(CNN) -- When Nelson Mandela stepped out of South Africa's Victor Verster prison a free man 20 years ago Thursday, he was his country's most famous freedom fighter.





Black South Africans and other opponents of apartheid lined streets to see him when he was released, cheering wildly and waving flags. He was a hero, imprisoned for 27 years for the crime of opposing a government that sought to enforce severe segregation laws with brutality.





Once free, Mandela worked with South Africa's white president, F.W. de Klerk to end those policies, knocking down the pillars of segregation one at a time. Three years after his release from prison, Mandela and de Klerk shared the Nobel Peace Prize.





The African National Congress -- once again legal after being banned in 1961 -- elected Mandela as its president, and he won South Africa's presidential election in a landslide in 1994, the country's first black president.





"We dedicate this day to all the heroes and heroines in this country and the rest of the world who sacrificed in many ways and surrendered their lives so that we could be free," he said in his inauguration speech. "Their dreams have become reality. Freedom is their reward. We are both humbled and elevated by the honor and privilege that you, the people of South Africa, have bestowed on us, as the first President of a united, democratic, non-racial and non-sexist government."





And he kept his promise to serve but one term.





Already in prison when convicted of treason in 1964 and given a life sentence, Mandela was a living symbol of the struggle against South Africa's racist apartheid system enacted when he was 30 years old.





But the African National Congress leader fought for justice long before the National Party's 1948 election and subsequent introduction of apartheid. And in his last public words before he was whisked off to jail, Mandela spoke of his own dream.





"I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination," he said. "I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony, and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for, and to see realized. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."





Rolihlahla Mandela was always meant for great things, but his name -- it means "pulling the branch of a tree" or, colloquially "troublemaker," in the Xhosa language -- foreshadowed how that greatness would manifest.





Born into a Thembu royal family -- but the wrong branch to be considered in line for the throne -- Mandela was the first of his family to attend school, where a teacher gave him the name "Nelson." He even went to college but was tossed out at the end of his first year for protesting school policies. And he ran away to Johannesburg, where he finished college and began law studies, to escape an arranged marriage.





But 1948 focused Mandela's life like nothing before. First organizing non-violent resistance to apartheid policies, Mandela and his ANC cohorts were nevertheless hounded -- arrested, beaten, followed, spied upon -- by the government. When the ANC was formally banned in 1961, the group realized that non-violence wasn't working.





"It was only when all else had failed, when all channels of peaceful protest had been barred to us, that the decision was made to embark on violent forms of political struggle," he said in court. " ... the government had left us no other choice."





Prior to his imprisonment, Mandela was anything but a free man, traveling incognito, organizing the business of the African National Congress without having to bring its members together in one place where they would be vulnerable to government action, spending days and weeks away from his family.





Even before his release, Mandela had moved beyond freedom fighter to statesman, a position he still holds despite retiring from public life in 2004 to spend more time with his family. He spoke out for democracy, human rights
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