Former San Francisco Mayor Willie brown recalls his childhood, education and civil rights.

This is Willie Brown, and I was born in a very small town in a place called Mineola, Texas. And at the time of my early childhood, there was still separate - but so-called equal - schools. I went to a little schoolhouse that had six rooms, two grades per room, which means that half the time in school, you had to just sit and remain quiet while they taught the other grade, of which you were not a part of. It was a great learning experience, though, because you were able, literally, to do two grades a year, if you really paid close attention. But, in the end, that little school did not qualify me to enter Stanford University, because I graduated from high school, came to California with the intentions of going to Stanford and becoming a math teacher.

That's when I fully realized that separate but equal was unequal; that I had been shunted aside by this crazy nation, and given a second-grade education - a second-class education, or a second-tier education. So, when I got to California, I literally had to start all over. Fortunately for me, as is the case in America, a really talented counselor who worked as a teacher at S.F. State, but he did a counseling job at Stanford, steered me away from a clear, non-admissibility provision at Stanford, to the first, maybe, beneficiary of Affirmative Action, in 1951. I got into San Francisco State without passing the entrance exam, because I was sponsored by this kindly, white, doctor of psychology, Duncan Gillies.

And of course, the rest is history. I graduated, went on to law school. But the early years were really very, very tough, as I reflect upon them.

In Mineola, you actually had to step off the streets, far away enough from where the cars were in the roadways, because white people driving along, in many cases, would deliberately come as close as they could. I don't know whether they intended to hit you or not, but they loved to see you jump. And believe me, many of us stayed as far away from the roadway as possible, because sometimes, we're not able to jump and when we were hit, we were just hit, and nobody would do anything about it.

I remember going to the store - a place called Spates - with my grandmother, Anna Lee. And at that time, Anna Lee was considered kind of a crazy woman. If you are black in the South and you defied the rules and regulations and the mores of discrimination, you were considered a little crazy; and particularly, if you were really old. And Madeah [?], as we called her, Anna Lee Collins, was really old. She's the woman that raised me, as was the case with many of the kids in Mineola. And Madeah was really tough. She was so tough it was incredible. She would tell anybody off - white or black, it didn't matter to her. She was kind of a pistol-packing woman. I remember her shooting a chicken that had attacked my brother - a rooster attacked my brother. She got her gun and shot that rooster. I remember her threatening to shoot some other people.

So, my grandmother was a little crazy, so white people didn't mess with her. I remember one great occasion when I was with her at the store, and she looked at some meat and the meat was really moldy-looking, and what-have-you, and she asked - Mr. Spates was his name - Hey, Spates, what will you take for that meat? And he told her some outrageous number and she looks at him and she says, You're right, you'd have to take it - nobody's gonna pay you for that. Those are the kinds of things that my grandmother would do, which kind of gave me some courage to be equally as defiant - except I didn't know that I was running the risk of real retaliation if I was defiant.

Fortunately for me, by the time I was old enough to be a threat defiant-wise, I was already in California. My experience in California was dramatically different. I got a good shot at a public education in San Francisco State University; graduated from Hastings, University of California, Law School.

And then, I got married, and 'lo and behold, discrimination visited itself again in a very dramatic fashion. My wife, Blanche, and her girlfriend, Everett Brandon's wife, went up to look at a house on Forest Hills - Forest Knolls. It was called Sunstream Homes. And the people showing the houses at that time saw them coming, and they abandoned the model home. And of course, my wife, being the person that she is, immediately called me and I told her, Don't move - stay right there. And we, of course, alerted the press, and the first demonstration of a sit-in demonstration in San Francisco occurred, generated because they wouldn't show my wife a home. It's how I met Dianne Feinstein, who ultimately became the Mayor, and then a U.S. Senator. It's how I met lots of people who were activists and advocates in the NAACP and the Council for Civic Unity - all right here in San Francisco, making a statement that this was not a city where you could discriminate and survive.

And that was dramatically different from what I had experienced in the South, and in Mineola, because black people had no rights that could not be eroded; black people had no access to resources that could not be taken away. But, in San Francisco, it was different. As the world unfolded in San Francisco, however, it became clear that that one, little act of defiance by Blanche and her girlfriend, as she created this opportunity for a demonstration, it translated into a Fair Housing Ordinance, passed here in San Francisco, with the NAACP's blessings. It ultimately led to my participating in the Sheraton Palace Hotel demonstrations, where hundreds of people got arrested, trying to integrate the hotels for work purposes. Auto Row - the same way.

And then ultimately, graduated into the antiwar movement, almost consistent with how Martin Luther King, Jr., did it. He went from being a church-inspired activist, operating in Montgomery, Alabama, all throughout the South; and then ultimately, ended up being a strong advocate for peace, worldwide. Well, I ended up the same way. I ended up being a part of a demonstration at the University of California with Mario Savio, involving a whole antiwar movement and the whole student movement. I ended up at San Francisco State, dealing with the issues of the business of what happens with black students who are there, when the black student union was formed and when black studies was to be advocated. All of this happened in a very short timeframe of less than 30 years.

Believe me, in America, the black experience can probably be replicated by almost every black, at least if they recall their history, the way I recall...