Former San Francisco Board Supervisor Bevan Dufty ’73 moved to Menlo Park from New York City in November of his junior year. “My mom wasn’t sure how she was going to pay for me to go to college at an East Coast school, so she got a job at Stanford University and we moved out here so I could qualify for in-state tuition at a UC,” he said.
One of the first things he did after arriving in Menlo Park was buy a tricycle. “I never learned how to ride a bicycle, and I didn’t take driver’s ed because the all-boys prep school I was at didn’t have it. My mom didn’t know how to drive either,” he said. “I had probably been in five private automobiles before I moved.”
“On my first day at M-A, I rode in and didn’t even lock it,” he recalled. “I knew nobody in their right mind would want the tricycle.”
Dufty later learned to drive and spent his weekends going to Round Table Pizza, which was founded in Menlo Park, and watching blaxploitation films in San Francisco. “Once I got over the shock of moving, I had a lot of fun,” Dufty said.
“No issue was too small” for Dufty to speak out about at M-A, earning him the senior superlative of ‘most radical.’ He advocated to change the prom theme song from “Colour My World” by Chicago to “Love Train” by The O’Jays, resulting in a meeting with the Leadership committee.
He also organized with other students to keep a teacher who was going to be laid off. “The school was going to lay off Jake Carter, the only black teacher that they had, in 1973. We had a protest and closed down the principal’s office. We got on Channel Four News and they brought him back for the following school year,” he said. “I was always stirring the pot, so to speak.”
Dufty’s interest in politics goes back to his childhood. His mom, Maely Dufty Lewis, was a civil rights activist.
Maely ran a voting rights storefront for people of all ages to improve their reading comprehension to pass the literacy test required to vote. Dufty spent the summer of 1964 there. “It was very moving to me to see these individuals who came forward and said they couldn’t read,” he said.
Later that summer, Dufty accompanied his mom to the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. “I thought a lot about what it would be like to be the person that people believe in and who can change things for other people’s lives and their families,” he said.
After graduating from M-A, Dufty studied political science at UC Berkeley. “My tuition was $212.64 per quarter. It was crazy how cheap it was. And still, my checks often bounced. I came to appreciate years later that my mom just picked us up and moved us to this suburb. It was a big sacrifice on her part to make that all work out, and I had a great experience,” he said.
At Berkeley, Dufty was appointed to fill a vacancy on the student senate and later elected as co-president of the student body.
For Dufty, working in Berkeley’s student government brought real experience and prepared him for a career in politics. “We had employees who worked for us, and we set their salaries,” he recalled.
Dufty worked on affirmative action with the UC regents to help underrepresented students take the classes they needed to qualify for the guaranteed UC acceptance that comes with being in the top 12.5% of one’s class.
Strict racial quotas were later ruled unconstitutional in the 1978 Supreme Court of California case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. “Sometimes the problem is that the way the goal is good, but the execution is not as solid as it should be. The Bakke decision really swept aside a lot of student affirmative action work,” he said.
Dufty also went to Washington, D.C., to lobby for student financial aid as a part of the National Student Lobby.
The summer after his junior year, Dufty interned with former Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to be elected to Congress.
“She offered me a job, ironically, because she never learned how to drive,” he said. “Most of the staff were women with kids and husbands and boyfriends and things like that. By the end of the summer, Mrs. Chisholm said, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do without you.’”
Dufty was hired as a staff assistant and promised he “would go back to school a year later,” he said. “It was the job of my dreams. If I could stay there, I wanted to do that.” He was promoted to senior legislative assistant after two years with Chisholm.
Dufty finished his degree at Berkeley in 1989. “I was probably not the greatest student, but everything that I did built into my career,” he said.
When Chisholm was approaching retirement in 1979, Dufty interviewed with former Congressman Julian Dixon. “I went to interview at the Washington Hilton Hotel,” he recalled. “I was not a drinker, and I had three gin and tonics. It was a two-hour interview, I was like, ‘How am I doing this?’”
Dufty was hired as Dixon’s chief legislative assistant. “I say that he’s the dad I never had. My dad wasn’t really in my life, and I worked for Julian for 10 years. He molded me a lot,” Dufty said.
