South African Embassy Unveils Statue of Nelson Mandela | NBC4 Washington

South African Embassy Unveils Statue of Nelson Mandela | NBC4 Washington: A 10-foot tall statue of Nelson Mandela, his fist raised in a power salute, has been installed outside the South African Embassy in Northwest D.C. -- where activists in the 1980s staged sit-ins and protests that helped spur the U.S. to impose economic sanctions against apartheid.

Randall Robinson, founder of TransAfrica; Mary Frances Berry, former chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission; former D.C. delegate, Rev. Walter Fauntroy; and current delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton attended the unveiling Saturday.

Those four staged their protest on the day before Thanksgiving in 1984, when they arrived for a meeting with the South African ambassador and never left.

"We knew that once they announced they weren't going to leave, the press wouldn't be there too long. So we asked about 50 people to show," Sylvia Hill, a professor of criminal justice at the University of the District of Columbia, told WAMU. "We had a picket line chanting 'Free South Africa and Free Nelson Mandela!'"