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.
Search. Nelson Mandela, a leader of the ANC, had been arrested in 1964 and sentenced to life imprisonment. Behind bars on Robben Island he became the symbol of the resistance to apartheid. Free Mandela was a familiar cry worldwide. The apartheid system began to fall apart in the 1980s.