Under Dixon, Dufty worked on the Los Angeles rail system, or Metro. “We were in the very early stages of trying to get funding from the federal government. One of the challenges for us was that President Ronald Reagan said that he was going to kill the L.A. subway project,” Dufty said.
After over a year of stalled progress, Dufty proposed an amendment to the omnibus bill the project was included in that would require then Secretary of Transportation Elizabeth Dole to sign the funding grant agreement for the project before she could access other federal funding for travel. “The White House was furious, but we got the full funding grant agreement signed,” he remembered. “Politics can be ugly.”
Another big project Dufty recalled was preventing the International Monetary Fund from giving money to South Africa during apartheid. “It came out in the dead of night that the IMF provided a $1.6 billion loan to the government of South Africa. It was like, ‘Wait a minute, you didn’t ask them how much money they are spending for this apparatus of apartheid,” he said.
Dixon, along with other Black Caucus members and Republicans, voted against the sanctions bill. “I’m proud of the fact that we didn’t let the apartheid government off the hook,” he said.
Dufty then worked for the Los Angeles Metro Agency. “Being on the staff side of politics taught me what makes things work,” he said. “I look at politics like going to prom. You have to go to the movies, study together, and do things to build a relationship. Being a lobbyist, you need a pulse of what politicians are worried about, what their constituents are telling them, and so forth.”
Later, following his partner at the time to San Francisco, Dufty thought he was “getting out of politics.” After a call from an old friend in the Berkeley student senate, however, Dufty began working on Susan Leal’s campaign for the SF Board of Supervisors. “Three months after I got to San Francisco, she was named supervisor. That started a 30-year career in City Hall,” he said.
Dufty served as the director of Neighborhood Services under Willie Brown before running for the Board of Supervisors. “It was a very challenging election, and a lot of people thought that I couldn’t win,” he said. “My response to that was I watched Legally Blonde 10 times during the course of the campaign. I’m a big Legally Blonde fan.”
During his campaign, Dufty added the graphic symbol his mom used in her community newspaper to his yard signs. “She was so in my corner and really believed in me,” he said. Maely passed away in 1984.
Dufty was elected as District 8 Board Supervisor in 2002. “I always call it the job of a lifetime,” he said. “Going from being a staff person to being the front person made me appreciate why it’s so important for politicians to be out and about.”
When he helped open a laundromat, Dufty recalled doing a load of laundry at the ceremony instead of cutting a ribbon. “I try to have a light sense of humor,” he said. “I’m always looking for things that connect with people and make them happy, or show compassion if they’ve had a loss.”
Dufty’s next gig was director of Housing Opportunity, Partnerships, and Engagement, or HOPE, under then Mayor Ed Lee. There, he would start the first navigation center, a “short-term interim housing program designed to act as a safety net” that’s open to people with pets and possessions. “People don’t always want to stay at shelters. Their stuff gets stolen, and it’s very prison-like,” he said about the motivation to create navigation centers.
He also created a system for telephone reservations for shelter beds so that people didn’t have to wait in lines at night.
Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART, was his next project. “I felt that BART was not addressing the problems of homelessness, addiction, and mental illness in the system. It was becoming very New York: people were kind of afraid, and the statistics were not good,” Dufty said.
After winning a seat on the Transit Board in 2016, Dufty spearheaded an ambassador program, where law enforcement without weapons and crisis intervention specialists could intervene before armed officers. “Most people who are homeless or mentally ill or addicted have had negative interactions with law enforcement officers, and so putting them in the position where in order to get assistance, you have to engage with a cop is just not great,” he said.
“I feel really good about what I was part of for the past eight years, and there’s just been such a great culture that has developed at BART,” Dufty said. He now serves as a commissioner on San Francisco’s Homelessness Oversight Commission.
Dufty’s advice for current M-A students: “Always aim high.”
To those interested in politics: “At its core, politics is about helping people. Shirley Chisholm had a quote I love: ‘People have to do what people have to do.’ Sometimes people will do or say things that I may disagree with, but the reality is that I don’t have control over them. I only have control over myself and how I respond.”
