Some days I can still close my eyes and imagine myself in my history classroom at Harlan High School on the corner of 96th and Michigan on Chicago’s South Side. The day I imagine is near the end of the school year. It’s hot and I’m sitting near the back. Jimmy Robertson, my high school bodyguard, is sitting next to me, and so is Denise Starks.
At the front of the room, but often walking about from front to back, is J. Quinn Brisben, my U.S. History teacher.  He is also my radical, even more than 35 years later. He is a stocky white man with a thick and full gray beard. Some of the kids called him the Colonel after the Kentucky Fried Chicken’s mascot, but never to his face.  If he heard them, Mr. Brisben (even today it’s hard for me to refer to him in any other way) would have some choice and unprintable words for them.
It wasn’t Mr. Brisben’s looks that made him radical. It wasn’t that he rode his bicycle to school long before it was environmentally chic. It was his actions.  We kids didn’t know it at the time, but Mr. Brisben played a big part in the Civil Rights movement.
He would tell us stories about being called an “Okie,” a name often used contemptuously for Oklahomans in the 1930s and 1940s. I felt bad that anyone would pick on Mr. Brisben and I think his stories made us students feel that we had a common bond with him.
By the 1960s, Mr. Brisben was an active member of the Congress of Racial Equality. He traveled the South with CORE and he helped organize the March on Washington. In 1964, he joined Freedom Summer. He was arrested once in Columbus, Miss. on trumped up traffic charges.
In 1966, he invited two black girls from Alabama to live with him, his wife and their two young children during summer vacation. Mr. Brisben was living on the Southwest Side at the time and the girls found that the North could be just as racist as the Deep South. Mr. Brisben’s neighbors broke windows in their home and car. They also set the garage on fire.
“Dr. King was leading open-housing marches in all parts of the area that summer and the young ladies saw more violence there than they had ever seen in Alabama,” Mr. Brisben told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2004.
About the same time, the Brisben family moved into a planned integrated community on the South Side, London Town Homes. Even after most of the other white families moved, the Brisbens remained. When they moved in 2011 after nearly 45 years – only because their narrow staircase was hard to navigate – they were the last white family remaining.
In 1992, Mr. Brisben ran for president of the United States on the Socialist Party ticket. He garnered more than 2,000 votes. I was proud to cast one of them.
Even today, Mr. Brisben is still a teacher. He passes along books for me to read and we talk about teaching and life in general.

To be perfectly honest, when I first heard of Terry Mutchler, I didn’t want to like her. I was in my mid-20s, working for a public policy magazine in Springfield, Illinois, and trying to make a name for myself as a journalist. A note went up in the Statehouse pressroom, where I had an office: Terry had been hired to head the Associated Press bureau there, overseeing three other reporters. She was only a year older than I was, and, frankly, I could feel the professional jealousy surge as I read the news.

When I actually met Terry, though, that sense evaporated. She became — and remains today, two decades later — a beloved friend. And the quality that touched me first was her commitment to stand up for what she believed in, no matter the consequences. That is why she’s “my radical.”

Even by the time I met her, Terry already had taken professional stands and stood up for convictions from many would shy away. As a cub reporter in Pennsylvania, for example, she had refused in court to name a source in a story about how a municipality’s “police officer of the year” had been investigated for potentially beating his wife. A judge ordered her to give up the name of the person who gave her the police officer’s personnel records, or go to jail. But Terry protected her source, as she had promised to do. She did not end up going to jail, but was willing to do so.

While I knew her, Terry took issue publicly with a long-time practice of editors going to a strip-club as part of a professional gathering. Because these editors were clients of the Associated Press, where she worked, her criticism caused major headaches for her own bosses. Again, though, she stood up for what she believed in, rather than what was convenient.

But perhaps the biggest test of her convictions came when Terry left her beloved reporting career to go to law school, in part so that she could work closely with the woman she was secretly involved with, Illinois State Sen. Penny Severns. When Penny died of cancer soon after, the outside world didn’t and couldn’t understand the grief Terry was experiencing.

Since then, Terry has gained a national reputation for her groundbreaking work as a lawyer fighting for open records in Illinois and Pennsylvania, where she heads the state’s Open Records Agency. But the work closest to her heart is as an advocate for being true to one’s self — a lesson she learned the hard way, by instead living much of her life in secret. She is my radical for fighting — whether publicly or privately — for what she believes in, and I’m proud to have her in my life.