David Mixner: Politically Speaking – The Metro Weekly Interview

metroweekly.com:

Editor’s Note: This in-depth interview with David Mixner, who passed away on Monday, March 11, 2024, at the age of 77, originally appeared in the issue of July 29, 2004.

Photography by Todd Franson.“You want a soundbite?”David Mixner grins.“I’ll give you a soundbite. I’m a man who’s devoted forty years of his life — sometimes at great validation and sometimes at great pain — to the struggle for freedom and human rights.“You know, when I was a child growing up,” he continues, “we didn’t have television, but we got Life magazine.

And it opened the outside world to us. As a kid I said, ‘I want to live the history of my times. I want to witness it.’ And then I got to a second level where I said, ‘God, if I could just meet and shake the hands of the people making the history of my times, I’d be happy.’ And then I said to myself, ‘If I could just be a tiny footnote in the history of my times.’“So that’s where I’m at now.

A tiny, tiny footnote. But a magnificent life journey for myself.”Mixner is being modest. If anything, he’s less a footnote than a frequent — and some might say necessary — headline.