He passed away today at age 95, probably of respiratory failure. He’d been hospitalized for a lung infection three months ago.

There will be many many tributes to the man, all richly deserved. But the thing that will always stick in my mind is what’s represented by this photo:

That’s a line of new voters snaking across the hills toward a polling place in South Africa in 1994, when the first fully-democratic election in the nation’s history was held. It was Mandela’s effort that made that happen, and when the results were in he had been elected as the first black President of the country.