Those who only knew Nelson Mandela as a free man walking the international stage – which is to say, people in their 20s or younger – might not fully grasp why his life, and thus his death, means so much to so many.

For parents and grandparents of millennials, however, Nelson Mandela was for years the world’s best-known political prisoner. All the world had of him during that time was rumor and an occasional letter written from prison to loved ones.

He seemed, for a time, the world’s most famous ghost.

He was a black man sent to prison for sabotage and attempting to overthrow the all-white South African government, crimes for which he could have been put to death under the country’s law. Instead, he was sentenced him to life in prison. The last thing the government needed was a martyr.

They got one anyway.

He entered prison on Robbyn Island – a former leper colony – at the age of 44. He was 71 by the time he was freed.

In the interim, his had become the face of the struggle for human rights and against the racist apartheid system that denied blacks – who made up 80 percent of South Africa’s population – any say in that country’s government, or rights under its regime.

“Free Nelson Mandela” became a rallying cry around the world and, by the mid 1980s, his imprisonment had come to stand as a symbol for oppression everywhere. The attention made South Africa an international pariah. The nation faced economic sanctions from corporations which, under pressure from increasingly vocal shareholders, withdrew their investments, and many musicians and entertainers refused to play the country’s Sun City resort.

But the issue hit a little closer to home than that, even.

Racism was a topic our country knew a little something about, and the question of whether pension funds and college endowment portfolios should divest their holdings in companies that did business in South Africa became a topic of intense national discussion. Shantytowns meant to mimic the living conditions of South Africa’s blacks sprang up on college campuses around the country as a protest. It was national news when, in 1986, a group of conservative Dartmouth College students opposed to the protests staged a 3 a.m. sneak attack and tore down the shanties on the green in Hanover.

In the end, the pressure became too much for the South African government to bear and Nelson Mandela became too big for any prison to hold.

When he walked free in 1990 after 27 years in prison, it was shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and was one of a series of events that gave the world hope. It was yet another reason to believe, in the words of the great Bob Marley, that “every little thing/ gonna be alright.”

Within a year or so of Mandela’s release came another sign that oppression was loosening its grip on the world and human rights were gaining strength – the Soviet Union collapsed.

Mandela in 1993 shared a Nobel Prize for peace with his former white oppressor, South African President F.W. de Klerk, and the year after that, Mandela himself was chosen his country’s first post-apartheid president when blacks gained control of the government through the nation’s first free elections.

To help heal the country’s wounds, the nation set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a tribunal chaired by the Rev. Bishop Demond Tutu which encouraged those victimized by apartheid to tell their stories, and gave those guilty of human rights abuses a chance to confess and receive amnesty.

That, as much as anything, symbolized what truly set Mandela apart. The thing that everyone marveled at when he ascended to power was his lack of bitterness and his willingness to embrace even those who had mistreated him. They, in turn, embraced him back.

We should all leave such a legacy.

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