“I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities, a thousand unremembered moments, produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people,” Mr. Mandela wrote in his memoir.
Throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, Mr. Mandela organized and agitated on behalf of the ANC. He held positions in the ANC’s youth wing and in the main organization. Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings, Mr. Mandela was initially committed to nonviolent resistance. He worked in concert with the Natal Indian Congress, an anti-racism group that Gandhi had helped found.
A growing struggle
Mr. Mandela practiced law and raised two sons and a daughter with his first wife, Evelyn Ntoko Mase, whom he married in 1944. Another daughter died in infancy.
By 1952, Mr. Mandela had become president of the ANC’s largest branch, in the Transvaal. That year, he and Tambo opened the only firm of black lawyers in South Africa. They provided free or low-cost legal counsel to blacks.
Mr. Mandela was arrested for the first time in 1952 while organizing an ANC defiance campaign. A court decreed that he could not legally be in the presence of more than two people at a time. Such repression drove activists like Mr. Mandela underground; in 1954, Mr. Mandela devised what he called the “M Plan” of small street cells to carry out nonviolent defiance of apartheid.
In 1955, the year he separated from Evelyn, Mr. Mandela met Winnie Madikizela, a young social worker. A year later, he and 155 others were charged with treason. They originally were jailed but were released as the case dragged on. It ended in 1961 with verdicts of not guilty.
Mr. Mandela and Madikizela had married in 1958, and their union became part and parcel of the liberation struggle. She became an activist in her own right.
As the ANC stepped up its activism, so did a related group, the Pan Africanist Congress. In what would emerge as a turning point in the black liberation struggle, the PAC organized a protest on March 21, 1960, in the black township called Sharpeville. As demonstrators marched to decry laws that required blacks to carry a pass to enter cities or other white areas, police opened fire, killing 69 people.
The government clamped down with a state of emergency, during which several leading figures were jailed, including Mr. Mandela.
In 1961, Mr. Mandela and others in the ANC formed an armed wing, called Umkhonto we Sizwe, or Spear of the Nation. Popularly known as “MK,” the wing carried out a sporadic underground sabotage and guerrilla campaign.
In 1962, just after returning from MK fundraising travels across Africa, Mr. Mandela was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison for incitement and illegally departing the country.
The next year, police arrested almost the entire leadership of MK. Along with Mr. Mandela, they were charged with treason, but when the case went to trial, the charges were changed to sabotage and conspiracy. They were convicted and expected to be hanged.