Candidate for
United States Representative; District 44

This is not a "full" biography, as most of the incidents in my 56 years would bore the reader to tears. The highlights given on my Smartvoter page give a general idea of some of my experiences and background that are relevant to my candidacy for Congress.

Let me just tell you a little about my early life so that you can understand my point of view, and what motivates me.

I was born in 1950 in Riverside, then a town of about 50,000 souls. When I was less than one year old, my parents bought a modest house on Date Street on the Eastside. My father worked at the Salinity Lab of the US Department of Agriculture (then at the foot of Mount Rubidoux), where his low pay would not see a raise all through the Republican administration of 1953-1961. Meanwhile, the family grew. I was the fourth son, and two daughters and another son were born in 1952, 1955 and 1959. By the end of the 1950s, with frozen low federal wages and a growing family, we were getting hungry. This was in the days before food stamps, and when I say "hungry" I mean that we actually had no food for a day or two before the biweekly paydays. Hunger is no fun, and hearing a mother cry because she has no food to give her children is a terrible sound.

During the 1950s the neighborhood was "turned" by the local real estate interests, back when housing discrimination was legal. My parents, who absolutely rejected racism, stayed on the Eastside while almost all our white neighbors moved. Many of our new neighbors were refugees from the Deep South, who came to Riverside to escape racist oppression and poverty. They found segregated schools and low-paying jobs, a step up from what they were escaping, but not enough. Most of our other new neighbors were Mexican-Americans with a family history of farm labor. I remember whole families piling in trucks, leaving only the very youngest children home with one older woman, and going off to the fields for a week or two at a time to work.

In 1961, carrying out its unwritten policy of school segregation, the Riverside Unified School District built Alcott School to serve the white families on the south side of the Tequesquite Arroyo. Lowell School, the year I went to sixth grade, had two or three white families left. The school's resources were considerably depleted. Old textbooks were used, and the new ones went to the while schools. Conditions at Lowell, as at the other minority schools, became worse over the next couple of years. By 1965 people on the Eastside had had enough, and a successful rebellion led to positive change. My parents were involved, I am proud to say.

When Kennedy was elected in 1961, he carried out his promises to improve the conditions of federal workers. My family was able to eat every day by the end of the year, and we even received medical insurance (signing up with Kaiser Permanente). Many of our neighbors also benefitted from the new federal policies, that resulted in slight increases in the minimum wage and in welfare payments. Pat Brown was governor, and he also was less hostile to the poor than his predecessor. Meanwhile, the civil rights movement became a national phenomenon, and in 1964 I (at 14) joined the newly-formed Riverside chapter of CORE, and helped picket stores that would not hire Blacks. 1964 was also the year I attended my first peace demonstration, the Hiroshima Day rally in Los Angeles. (Hiroshima Day happens to be my birthday.)

The 1965 Riverside school boycott was a very exciting experience for me, as for many students I knew. After weeks of organizing, the boycott took only one day to make a huge difference. At the school board meeting that night, the Board voted to integrate the schools. The plan was not perfect, but victory was sweet, and it let to some very good results. Riverside is one of the least segregated of American cities today, a big step forward from the rigid segregation of 1965. This is largely because it is impossible to move to any neighborhood where the schools are not integrated, so the most common motive for racist parents to pick a particular neighborhood was no longer relevant.

I believe it was in early 1966 that I helped organize a peace demonstration that included an overnight vigil on the steps of the County Courthouse. I became more and more active in the movement to end the Vietnam War, and during 1967 I helped in the big organizing drive that led to qualifying the Peace and Freedom Party for the ballot.

It would be easy for me to go on and on about my political activities and personal life, but why should you have to suffer through that? I am going to skip from 1967 to 2006, to tell you that today I am married to Margie Akin (for 33 years), have four adult children (Alexander, Jeremiah, Isaiah and Shushannah), and two granddaughters (Ruby and Ella). After 38 years of work as a carpenter, steelworker and steam engineer, I have just retired. For more information, just ask me. -Kevin Akin