Carol Ruth Silver

Carol Ruth Silver
Silver in 2012 in San Francisco
Member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors from District 6
In office 1978–1980
Preceded by	District created
Succeeded by	Districts abolished
Member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors at-large
In office 1981–1989
Preceded by	Districts abolished
Succeeded by	Terence Hallinan
Personal details
Born	(1938-10-01) October 1, 1938 (age 78) Boston, Massachusetts
Political party	Democratic
Residence	San Francisco
Alma mater	University of Chicago
Profession	attorney

Carol Ruth Silver (born October 1, 1938) is an American lawyer and activist. She was a Freedom Rider, arrested and incarcerated for 40 days in Mississippi. She was among those on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors allegedly targeted by Dan White in the Moscone–Milk assassinations, but was saved because she was not in her office at the time of the murders.

Silver grew up in a Jewish family in Worcester, Massachusetts. She attended the University of Chicago, earning a bachelor's degree in 1960 and a law degree in 1964. She was a fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

In 1961, she was a Freedom Rider during the Civil Rights Movement, a civil rights activists who rode buses into the South to challenge ongoing racial segregation by deliberately violating the laws for separate waiting rooms at interstate bus stations. She recalled in 2011,

"On June 2, 1961, I got on a bus in New York bound for Jackson. The bus went to Nashville, where we wrote our wills. When we arrived in Jackson, on June 7, I went into the bus station waiting room marked 'Colored.' I took three steps and was arrested and transported to the city jail."

Silver was sentenced to six months in jail but was released after serving 40 days. In 2011, on the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Riders, she appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show to talk about the experience. In 2014, she published a book, Freedom Rider Diary: Smuggled Notes from Parchman Prison.

In 1985, after Bernhard Goetz shot and wounded four attackers on a New York subway train, Silver wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "The legality of the actions of the 'subway vigilante' cannot be determined until all the facts are in. What is already clear is that the New York officials denouncing him misconceive the law of self-defense... A subway rider attacked by armed criminals has every right to shoot in self-defense... Rational gun control is a necessity. But New York City's long history of prohibiting ordinary, responsible adults the only realistic means of self-defense is not rational." "I don't like it," San Francisco Police Chief Con Murphy said about Silver's views on guns. "Keeping guns at home creates more problems than it solves. It creates a false sense of security."