On Saturday, June 17, Eugene “Gus” Newport passed away at the age of eighty-eight. Newport, a socialist, served as the mayor of Berkeley for seven years, from 1979 to 1986. While his name is lesser known today outside the Bay Area, Newport’s mayoralty epitomized a national movement among local elected officials to institutionalize the Third World solidarity politics of the 1960s at the level of city government.

During Newport’s seven-year stint as mayor, Berkeley supported and aided left-wing revolutionaries from Southern Africa to Central America and the Caribbean. The support came not just from campus classrooms and left-wing bookshops, but directly from the mayor’s office. Newport’s attempts to give Berkeley its own foreign policy would inspire other local elected officials, including Burlington’s socialist mayor Bernie Sanders. Two-time presidential candidate Jesse Jackson affectionately referred to Newport as “the mayor of the world.”

Once elected, Newport, who had been the candidate of the city’s left-progressive political coalition Berkeley Citizens Action, opened the doors of city hall to a network of global revolutionaries and their local supporters. Soon after his election, Newport became the cochair of the US Peace Council — the US affiliate of the Soviet-aligned international peace organization the World Peace Council. Inspired by the example of other black internationalists like Paul Robeson, Newport, through the World Peace Council, advocated for a permanent détente between the United States and the Soviet Union and connected with revolutionary leaders around the globe.

During the early 1980s, Newport traveled globally, from Helsinki to Havana, as part of his duties as cochair of the US Peace Council. Locally, Newport welcomed leaders from international movements, including US ambassador Dessima Williams from Grenada’s New Jewel Movement and Nicaraguan Sandinista leader Martha Cranshaw. He hosted them in Berkeley as a gesture of support for those countries’ reform efforts.

Whenever possible, Newport offered Berkeley’s resources and its platform of city government to local solidarity activists attempting to aid contemporary revolutionary movements from afar. In 1979, Berkeley became the first US city to divest from apartheid South Africa. The city marked another internationalist milestone when, in 1983, Berkeley activists — with the help of the city council — created a sister-city relationship with a Salvadoran village known as San Antonio Los Ranchos, located in the Marxist Popular Forces of Liberation (FPL)–operated zones of popular control, amid the country’s civil war. The sister-city relationship with San Antonio Los Ranchos was the first one to have a decidedly left-wing political bent. A few years later, in 1986, Berkeley became sister cities with the Sandinista stronghold of León, Nicaragua.

While mayor, Newport also weighed in on the Israeli occupation of Palestine. In 1984, he was the only elected official to support a local ballot initiative that called on the United States to cut Israeli aid by the amount Israel spent on settlements each year in the West Bank.

Newport blazed the trail for local officials across the country. Throughout the 1980s, local government became one of the most prominent sites of internal dissent to the Reagan administration’s revival in Cold War military adventurism. By the end of the decade, ninety US cities had divested from apartheid South Africa. Nearly one hundred municipalities, large and small, had established sister-city relations with Sandinista Nicaragua and Salvadoran villages controlled by the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). Hundreds more passed ballot initiatives denouncing US military spending.

As mayor of the world, Newport will be best remembered for his work around El Salvador. In 1985, Newport attempted to travel to Berkeley’s Salvadoran sister city, San Antonio Los Ranchos, with local members of solidarity movement organizations like New El Salvador Today (NEST) and the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES). The trip was planned after activists received news that the FPL-controlled village had been vacated due to repeated government bombing attacks. Newport’s travels were clandestine as, technically, San Antonio Los Ranchos remained in a warzone.

While in Chalatenango, the Salvadoran department where the village was located, Newport and his companions toured the community-controlled systems of agricultural production, education, health care, and justice in the nearby village Las Vueltas. But the activists would never make it to Berkeley’s sister city, as it came under bombing attack by the Salvadoran military. “We were on a march [through] Chalatenango, and the people wanted to take us to San Antonio Los Ranchos, and on the way, some of the guerrillas [intercepted] a message that there was a bombing going on and we couldn’t go any further,” he recalled. “So they took us to sort of a cement floor house, and told us to duck and get on the floor. They could tell how many bombs were being dropped and how many the plane had. You could see fires all night.”

Following his return to the United States, Newport testified before Congress regarding US funding of the Salvadoran military and its impacts on civilians. He also participated in a thirty-city speaking tour sharing his experience in El Salvador with US audiences. Newport’s efforts would help NEST and CISPES raise tens of thousands of dollars to assist displaced Salvadoran activists resettling in Chalatenango in the late 1980s.

Newport’s critics often attested that international issues like Grenada’s revolution or El Salvador’s civil war had little to do with the everyday problems faced by Berkeley residents. But Newport argued the opposite. During the 1980s, urban spending dropped from 12 percent of the federal budget to a measly 3 percent in a ten-year period. At the same time, Ronald Reagan’s administration oversaw the biggest defense buildup in US history. Observing these two contemporaneous developments, Newport insisted that the local and global were interconnected. “I do this because I see how our city’s money disappears to feed an eager war machine, to build weapons which can destroy the world a hundred times over, while citizens remain homeless and hungry,” Newport declared.

In recent years, left-wing politicians have made impressive gains at the local level in cities like Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia. In these same cities, internationally minded movements focused on myriad issues ranging from Palestinian self-determination to ending the blockade on Cuba continue to grow at the grassroots. But today these two simultaneous phenomena rarely intersect. The Left should consider the memory of Gus Newport, a figure who extended a hand of political partnership to internationalists and, in the process, broadened the boundaries of local politics far beyond the borders of his city.