Candidate for
Mayor; City of Oakland

Dan Siegel is a small business owner & civil rights attorney whose lifetime of experiences makes him a strong leader.

He was born in the Bronx & attended high school on Long Island. Always a fighter & organizer, he led successful demonstrations against school budget cuts & spoke out for civil rights & against the war in Vietnam.

In college, Siegel joined the Congress on Racial Equality & fought against employment discrimination in upstate New York. In 1965, he joined activists defying the Ku Klux Klan to register African American voters in the South. After graduating magna cum laude, he moved to Boston to work briefly as a newspaper reporter before moving West to attend U.C. Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law in 1967.

Siegel became a high profile leader at Cal, heading the Vietnam Moratorium & Campus Draft Opposition & organizing support for the 3rd World Strike. Students responded by electing him overwhelmingly as campus student body president.

Siegel entered private practice in 1973. His storefront community law collective in the Fruitvale District specialized in employment discrimination, labor law, & civil rights litigation.

In 1991, Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris appointed Siegel to the board of the scandal-plagued Oakland Housing Authority where he led efforts to resolve problems created by corrupt security officers & poor maintenance. He convened OHA staff and residents to improve living conditions in over 11,000 housing units. His leadership helped elevate the OHA to one of the most respected housing authorities in the U.S., leading to its receipt of over $90 million in federal funds for its innovative tenant & housing modernization programs.

Siegel served as Vice Chair of the City's Community Policing Task Force. He helped draft the City Ordinance that remains the blueprint for community policing in Oakland.

Serving on the Oakland School Board from 1999 to 2006, Dan led efforts to hire Superintendent Dennis Chaconas, raise teacher pay, & create new, small autonomous schools in the District.

Dan Siegel & his wife Anne Weills have lived in East Oakland since 1975. They have 2 sons and 2 grandsons. Chris Scheer is a teacher at Skyline High. Former teacher Michael Siegel is a civil rights attorney.