Candidate for
United States Senator

WHO IS DUANE?

Duane Roberts is a well-known community activist from Orange County, California who has been involved in a number of important struggles during the past decade. He was born of working-class parents in Burbank in 1967 who relocated to Anaheim for economic reasons in the early 1970s where he has been ever since. As a child, Roberts was mostly home-schooled but later attended a mix of public and private schools, earning a diploma from Fullerton Union High School.

He worked as a typesetter for several years before going back to school, taking classes at Fullerton College before enrolling at the University of California, Irvine. While at UCI, Roberts studied drug policy, white collar and government crime, police behavior and elite deviance and was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in Criminology, Law and Society in 1997.

In November 2000, he ran for one of two seats on the Anaheim Union High School District Board of Trustees, winning approximately 7,129 votes. He was the first Green Party candidate running in a non-partisan race to ever receive the endorsement of the Orange County Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO.

As a community activist, Roberts has been a defender of immigrant rights, a critic of police misconduct and abuse, and has even exposed political corruption. In 2003, he helped organize what then was one of the biggest anti-war demonstrations in Orange County since the Vietnam War at the Richard Nixon Library in Yorba Linda. Roberts has been involved in many demonstrations and marches and has used his extensive knowledge of police behavior to protect the civil rights and liberties of protesters.

Between 2006 and 2008, Roberts was publisher of the Orange Coast Voice, a monthly community newspaper that circulated 15,000 copies in Costa Mesa, Huntington Beach, Fountain Valley and surrounding areas.

He is a longtime member of the Unitarian Universalist Church in Anaheim and has been elected to serve on its Board of Trustees three times.

Roberts is single and has no children.

He still resides in the same working-class neighborhood he grew up in.