OAKLAND — Dan Siegel, the attorney who led the “Bloody Thursday” protest at People’s Park that helped ignite a tradition of activism in Berkeley, drawing scrutiny from the FBI and launching Siegel’s storied career in Oakland’s courtrooms, died on July 2. He was 79.
A lifelong advocate for civil rights, Siegel was a UC Berkeley law student when he yelled “Let’s take the park!” to a crowd of thousands of protesters in 1969, setting off a clash in which police killed one person and sent 128 others to the hospital.
Siegel, accused in the aftermath of inciting a riot, later had his license to practice law denied by the State Bar of California. He successfully sued, taking the case to the state Supreme Court and winning. The case set an important precedent for determining the “moral character” of attorneys.
It was that very notion of morality — remaining principled, both when challenging social institutions and serving in them — that most resonated with Siegel’s family, friends and colleagues following his death from cancer.
An Oakland resident since the 1970s, Siegel died at the local Kaiser hospital. He is survived by his wife and fellow attorney, Anne Butterfield Wells, as well as a son, Michael, and stepson, Christopher Scheer.
Known for his fierce work ethic, Siegel took on cases that promised long hours and lengthy paperwork, earning a reputation for being feared, respected and willing to brave a trial in the East Bay’s various courthouses.
“A lot of the times, it was the difficult cases other attorneys aren’t willing to take,” said his colleague, Alan Yee, of the Oakland-based firm Siegel, Yee, Brunner and Mehta.
Siegel took on police departments, helping to secure multi-million dollar settlements for Black Lives Matter protesters who were met with a forceful police response during the 2020 demonstrations that followed the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
He litigated breakthrough Title IX cases that prevented gender discrimination on university campuses. He also sought to reform government from the inside, serving eight years on the Oakland school board and running unsuccessfully in 2014 to be the city’s mayor.
Last month, he stood in Oakland’s City Hall plaza at the “No Kings” rally that drew thousands protesting the Trump administration, where he urged the crowds not to fall complacent in the face of white supremacy.
“I say our struggle is to create democracy — not bring it back,” he said on a microphone at the June 14 rally, reflecting on the country’s dark legacy of Indigenous genocide and slavery. He went on to call for political unity between both the “good Democrats” and “bad Democrats.”
Scheer recognized in the speech his stepfather’s “radical” streak, which he said first led his mother to fall for Siegel in the 1970s. But there was also Siegel’s pragmatic side, the kind that once had helped him build bridges with teammates on Hamilton College’s football team — even the conservative frat stars.
“Dan had this inexhaustible curiosity and intellectual energy,” Scheer said in an interview. “It was classic ‘him’ to take on cases that were new and challenging for him. He never wanted to be stuck in some narrow niche.”
Daniel Mark Siegel was born on July 2, 1945, in The Bronx, New York, to working-class parents. The family later moved to a diverse neighborhood in Long Island, which, along with a secular Jewish upbringing, first exposed Siegel to progressive values.
He majored in religion and philosophy at Hamilton before heading west to Berkeley for law school. There, he became the president of a student body enmeshed in the chaotic activism of the late 1960s, when then-Gov. Ronald Reagan’s administration was increasingly cracking down on campus anti-war demonstrations.
“Bloody Thursday,” as it came to be known, was set in motion when the mayor of Berkeley at the time ordered authorities to fence off People’s Park and remove playground equipment and artwork installed by members of the public.
Siegel’s call to “take the park” is now written into history books — a reminder of the school’s history of student activism amid more recent clashes over the park’s future, and of deadly police responses that Siegel fought to reform in the ensuing decades.
Even as he became embedded in the courtroom, Siegel never forgot he was fighting for the communities that had shaped him, colleagues and family members recalled.
“The people my parents represented as lawyers were also our comrades, our brothers and sisters in arms,” said Siegel’s son, Michael, who last November was elected to the city council in Austin, Texas. “We were working with them on the frontlines.”
Michael helped run his father’s successful 1997 campaign for the Oakland school board. As the school district entered state receivership due to financial problems, Siegel steadfastly fought against cuts to faculty jobs.
In 2011, Siegel publicly split from the Oakland mayor he’d been advising, Jean Quan, over local law enforcement’s response to Occupy protesters. In an online post, he urged the public to support the demonstrators and “not the 1% (or) its government facilitators.”
Three years later, Siegel ran to be mayor himself, garnering 18% of first-place votes in a crowded race won by Libby Schaaf. The lawyer’s focus remained in the courtroom, where in 2014 he settled with the city on behalf of the family of Alan Blueford, who was killed by Oakland police a couple years earlier.
“Dan’s legacy of justice lives on in every life he touched and every victory he won for our community,” Mayor Barbara Lee, who said she knew Siegel “for many years,” said in a statement over the weekend.
Outside work, Siegel was an avid reader and a thrill-seeker — heading out to adventures in Alaska with his wife, who saw the couple “hiking with grizzly bears,” Scheer recalled.
But there were always cases left to fight, including one for demonstrators who were arrested in front of Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s house for protesting Israel’s assault in Gaza. The next hearing had been scheduled for Friday.
“I think he definitely would like to have seen it through,” Walter Riley, the civil-rights attorney partnering with Siegel in that case, said Monday. Riley, whose wife, Jennifer, befriended Siegel at UC Berkeley in the 1960s, said his colleague was committed to finishing whatever he started.
“Dan,” he said, “was simply a very great ally in our struggles for justice.”
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