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I lived in an atmosphere where Mama brought 60 Basque refugee children to England during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.

My mother was an activist; so was my father. They came from a generation of young Somalis who were actively involved in getting independence for Somalia in 1960.

My mom, Clida, taught my four brothers and me about her father's work to organize black voters in rural Louisiana in the 1950s. We carried her dad's legacy of activism with us. The Civil Rights Movement was present in the daily life of my family in Detroit in the 1970s.

My mom and dad? Oh, they were a fiery pair. They stayed together for the kids and also because they were hopelessly in love with each other, but they were totally incompatible.

My mother went into the Peace Corps when she was sixty-eight.

Berta Caceres, a Lenca woman, grew up during the violence that swept through Central America in the 1980s. Her mother, a midwife and social activist, took in and cared for refugees from El Salvador, teaching her young children the value of standing up for disenfranchised people.

My mother was very involved with Cesar Chavez's work on behalf of the migrant farm workers in California.

My father was a professor of political science and also a young politician fighting for democracy in Kenya, and when things got ugly, he went into political exile in Mexico.

After the Spanish Civil War against Franco, a group of us got together: a group of well-to-do people who were sympathetic to the lost cause of a Republican state. We bought a convent in Toulouse and converted it into a hospital run by the Unitarians. It took care of the Spanish refugees who fled to Toulouse.

My father is Hungarian and moved to Britain during the uprising, and my Spanish mum comes from Galicia; they moved here at the end of the Fifties.