Nelson Mandela was a South African activist and politician who led the anti-apartheid movements and who, after a long struggle and 27 years in prison, presided over the first government to put an end to the racist regime in 1994. The 20th century left two world wars, the death camps and atomic terror, but also great champions of the fight against injustice, such as Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King. The last of them was Nelson Mandela.
Both Walter Sisulu and the countless people who had contact with Mandela throughout his life coincide in pointing out his extraordinary personality. The power of seduction, self-confidence, work capacity, courage and integrity are among the virtues for which he shone wherever he went. Sisulu immediately captured his innate leadership gifts and brought him into the African National Congress (ANC), a movement to fight the oppression that black South Africans had suffered for decades. Soon his qualities would place him in prominent positions in the organization. In 1944, Mandela was one of the founding leaders of the Congress Youth League, which would become the dominant group in the African National Congress; its ideology was an African socialism: nationalist, anti-racist and anti-imperialist.
In 1948 the National Party came to power in South Africa, institutionalizing racial segregation by creating the apartheid regime. In fact, institutional racism in South Africa dated back to at least 1911, the date of a discriminatory provision that prohibited blacks from holding skilled jobs. Numerous measures enacted in the following decades (thirty-six in total) had already led, to give a single example, to the exclusion of blacks and mestizos from the electoral roll.

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Martin Luther King was an American Baptist Pastor, defender of civil rights. Since 1955, the long struggle of black Americans to achieve full rights experienced an acceleration in whose leadership the young pastor Martin Luther King was soon to highlight.
Martin Luther King’s fame spread rapidly throughout the country and he soon assumed the leadership of the American peace movement, first through the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and later through the Congress of Racial Equality. Also, as a member of the Association for the Advancement of Colored People, he opened another front to achieve improvements in their living conditions.
In 1960, he used a spontaneous sit-in by black students in Birmingham, Alabama, to launch a nationwide campaign. On this occasion, Martin Luther King was imprisoned and later released through the intercession of John Fitgerald Kennedy, then a candidate for the presidency of the United States, but he achieved equal access for blacks to libraries, dining rooms and parking lots.

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William Shakespeare was born on April 23, 1564, in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. He was the son of a merchant named John Shakespeare, who also served as a city councilman, and of a wealthy Catholic woman named Mary Arden.

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Oprah Winfrey is a presenter, actress, writer, and producer, best known for her work hosting her own television show: The Oprah Winfrey Show. The Oprah show ran for twenty-five seasons, from 1986 to 2001.

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Her full name was Lucille Desiree Ball, she was born on August 6, 1911 in Jamestown, New York.

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