Willie on Willie, In His Words
“The single biggest challenge I faced as mayor was simply trying to get things done.”

I’m Willie Brown. My father, an earlier Willie, wouldn’t tolerate any other name, or he’d damn me for life. I was born in a little place called Minneola, Texas, about 80 miles southeast of Dallas, where life was simply miserable. If I had the pleasure to sentence Charlie Manson, I’d send him to Minneola for 17 years. The foundation for everything I do today stems from those times I served hard labor without ever having committed a crime.

My parents gave nothing because they had nothing. And my dad was never a dad. He never slept in our house in my entire life. My mother was a maid and a cook in another city, who worked for something far less than minimum wage. But she sent it all back home. My grandmother was a wily entrepreneur who sold bootleg hooch. She made sure that in her “acquisition of resources” she always gave to the church. She fed everyone who needed to be fed. That was the way poor people took care of each other—and that was the foundation of my sense of generosity.

I arrived in San Francisco August 4, 1951, at the behest of my uncle. The second day I was here, he told me to walk, walk, walk—and to learn everything about the City. San Francisco became my home as if I had been born here. It remains so to this day.

I attended San Francisco State University and then went on to the University of California. I actually went to law school to avoid the draft. I was a member of the Air Force ROTC but was determined not to go to war. At the time, I realized that the law stuff would be a good place to hide.

When I graduated, I got a job with a federal judge who died before I got my first paycheck, so I had to scramble to try to do something. I went over to the Fillmore, which was a black part of the city. I rented a space from a practicing lawyer who was a rabid NAACP advocate and I started representing hookers. I didn’t know I was really doing civil rights work, but I knew it seemed unconstitutional to arrest only Blacks. Then every hooker and pimp in town decided they wanted to hire me. So here I am in the midst of a major civil rights movement working on behalf of my own pocketbook. In the end, though, my work was on behalf of a good cause.

I began protesting without fully appreciating and organizing. I realized that I had a little bit of a gift. Maybe a little more brain power than most. So I set about making sure that there would be the same resources for black kids as for white kids in terms of education. That effort became the catalyst for my focus on civil rights.

It’s very difficult to say what would be the biggest accomplishment in the 40 years I spent in the world of decision-making and the exercise of power. I would say, however, that participating in the effort to remove apartheid in South Africa and freeing Nelson Mandela would have to rank way up there. There was also work that I did to change the nature of the prosecution of same-sex acts that I think that remains the foundation of the gay rights movement in this nation.

The single biggest challenge I faced as mayor was simply trying to get things done in a city where you’re not expected to. We’re incredibly liberal and progressive, but we’re plagued with a virus called “process.” As mayor, you’ve got to fix the Muni. You’ve got to get the ballpark done. You’ve got to get Mission Bay done. The challenge was always to make believers out of people that results could be achieved.

I don’t really think that I have experienced any real dark days in my political career, except for my personal feelings when George Moscone and Harvey Milk were assassinated by Dan White. On that day I was trying a case in City Hall. That’s the time that I would identify as the worst period of my 40 years of exposure to the political process. I didn’t think the city ever would or could recover. In reality, it never did.

Since leaving public office, I’ve created the Willie Brown Institute on Public Policy and Politics. The role of this institute is to produce more [San Francisco Mayor] Gavin Newsoms. We’re working to shape public policy on issues ranging from health care to free investment. The ultimate goal is to, finally and hopefully, produce somebody who’ll continue the work of the institute as well as the things that I’ve done in politics when I pass on.

Willie Brown appears this week on OUT Spoken Friday, Saturday & Sunday.