And in my heart of hearts, I realized that apartheid was wrong. I realized that we have arrived at a place which was morally unjustifiable. The announcement electrified a country that for decades had been scorned and sanctioned by much of the world for its brutal system of racial discrimination known as apartheid. By then, de Klerk and Mandela had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in for their often-tense cooperation in moving South Africa away from institutionalized racism and toward democracy.
Power would shift. A new constitution would be written. Ways of life would be upended. The toll of the transition was high. As de Klerk said in his Nobel lecture in December , more than 3, died in political violence in South Africa that year alone. As he reminded his Nobel audience, he and fellow laureate Mandela remained political opponents, with strong disagreements. After Mandela became president, de Klerk served as deputy president until , when his party withdrew from the Cabinet.
Botha, had begun by meeting secretly with Mandela shortly before leaving office. In the late s, as protests inside and outside the country continued, the ruling party had begun making some reforms, getting rid of some apartheid laws. De Klerk also met secretly with Mandela before his release. This episode sees Lenny move in with a family of orphans - year-old boy Bernard and his four siblings.
Samantha stays with year-old Helen, who works in the sex trade. Reggie is placed with cousins Francis and Paul, who are desperate to build a successful life outside of Kibera. And Angela gets to grips with the harsh realities of HIV as she moves in with single mum of six and hair salon owner Caren.
When Lenny finds the experience totally overwhelming, how does he decide to take matters into his own hands? How does Sam find a night out in Nairobi's red light district? What does Reggie do to help Paul realise his dream of success in the music industry? Patriarchs thought women should stay home. Conservatives opposed change. Socialists wanted more. Many Chicago businessmen considered her a dangerous radical. Addams believed that the remedy for sprawling cities and dehumanizing factories was cooperation among classes and ethnic groups.
Conservatives then as now believed that entrepreneurs and capitalism produce abundance, that competition motivates workers, that social classes were inevitable, and that trade unions and government interfered with freedom. Fame had come early for Addams.
Visitors to the Columbian Exposition included Hull-House in their itinerary. In , she had published her first major book, Democracy and Social Ethics. Prominent public intellectuals of the early twentieth century drew audiences to the Hull-House Theatre: educator John Dewey, sociologist W. DuBois, suffragist Susan B. Wells, and Theodore Roosevelt. Her account was personal, modest, and candid, blending her accomplishments and progressive philosophy with poignant portraits of immigrants in the Nineteenth Ward.
It quickly went through six printings and was translated in German, French, and Japanese. An optimistic book, it is regularly excerpted in contemporary books for young adults and children as well as in literature anthologies and history texts. By , Jane Addams had become a household name, a beloved national figure, the recipient of honorary degrees. She would also appear in movies and later on radio.
This all changed in with the start of World War I. Her dream of increasing internationalism and declining militarism was shattered. Europe suddenly descended into chaos. The United States slowly rearmed and crept toward war. Addams opposed the war, remained a pacifist, and became a pariah. Humans were not innately pugnacious. With some of the delegates, she then traveled to the warring nations, meeting foreign ministers, visiting wounded soldiers and grieving mothers, and absorbing the carnage ruining Europe.
Returning to the U. She ended her speech describing the way liquor was doled out to soldiers before bayonet charges. The ensuing reaction to her insinuation that combatants were not inherently brave and self-sacrificing was brutal. Newspapers attacked Addams, one calling her a traitor and a fool. Sick for much of the war, isolated and shunned, Addams escaped self-pity by joining with Herbert Hoover in the humanitarian issue of food, urging Americans to conserve food and to send the surplus to starving Europeans.
Addams endured criticism from Teddy Roosevelt for her pacifism during World War I but was later recognized for her efforts on the international stage and won the Nobel Peace Prize in The armistice of November 11 ended the war. Before the conference began, she took a five-day journey, walking through towns devastated by war, passing houses shattered by artillery, and seeing emaciated children everywhere.
With Alice Hamilton, she trudged through rain and mud to the cemetery at the Argonne searching for the grave of her favorite nephew, Captain John Linn, who had been killed by shellfire about a month before the armistice. The Zurich delegates protested the punitive Versailles Treaty, which assigned blame for the war to Germany and imposed costly war reparations that ruined its economy, although they approved of the League of Nations. Addams returned to America and Hull-House.
The s were not easy for Addams. Progressivism was in retreat. Americans celebrated business, not reform, corporations, not settlement houses. Race riots and the Red Scare at the start of the decade gave way to prosperity before the crash of Despite illness and a declining income, Addams remained resilient, tending to Hull-House, continuing to advocate for old-age pensions in the midst of the Great Depression, and presenting President Hoover with a petition for disarmament signed by some two hundred thousand women voters.
Never repenting her pacifism, Addams spent the last half of her life denouncing war in impassioned speeches and in subtle, convincing articles that gained in relevance as the Great War increasingly seemed futile. Whether her opposition to militarism would have remained steadfast with the challenge of Franco, Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin will never be known.
To the public and most historians, however, she is more revered and remembered as a social reformer than as a critic of war. While Addams was undergoing an operation for an infection, doctors found cancer. She died three days later on May 21, The funeral took place at Hull-House before thousands of grieving residents of the Nineteenth Ward.
She was buried in Cedarville next to her parents. She had pity without retreat into vulgarity. She had infinite sympathy for common things without forgetfulness of those that are uncommon. That, I think, is why those who have known her say that she was not only good, but great.
The reputations of heroes rise and fall. In her last years, she became the respected humanitarian who foresaw the folly of World War I and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in No longer just a saint and social worker, scholars now praise Addams as an intellectual and theorist. Her 11 books, hundreds of articles and reviews, and thousands of letters offer academics abundant material for commentary and debate.
Others study her oratory, writing style, and changing religious beliefs. Both went into politics and quickly became famous. Each wrote books and was a privileged intellectual with a social conscience. Each was a good listener and respected ordinary people. Putnam with Shaylyn Romney Garrett looks back to the Progressive era and to Jane Addams for guidance on how to mitigate class division and poverty and become a less narcissistic nation.
Addams, Putnam argues, stood for community and cooperation, rejecting the hyper-individualism of the nineteenth-century Gilded Age. Addams believed that democracy was not only a political theory, but a way of life. One of the purposes of Hull-House was to make citizens. As a scholar of heroism and a former teacher of secondary-school students, I am always looking for exemplary lives. I think of Jane Addams as a hero—a woman of extraordinary achievement, courage, and greatness of soul.
Heroes are contested and surrounded by legends and myths. Allen Davis, who wrote the first scholarly biography of Jane Addams in , American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams , wanted to create an objective and realistic portrait. Davis admired her, praising her as an outstanding person and significant reformer, but not as an original thinker. Her work foreshadowed the New Deal and the Great Society. She was a social justice progressive urging Americans to become more equal, cooperative, peaceful, and kind.
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