**My entire career and life has been devoted to the proposition that while one person is unfree, so am I, so are we all.
**In spring of 1960, I organized students to do picketing of Woolworths in Chicago, in sympathy with the Sit-Ins in the South.
**In June, 1961, I was a Freedom Rider, arrested in Jackson, and was incarcerated for 40 days, in Parchman Prison, the Hinds County Jail, and Jackson City Jail. Then I bailed out, and later my conviction was reversed.
**Returning to school, during 1961-1964 I organized the University of Chicago Law School chapter of the Law Students Civil Rights Research Council (LSCRRC), sending internes to the South during the summer and producing research back-up for civil rights lawyers in the South.
**In 1964, I became the first full-time intern for LSCRRC in the law offices of African-American Civil Rights Attorney Floyd Bixler McKissick, McKissick & Burke, in Durham, NC.
**In 1965 and for the next five years or so, I worked in the Office of Economic Opportunity programs for Legal Services for the Poor, in Oakland, CA, in Delano, CA (with Cesar Chavez's Farmworkers organizing efforts), and elsewhere. During these years, I spent part of each summer in the South, either Mississippi or Louisiana, with the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee (LCDC).
**After 1973, I worked on the rights of jail inmates, and in the women's movement, and the movement for the rights of gays, Native Americans, the disabled, and other movements.
**In 1975 I began my political career, and from 1977 to 1989 was elected to three terms as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. I ran unsuccessfully for congress in 1996, and after paying off my deficit, retired from politics.
**In 2001 I organized a 40th Reunion in Jackson, Mississippi of the 1961 Freedom Riders.
**In 2004 I attended the 40th Memorial Service in Neshoba County, Mississippi, for the three civil rights workers slain in 1963, Chaney, Goodman & Schwerner.
Copyright © 2004-2007
Last Modified: October 29, 2007.
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