There’s a lot I could say about my mom. But above all else I can say she was — in her heyday, in my youth — if not a glass-ceiling breaker then a glass-ceiling cracker, and her legacy continues to benefit many.

In 1959, she and my father were both students at Cornell University. When they became pregnant, this institution of higher learning “asked” my mom to leave but “invited” my father to stay.

Pregnant and divorced, she returned to her parent’s home in Louisville, enrolled in the University of Kentucky and got a job. People told her “forget about getting a degree” and “put the baby up for adoption.”

Defying her family and social norms, she did neither. In 1960, three weeks before her 21st birthday, she became a single mom — and, later, earned her bachelor’s degree and teaching credential.

These experiences defined who she would be as she grew in to adulthood. The injustices she endured for becoming pregnant and then being a single mom set her on a course to right social wrongs. She was not just an advocate; she was an activist.

In the 1960s, she joined forces with another teacher to lead if not the first then one of the first teacher strikes in Kentucky. It wasn’t wages that drove them to the picket line. It was the outrage that the textbooks in their classrooms dated back to World War II.

She was boots-on-the-ground during the Civil Rights Movement, standing and marching shoulder to shoulder with national leaders including Julian Bond and Martin Luther King Jr., even after the KKK (in full regalia) burned a cross on our front lawn. She actively and regularly protested the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War and was at the forefront of the feminist movement.

Having endured firsthand housing discrimination, she became a fair housing crusader. She worked closely with then-California State Senator George Moscone and then-California Secretary of State Jerry Brown to pass state legislation that prohibited landlords from discriminating against women. That legislation paved the way for those working on the national level to, in 1974, successfully get the Fair Housing Act of 1968 — which prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion and national origin in housing — amended to include gender.

She was many things to many people. To some she was a champion. To others, a militant. But, to me she was and is just “mom.”