Cat Brooks facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Cat Brooks
Cat Brooks at a 2018 fundraising event
Personal details
Born	1975/1976 (age 48–49) Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S.
Residences	Oakland, California, U.S.
Alma mater	University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Cat Brooks is an American activist, writer, and artist. She uses her voice to speak up for people and make communities better. She ran for mayor of Oakland in 2018.

Early Life and Education

Cat Brooks earned her college degree from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She studied theater there.

Career and Activism

After college, Cat Brooks studied acting in London. Later, she moved to Los Angeles and worked at a talent agency. In 2002, she joined a group called Community Coalition. Here, she worked on improving education and making things fair for everyone, especially regarding race.

Fighting for Justice

Cat Brooks became very active in fighting against police violence. This happened after a sad event where a young man named Oscar Grant was shot by a police officer. She helped start a group called the Anti Police-Terror Project. She also worked for the Bay Area branch of the National Lawyers Guild, which helps people with legal issues.

Brooks also became an organizer for the Black Lives Matter movement. This movement works to stop violence and unfair treatment against Black people. In 2015, she was arrested while protesting a ban on night-time marches in Oakland.

Running for Mayor

In 2018, Cat Brooks ran for mayor of Oakland. She ran against the person who was already mayor, Libby Schaaf. During her campaign, she held meetings to ask people for their ideas on local policies. She also supported changing a law about renting homes. After her campaign, she went back to hosting a radio show called UpFront on Pacifica Radio station KPFA-FM. Her part of the show later became a program called Law And Disorder.

Theater Work

Cat Brooks also writes plays. Her one-woman show, Tasha, is based on the story of Natasha McKenna. This play explores what happened when Natasha died while in police custody.

Personal Life

Cat Brooks was born in Las Vegas, Nevada. Her father was Black and her mother was White. Brooks's mother was an activist who worked to stop nuclear weapons. She often took Cat to protests when she was a child.

Today, Cat Brooks lives in West Oakland.

Privacy Lawsuit

Cat Brooks and Rasheed Shabazz were important people in a big lawsuit. This lawsuit was against a company called Thompson-Reuters. The lawsuit was about how the company collected and shared people's personal information. The New York Times described this information as a "360-degree view of U.S. residents’ lives."

A settlement was proposed in October 2024. Thompson-Reuters agreed to pay $27.5 million to people in California who apply. They also agreed to make it easier for California residents to remove their personal information from the company's records.