Although he has no direct control over San Francisco's public schools, Willie Lewis Brown Jr., then the newly elected mayor, was the person the students believed could help them save their principal and two assistant principals. 

Unaware of the situation, Brown emerged from his police-chaffeured Lincoln Town car and delivered an impromptu speech, explaining to the students they had come to the wrong place to gripe. 

But Brown did not just turn the students away. He marched them several blocks to the schools administration offices. The students were pleased with their newfound hero, chanting We love you, Willie, as he led the parade. 

Still, school administrators rebuffed the students' attempts to see them. 
So, Brown made a surprise visit to the school board meeting later that evening. 
We can no longer make decisions for people, Brown told the school board members and school administrators. We have to make decisions with people. How important it is for young people to be identified in that process.  

Brown's lesson in community relations was not lost on the school board. The school officials met with students the next week to explain why they were moving their favorite principal. 

Young people at every age must be given an opportunity to be heard, Brown says . They must also be given the opportunity to listen, be fully informed of every single solitary reason and policy that is made.  

The performance was classic Willie Brown, the consummate politician, seizing opportunity, championing the underdog, forcing inclusiveness and showing the force of power and the ability to make things happen that got him elected mayor in December 1995.

If life were fair, Willie Lewis Brown Jr. should not be sitting in San Francisco's seat of power, listening to citizens complain about their trash not being picked up, cutting a ribbon for a ground breaking of a youth center, and then, dashing off to meet with disgruntled affordable housing advocates. 

Brown, San Francisco's first Black mayor, should be in Sacramento wielding influence and running the California Assembly, where he was elected to 16 two-year terms by the city's voters. 

He was such a powerhouse in the Assembly raising money and distributing it to Democratic candidates throughout the state that his peers elected him Speaker of the Assembly. He held the post for more than 14 years, longer than anyone in California history. 

But the mood of the voters sent Brown packing in 1995. Mind you, it was not San Francisco voters who put him out, but the state's voters who supported a ballot initiative limiting the number of terms a person could serve. 

It was the only way gleeful Republicans could get rid of the California Democratic Party's chief fundraiser, power mogul and political strategist. 

But in leaving the Assembly, Brown has found new ground upon which to romp and conquer and he's fallen in love with the nation's most beautiful city all over again.

This is the best job I've ever had, he repeatedly says, since he defeated the incumbent mayor in a December 1995 runoff election by a margin of 57 percent to 43 percent. 
Brown, a lawyer by trade but a politician's politician in actuality, has held numerous jobs in his 63 years, including janitor, playground director, fry cook, shoeshine boy and field worker. 

I picked berries. I picked watermelons. I picked potatoes. I picked beans. I picked cotton, Brown says. Berries were the worst. It's hot, you have to put your hand into the briar patch, and it's laced with snakes, and you have to carry then in wooden lugs.  

Not a day goes by when he doesn't remember his humble beginnings in Mineola, Texas, a small, segregated town in the eastern part of the state. 

He often talks about shining shoes and having to fish the quarters he earned out of a spittoon. Brown graduated from the all-Black high school, an education he often equates with about a tenth-grade schooling. He left Mineola as fast as he could once he completed high school. But the mayor of San Francisco carries no visible traces of having grown up poor in a Cotton Curtain town. He sports expensive Italian suits, often topped with a Borsalino hat, dines at the most upscale restaurants, often with a stunning woman on his arm, has driven the fanciest sports cars, and wields power like it belonged to him all along. 

Among his fans, of which I count myself, he's one of the most astute politicians in American today, says Julian Bond, a former Georgia legislator who now teaches civil rights history. 

But Bond's view is not the only one that characterizes San Francisco's wildly popular but controversial mayor. 

The participatory democracy in San Francisco has ended, complains Arthur Bruzzone, chairman of the San Francisco Republican Party. We have submerged into what is basically a dictatorship. 

Brown is doing the old-fashioned, Tammany Hall-style politics, Bruzzone adds. Everybody's afraid of him. Nobody will talk. These are the old political machine tactics.  

Brown, indeed, runs a tight-lipped ship. He likes to be the one to break the news. He hates leaks and cherishes loyalty. 

When he arrived at city Hall during the first few days of his administration, he made it clear to staffers in a meeting that if he saw their names [as sources] in the newspaper he would consider it their resignation. 

He targeted for firing several department heads including the honchos of the Municipal Railway and the Housing Authority, both of whom were Black. 

But since Brown has been in office, he has made city government look more like the people who live in San Francisco. 

On inauguration day, he named the city's first Asian-American police chief, promoted a Black detective to assistant police chief, named a Black man who had sued the fire department for discrimination to head it, and filled commissions with women, non-whites and young people under 35. 

Since then he has named a Black man to head the city's Planning Department, another to run the recreation and parks department, and a Latino man, who was his chief of staff, to oversee the Municipal Railway. 

Brown says he wants to put in place the next generation of leadership in San Francisco.  

On his staff, Brown has hired Brajah Norris, a 25-year-old African-American political science major who attended Fisk University and graduated from Southern Illinois University. Norris grew up a crime-troubled youth in the city's southeast corridor. But 
Norris always did well in school despite his brushes with the Law. 

Norris says his job at City Hall is the best learning experience I've ever had.  

