Ronald Bridgeforth: a Man of Integrity

For four decades, he lived an alternative life, with a name that wasn't his own, keeping secret a criminal past. In August, the 67-year-old counselor decided it was time to surrender.
Ronald Bridgeforth and his wife slowly packed their Michigan home, where they had lived for 35 years, giving away personal belongings and donating a majority of their books to local libraries and museums. They resigned from their jobs: he, a licensed therapist and faculty member at a community college; she, a professor of English composition and literature.
Hand in hand, they boarded a flight to the Bay Area.
Today, Bridgeforth plans to plead guilty to assault on a police officer with a deadly weapon. Fearing a lengthy prison term, he skipped out on bail shortly after pleading no contest to the 1968 crime. According to his attorney, Bridgeforth faces one to 15 years in prison.
He sat down with The Chronicle shortly after turning himself in to authorities this month to describe how he created his life as Cole Jordan, the mild-mannered Michigan college therapist, and what led him back to the Bay Area to once again become Ronald Bridgeforth.
Bridgeforth's mother was 15 when she gave birth to him in Berkeley. The first six years of his life were spent with his grandparents in Arkansas, until his mother married and moved the family to the Los Angeles area. His mother became a pharmacist; his stepfather was a mechanic.
"It was a good family," he said. "I was nurtured." Describing himself as an "athletic nerd," Bridgeforth said he played the violin and varsity football and "never got in any trouble." Finding a place to fit in After graduating in 1962, he decided to attend Sterling College, a small Presbyterian school in Kansas where he was one of only two black students. He attended classes there for a year and a half, but felt isolated. He didn't fit in.
So halfway through his sophomore year, he transferred to Knoxville College, a predominantly African American school in Tennessee. "I saw myself in everyone around me," Bridgeforth recalled. "I wasn't an oddity."
It was there that 19-year-old Bridgeforth met a recruiter from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and agreed to work the summer of 1964 registering black voters in Mississippi.
"I did not have a real understanding of the politics of the South," he said. "When my mother found out, she was terrified."
That summer stretched into a full year with the committee. He dropped out of college. During that time, he said his work led to being threatened by mobs, vigilantes and being unfairly targeted by police officers. "People risked their lives to vote," he said. "It wasn't safe. You could disappear in Mississippi." Ron Carver worked under Bridgeforth with the committee and considered him a mentor. One day, Carver remembered, he gave his car keys to his friend in front of a state trooper, who then arrested Bridgeforth on a trumped-up charge of stealing Carver's car. That was the life he led in Mississippi as a politically involved black man, said Carver, who now lives in the Washington, D.C., area and is a consultant for labor, environmental and human rights organizations.
"He was brave. He was a leader," Carver said. "He helped empower the black community of Starkville, Miss." Back to Bay Area Bridgeforth transferred to the committee's San Francisco office after a year in Mississippi. But once he was back in the Bay Area, Bridgeforth drifted away from the student group. He worked part time for the longshoremen's union. He also joined the Independent Action Movement, a volunteer community service group that he said helped to improve schools through literacy programs.
Then came the day that would forever change his life: Nov. 5, 1968.
Police were called to a White Front discount store on El Camino Real in South San Francisco on a report of a customer arguing with store employees. Bridgeforth admits he was trying to buy toys and clothing for kids in the community with a stolen credit card.

By Laura Rena Murray
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/11/21/MN901M1FSV.DTL#ixzz1eUNFN4tu