From 1965 to 1967, my dad, Jack Gilligan, served in Congress and helped pass landmark laws like the Voting Rights Act.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My father joined our party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did.
When my sister and I came along, my father's political life was completely over. He ran for president the year I was born. So that was the end of it. He had been congressman first, then governor, before all that. So when we came along, he was running the Dayton newspaper.
My dad was the district attorney of New Orleans for about 30 years. And when he opened his campaign headquarters back in the early '70s, when I was 5 years old, my mother wanted me to play the national anthem. And they got an upright piano on the back of a flatbed truck and I played it.
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 father was a journalist.
My dad was one of only four congressmen who supported Reagan.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 brought an end to the ugly Jim Crow period in American history.
My father was in Congress when I was born. He was mayor my whole life from when I was in grade school - first grade - to when I went away to college.
In 1964, I tried to convince my grandfather, who was active in the New York City firefighters union, to vote for Barry Goldwater over Lyndon Johnson because at the time I thought his approach to limited government was right on.
I cast my first vote on my father's lap in 1960, for Richard Nixon, in the voting booth. I was 8.