Parallels seen between Mandela, Martin Luther King

WASHINGTON, D.C.: Standing on the balcony outside Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on a clear and cool November day in 2000, Nelson Mandela couldn’t help but weep. It was at that very spot where Martin Luther King was cut down by a sniper’s bullet 32 years earlier, cutting short the life of the US civil rights crusader who had been such an inspiration to him.

“Many decades after that tragic event, I could not be composed,” the former South African president and anti-apartheid leader told a youthful crowd of 7,000 later that day. “It was too heavy for me to bear,” he said, quoted on the day by the Memphis Commercial Appeal newspaper.