Horwitz is a nationally known author and lifelong civil rights activist. He was one of the founders of the New Left in the 1960s and editor of its largest magazine, Ramparts. In the 1970s he created the Oakland Community Learning Center, an inner city school for disadvantaged children that was run by the Black Panther Party. In the 1990s he created the Individual Rights Foundation, which led the battle against speech codes on college campuses, and compelled the entire "president's cabinet" of the University of Minnesota to undergo five hours of sensitivity training in the First Amendment for violating the free speech rights of its students. In 1996 he was a spokesman for the California Civil Rights Initiative, which barred government from discriminating against "or granting preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin." Recently he was part of Ward Connerly's campaign to pass a Racial Privacy Initiative -- an anti-racial profiling initiative that would prevent government agencies from asking citizens about their race. Horowitz is an outspoken opponent of censorship and racial preferences, and a defender of the rights of minorities and other groups under attack -- including the rights of blacks, gays, women, Jews, Muslims, Christians and white males.
