Willie Brown (1934- )
In 1964, Willie Lewis Brown, Jr. became the fourth African American elected to the California State Assembly and the first African American Speaker of the Assembly, and the longest serving Speaker of the Assembly, during his 16-year tenure.
Born amidst segregation in Texas in 1934, Brown moved to California as a teenager, working his way through college and graduating from San Francisco State College and University of California Hastings College of Law.
Among Brown’s many legislative interests that included civil rights, urban development, education, and public health and safety, Brown was a devoted advocate for the queer community, creating landmark legislation for the LGBTQ community in California with AB 479 in 1975. Brown also played a crucial role in significantly increasing California’s HIV/AIDS research funding in the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s. The same year that Brown retired from the Assembly in 1995, he also became the first African American elected as Mayor of San Francisco, a position that he held for nearly a decade after serving two terms.
In addition to his impactful political career, Brown became somewhat of an iconic figure lauded for the poised fashion sense he brought to public appearances. He has made several onscreen appearances in American television and movies, often playing himself as Mayor of San Francisco, as he did in the films George of the Jungle and The Princess Diaries. In 2013, Brown’s legacy was further memorialized in popular culture when the western span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was renamed in his honor.