There's not a day that goes by without me learning something new, says Norris. Dealing with him personally is challenging. There's an aura about him that can be intimidating. I've learned his style and roll with the punches.... But I was determined to make him proud of me.  

Also on his staff is a 23-year-old Black woman, Naomi Little, who graduated from New York University with a degree in psychology and plans to go to law school as her mentor, the mayor, did. Little was hired after she wrote a compelling letter to Brown, enclosing a picture that was taken when she was in high school of herself and the then Assembly speaker. In her letter, she asked him to autograph the picture if he didn't give her a job. 
She was hired for her writing ability and is on the fast track, according to mayor aides. She works in the mayor's Office of Community Development as his liaison to several neighborhoods. 

I'm learning officepolitics, says Little. How to deal, how to survive in an office, who to trust, who not to trust, how to keep your mouth shut and every once in awhile, strategy. 
He puts you in touch with the right people to learn strategy. I want to learn the art of making a deal, she says with youthful wide-eyed enthusiasm. 

Brown says both Norris and Little would make excellent public policy administrators, but first, they must seek graduate or professional degrees. 

I would think that my level of accomplishment can be duplicated, says Brown of young African Americans seeking political careers. They can't use the same route or technique I used. They must monitor the situation as it exists. But simple replication of what I have done is not furthering the agenda. There is still plenty of room for firsts.

Brown advises young Black men and women who want to pursue careers in public services or elective politics to get maximum credentials before venturing into the rough and tumble world of politics. 

Get a doctoral degree that will equip you to have an independent income producing activity, he says, adding, One that will allow you to be independent and free of any employment obligation.  

Brown says young Black men and women have advantages today that were not available to him at a comparable age. Those who seek political careers must get involved in political clubs, the social scene, social causes and maintain a history free of any hint of improper conduct of any nature whatsoever.  

For entry purposes, Brown says the best fields for young college graduates to seek employment are in law enforcement administration or as a prosecutor. 
You instantly overcome one of the realities of race in this nation, he says. If you are a person of color, you are suspected of being part of the problem. In that rarified air, say in the District Attorney's office or at the police captain level, you overcome that.  

Brown cited as examples Tom Bradley, a former police officer, who became mayor of Los Angeles and just an eyelash from being elected governor and the current mayor of Baltimore, Kurt Schmoke, a former state's attorney.

Brown began his professional career in 1958, after graduating from Hastings School of Law in San Francisco, as a criminal defense attorney. He took cases defending pimps, prostitutes, petty thieves and gamblers the ones high-powered attorneys would not take. 

He gained fame when he led a sit-in protesting racial housing discrimination in 1960. He ran for the Assembly in 1962 and lost to the incumbent by 600 votes. 

Two years later he was back running for the assembly seat. This time he won it, and proceeded to win it 15 consecutive times. In the process, Brown chaired the influential Ways and Means committee and then, in 1980, he won the speakership. 

State Senator Barbara Lee, who served in the assembly when Brown was speaker, says Brown was great role model and excellent leader. 

One of his true assets is he listens to other people, she says. 

Lee remembers Brown conducting Democratic caucus meetings, during which he listened to everybody and allowed the discussion to go on. You can feel the dynamism around the process, allowing for consensus to be built. There was no good or bad, right or wrong. He deals with what makes sense and what doesn't make sense. 

And that's how he was able to be a great (Assembly) speaker people felt they were a part of the speakership, Lee says. 

Brown listens, but he acts on his own volition. 

He's not afraid to have strong people around him, says Rudy Nothenberg, one of the Mayor's most trusted friends. He's not afraid to ignore them either. Both of them are strengths.  

Mayor Brown never one to suppress his ego has also put San Francisco back as a place of destination, touting the city as fun and exciting and making its residents believe it, too. 

Willie Brown understands what mayor's are supposed to do, says former San Francisco supervisor Harry Britt, now a political science instructor at New College of California. 

Willie understands that politics is a process of creation, Britt says. He realizes he has to create a city, as Franklin Roosevelt created a nation during the Depression. He's creating a romantic view of what the city is. 

To labor people, it's a labor town; to gay people, it's an international mecca; to immigrants, it's a city that's welcoming and tolerant. That's the creation in our minds, when in reality, we still have gay bashing; we still have bigotry; we still have bad business practices, Britt says. 

Willie Brown has been able to create a romantic image for the people, he says. 

But Brown also has brought new thinking to chronic urban problems. He is determined to bring about city health coverage for the poor and homeless, a program he says will save the city money because currently emergency health care is the most expensive health expenditure. He is battling the federal government to allow military housing on the Presidio, a former military installation that has been turned over to the city, to be used for low-income housing in the most expensive real estate market in the nation. He hosted the U.S. Conference of Mayors in June, using his clout to draw President Clinton and Vice President Gore, as well as other cabinet members, to San Francisco. 

None of this might have happened if the state's voters had not decided to send Brown back to San Francisco. 

Without term limits, I would have never left the powerful position of Speaker of the Assembly, says Brown. Which means the array of skills I now exhibit wouldn't have been utilized. Single decision making and the quality of that would have remained unknown. 

The legislature is not a single decision-making body, in spite of titles, Brown says. The mayor's decision is a single decision-making process. It's yours and yours alone.