HONORARY MEMBER

Mayor Ron V. Dellums

Ron V. Dellums currently serves as Oakland's forty-fifth (and third African-American) mayor. From 1971-1998, he was elected to thirteen terms as a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Northern California's 9th Congressional District, which has a Cook PVI of D +37.

Dellums was born into a family of labor organizers, and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps before serving on the Berkeley, California, City Council. Dellums was the first African American elected to Congress from Northern California and the first openly Socialist Congressman since World War II.[2] His politics earned him a place on President Nixon's enemies list.

Dellums has been in politics for over forty years. He has held positions on the Berkeley City Council, in the US House of Representatives, and is the mayor of Oakland, for the term beginning January 1, 2007. He was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1970 after being recruited by anti-Vietnam War activists to run against the incumbent, Jeffery Cohelan, a white liberal close to organized labor who had not opposed the war early enough to win reelection in the district. Dellums defeated Cohelan in the Democratic primary and won the general election, serving without interruption for 27 years.

During his career in Congress, he fought the MX Missile project and opposed expansion of the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber program. When President Ronald Reagan vetoed Dellums' Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, a Democratic-controlled House and a Republican-controlled Senate overrode Reagan's veto, the first override of a presidential foreign policy veto in the 20th century.

Dellums was born in Oakland to Verney and Willa Dellums. He served in the United States Marine Corps from 1954 to 1956. Dellums later received his A.A. degree from the Oakland City College in 1958, his B.A. from the San Francisco State University in 1960, and his M.S.W. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1962. He became a psychiatric social worker and political activist in the African American community beginning in the 1960s. He also taught at the San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley.

Dellums is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first intercollegiate Greek-letter fraternity established for African Americans. He is a member of the fraternity's World Policy Council, a think tank whose purpose is to expand the fraternity's involvement in politics, and social and current policy to encompass international concerns.


This information was taken from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Dellums