Our fight is against real, and not imaginary, hardships or, to use the language of the state prosecutor, “so-called hardships”. Basically, we fight against two features…  poverty and lack of human dignity, and we do not need communists or so-called “agitators” to teach us about these things. South Africa is the richest country in Africa, and could be one of the richest countries in the world. But it is a land of remarkable contrasts. The whites enjoy what may be the highest standard of living in the world, whilst Africans live in poverty and misery…

The complaint of Africans, however, is not only that they are poor and the whites are rich, but that the laws which are made by the whites are designed to preserve this situation. There are two ways to break out of poverty. The first is by formal education, and the second is by the worker acquiring a greater skill at his work and thus higher wages. As far as Africans are concerned, both these avenues of advancement are deliberately curtailed by legislation. The government has always sought to hamper Africans in their search for education… Approximately 40% of African children in the age group seven to 14 do not attend school. For those who do, the standards are vastly different from those afforded to white children. Only 5,660 African children in the whole of South Africa passed their junior certificate in 1962, and only 362 passed matric…

Our complaint is not that we are poor by comparison with people in other countries, but that we are poor by comparison with the white people in our own country, and that we are prevented by legislation from altering this imbalance.

Freedom fighter and Nobel Laureate Nelson Mandela, at the 1964 trial that led to his three decade-long incarceration before he regained his freedom, led the end of South Africa’s state-sanctioned bigotry, and became that nation’s first president of Native African descent. Mandela celebrates his 94th birthday today. While the struggle to reform American public education may not be as nearly driven by racial bigotry, the Zip Code Education policies and other underlying causes of the nation’s education crisis that have hinder far too many poor and minority families from giving their kids the high-quality education they need to join the economic mainstream are just as deep.