Nelson Mandela, the former South African president who helped end apartheid, died Thursday. He was 95.

Mandela earned respect and praise because he went beyond the African National Congress days of violence to truly advocate for peace, much as MLK did in the 1960s. The difference is that MLK had a national narrative to appeal to, namely “that all men are endowed by their Creator,” but Mandela had no such foundational narrative. In effect, he wrote South Africa’s declaration of Liberty for all people. His 1993 Nobel Prize – shared with his former oppressor, South African President F.W. de Klerk – was earned by both of them.

The Wall Street Journal summed it up: “The bulk of his adult life, Nelson Mandela was a failed Marxist revolutionary and leftist icon, the Che Guevara of Africa. Then in his seventies he had the chance to govern. He chose national reconciliation over reprisal, and he thus made himself an historic and all too rare example of a wise revolutionary leader. … He won the country’s first free presidential elections in 1994 and worked to unite a scarred and anxious nation. He opened up the economy to the world, and a black middle class came to life. After a single term, he voluntarily left power at the height of his popularity. Most African rulers didn’t do that. … Mandela became the biggest of African men by refusing to act like a typical African ‘Big Man.’ He transcended his party’s history of Marxism, tribalism and violence. The continent and world were fortunate to have him.”

Mandela was a symbol of Liberty, which serves as a contrast to our own first black president. Mandela earned his place in the history of advocating for Liberty. Fellow Nobel laureate Obama, on the other hand, has earned nothing, and promotes policies which lead, inevitably, to rule of men not Rule of Law.