Mandela walks out

Nelson Mandela walked through the gates of Victor Verster prison after twenty-seven years, and almost nobody watching had seen a photograph of him in decades.

Publishing his picture had been illegal in South Africa for most of that time, so the world's image of him was a young boxer from the 1950s. He gave a speech in Cape Town the same evening from notes written that afternoon, and the release was carried live in about fifty countries.