Mandela project launched today

The Nelson Mandela Museum in conjunction with the Michigan State University Museum today launched a project between South Africa and the United States.

The project - Dear Mr Mandela and Mrs Parks, Children's Letters Global Lessons - is aimed at getting the youth talking and thinking about the qualities possessed by these two liberation leaders.

Rosa Parks is seen as one of the founding members of the civil rights movement in the USA when she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a segregated bus in December 1955.

This sparked the Montgomery and Alabama bus boycott that eventually led to equal treatment under the law for all black Americans.

Over the years both South African and American children have written to these prominent figures and this project will bring the two countries together, showing that the values of these two people are the same though on different continents.

A joint exhibition in SA and the USA will be held later this year of these letters. The project forms part of Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday celebrations and the Nelson Mandela Museum's eighth anniversary.