Biography
A former White House aide to President Bill Clinton, Boykin was raised in St. Louis, Missouri, and attended Countryside High School in Clearwater, Florida, before graduating from Dartmouth College.
After leaving Dartmouth in 1987, Boykin spent a year and a half working for Michael Dukakis' presidential campaign and then entered Harvard Law School, where he was a leader in the campus diversity movement and general editor of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. He received his J.D. from Harvard in 1992 and then joined the Clinton/Gore Campaign in Little Rock, Arkansas. After Clinton's election, Boykin became a Special Assistant to the President and Director of Specialty Media. Once the highest-ranking openly gay person in the Clinton White House, Boykin helped organize and participated in the nation's first meeting between gay and lesbian leaders and a U.S. President.
Boykin left the White House to write his first book, One More River to Cross: Black and Gay in America, published in 1996. He released his second book, Respecting the Soul, in 1999.
In 1997, Clinton appointed Boykin to the U.S. presidential trade delegation to Zimbabwe, along with Rev. Jesse Jackson, Coretta Scott King and Transportation Secretary Rodney E. Slater. From 1999 to 2001, Boykin taught political science at American University in Washington, D.C.
Read more about this topic: Keith Boykin
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