Thousands of people packed the Oakland Coliseum to see Mandela just months after he had been released from prison. He had come to the Bay Area with a message of thanks and hope.
The East Bay was at the forefront of the anti-apartheid movement in the U.S. Students at UC Berkeley protested, pushing for divestment, and longshoreman refused to unload South African goods.
But the movement's Bay Area roots can be traced to the Rev. Amos Brown and San Francisco's Third Baptist Church, where long before those protests, parishioners were writing checks as they prayed for change.
