A Comment by Doug Draper
One of my last heroes in North American politics – Bobby Kennedy – was one of the first white leaders of any stature to show the courage t go to South Africa and decry the plague of apartheid that Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in jail fighting against.
Bobby Kennedy, driving for progressive politics shortly before he was gunned down in June, 1968
Bobby Kennedy, then a U.S. senator for New York, spoke at the Cape Town University in June of 1966, almost three years after his brother, U.S. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and two years before he was assassinated running for president. And the following lines from his speech in Cape Town, South Africa are immortalized for all time.
“It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped,” said Kennedy. “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
You can learn more about these courageous words, spoken about 20 years before U.S. president Ronald Reagan and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher were still writing Mandela off as a ‘terrorist’, by clicling on http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/06/30/197342656/looking-back-rfks-ripple-of-hope-speech-in-south-africa
Robert Kennedy’s entire Cape Town University speech can be read by clicking on http://www.rfksafilm.org/html/speeches/unicape.php .
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Niagara At Large 
I always admired Robert Kennedy for his sheer guts and tenacity. What other white man would dare go into black ghetto on the night of June 4, 1968 – the night black civil rights leader Martin Luther King was murdered? I think the death of his brother (50 years ago this past November) changed him profoundly in many ways and made him a better person.
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