I Have Cherished The Ideal Of

The closing words of Nelson Mandela's three-hour statement from the dock at the Rivonia Trial, delivered on April 20, 1964, in Pretoria. Mandela and seven co-accused faced the death penalty for sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the government. His lawyers urged him to omit the final sentence lest it provoke a death sentence, but Mandela refused. He and his co-defendants were ultimately sentenced to life imprisonment; the last paragraph of the speech is engraved on a wall of South Africa's Constitutional Court in Johannesburg.