Lateefah Simon – A Commitment to Advocating for Civil Rights

A civil rights advocate, Lateefah Simon was named as one of the five most influential Bay Area Black activists by SF Weekly in 2018. Her name and story deserve greater recognition beyond the region, since she also embodies the passionate and ceaseless striving for fairness and equality. She represents a uniquely American and quintessentially Bay Area success story.

Simon, the president of the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) board of directors for 2020, was initially elected to serve a term beginning in November 2016. Subsequently, she won re-election in 2020. She represents District 7, which encompasses large parts of the East Bay (including portions of Berkeley and Oakland) and parts of San Francisco.

Long before leading the BART board, Simon earned nationwide praise for her civil rights advocacy and support for the contemporary movement for racial justice. Starting in her teen years, she has accumulated more than two decades of experience in leadership roles that have given her the chance to promote greater opportunities for Bay Area people of color and other marginalized communities.

Helping other young women

Simon is the youngest woman ever to ever receive a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award. In 2003, the foundation selected the then-26-year-old Simon as a “Genius” fellow based on her work as the executive director of the San Francisco-based Center for Young Women’s Development (now known as the Young Women’s Freedom Center).

Her advocacy for the well-being of young women living on the streets, and her passionate belief that young women need to become the key decision-makers in their own lives, were among the key reasons why she received the MacArthur award. Simon began her advocacy efforts in 1993, when she herself was a teen working at a low-wage job in a fast-food restaurant, fighting to survive so that she would not be forced into life on the streets.

Simon was a driving force behind the development of the peer-to-peer counseling and assistance project known as the Street Survival Outreach Program, which she expanded into the Center for Young Women’s Development. A few years later, while still a teen, she accepted the position of executive director at the new center and would serve in that role for 11 years.

Under her leadership, the center grew its budget to over $1 million and worked with several thousand young women each year. Simon also spearheaded its expansion into violence prevention. Now, the Young Women’s Freedom Center has broadened its reach to include Santa Clara County, Los Angeles, and Oakland.

Bay Area roots

Born and raised in San Francisco’s Fillmore neighborhood, a thriving center of African American life and culture before gentrification shrank the city’s Black population, Simon was a struggling teen mother. She still recalls jumping the BART fare gates, desperate to arrive on time for her job at the local youth radio station.

Nearsighted since birth, Simon is legally blind. She has never able to drive and has always depended on BART for transportation to and from work, as well as to get her daughter to and from school.

Her election to the transportation agency’s board signals a new era in terms of BART’s politics, as forward-looking new members have begun to direct their focus toward promoting equality among all riders during an era that in recent years has seen the board discount youth fares and develop a corps of civilian ambassadors in stations and trains to help keep the peace.

A dedication to ending injustice

Simon was inspired to run for a seat on the BART board in 2016, due to her determination to end the type of injustice that resulted in the death of Oscar Grant in 2009.

The Bay Area case drew national attention after a BART police officer fatally shot Grant in a local BART station in the pre-dawn hours of New Year’s Day. The unarmed 22-year-old African American man died on the station platform.

While the officer who pulled the trigger was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, he served less than a year of prison time. In 2020, the Alameda County District Attorney’s office reopened the case, holding out the possibility that other officers—including one shown on a bystander’s video kneeling on Grant’s neck and uttering racial slurs—could possibly be charged in connection with the death.

Grant’s death remains a painful memory that has mobilized a new generation of socially progressive civic leaders. They include those who, like Simon, have earned a place at the table of an agency previously noted for its focus on route expansions and traditional pro-business, “good government” practices. As the only currently serving African American BART director, the issue that her daughter calls “transportation justice” is central to Simon’s leadership on the board: One of her goals is to bring affordable housing near BART stations and other hubs within the reach of today’s working-class Bay Area residents.

A lifetime of service

In 2010, Caroline Kennedy presented Simon with one of that year’s two John F. Kennedy New Frontier Awards for her work toward solving the problems of discrimination, poverty, and injustice through a commitment to public service.

Moreover, in 2005, then-San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris chose Simon to lead a new city public-private partnership aimed at reducing the possibility that former offenders would return to a life of crime. Working out of the DA’s office, Simon sought to develop the program Back on Track, which blends close monitoring of former offenders with access to educational and career opportunities. That program has lowered the rate of participant recidivism to under 10 percent.

In 2009, Simon became the executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area. This organization speaks up on behalf of people in indigent circumstances, refugees, people of color, and other immigrants. And, as a member of the California State University’s board of trustees, Simon has advised policymakers state-wide on issues related to racial justice.

Simon has also served as the director of California’s Future Program at the Rosenberg Foundation. In this capacity, she initiated the Leading Edge Fund, which was set up to provide seed money, as well as an incubator and accelerator, for incisive concepts brought forward by emerging progressive leaders.

And, since 2016, Simon has served as the president of the Akonadi Foundation. The organization aims to end the criminalization of Black and brown youth in Oakland, striving to make “a Racially Just Oakland” a reality at last.