completing his residence for the doctorate in 1953 and
receiving the degree in 1955. In Boston he met and married Coretta Scott,
a young woman of uncommon intellectual and artistic attainments. Two sons
and two daughters were born into the family.
In 1954, Martin Luther King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist
Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong worker for civil rights for
members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive
committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People, the leading organization of its kind in the nation. He was ready,
then, early in December, 1955, to accept the leadership of the first great
Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States,
the bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in
honor of the laureate. The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956,
after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional
the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses
as equals. During these days of boycott, King was arrested, his home was
bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time he
emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank.
Woodrow Wilson
Biography
Thomas
Woodrow Wilson (December
28, 1856-February 3, 1924) was born in Staunton, Virginia, to parents of a
predominantly Scottish heritage. Since his father was a Presbyterian
minister and his mother the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, Woodrow
was raised in a pious and academic household. He spent a year at Davidson
College in North Carolina and three at Princeton University where he
received a baccalaureate degree in 1879.
After graduating from the Law School of the University of Virginia*,
he practiced law for a year in Atlanta, Georgia, but it was a feeble
practice. He entered graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University in 1883
and three years later received the doctorate. In 1885 he publishedCongressional
Government, a splendid piece of scholarship which analyzes the
difficulties arising from the separation of the legislative and executive
powers in the American Constitution.
Before joining the faculty of Princeton University as a professor of
jurisprudence and political economy, Wilson taught for three years at Bryn
Mawr College and for two years at Wesleyan College. He was enormously
successful as a lecturer and productive as a scholer.
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Theodore
Roosevelt
Mother
Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Skopje
