Long Beach is part of Los Angeles County. Long Beach has 50.29 square miles of land area and 1.14 square miles of water area. As of 2010, the total Long Beach population is 462,257, which has grown 0.16% since 2000.
It was Nov. 9, 1970, and the prisoner was Nelson Mandela, held on Robben Island for his leading role in planning bomb attacks. A visit to a prison has a significance difficult to put into words, Mandela wrote in a letter to a friend in 1987.
Mandela was captured and jailed in 1962, and in 1964 he was convicted of treason and sentenced to life in prison. He began serving the sentence as prisoner 46664 on Robben Island, near Cape Town, but instead of disappearing from view, Mandela became a prison-bound martyr and worldwide symbol of resistance to racism.