Robert Gnaizda — civil rights advocate, pioneering lawyer
Robert Gnaizda, a San Francisco attorney who devoted his career to representing poor people and minorities, and helped to launch pioneering legal organizations promoting their interests, has died at age 83.
Gnaizda was a cofounder of California Rural Legal Assistance, serving farm workers and rural families, in 1966; of Public Advocates, representing poor and minority residents and workers, in 1971; and of the Greenlining Institute, advocating equal rights in housing, health care and economic issues, in 1993. He also served as state health director under Gov. Jerry Brown from 1975 to 1976.
Gnaizda was “the most imaginative and effective lawyer that I’ve ever worked with (and) the most effective public interest lawyer in this nation,” said state Appeals Court Justice J. Anthony Kline, who as a lawyer was a cofounder of Public Advocates.
“Our social justice community has lost a giant, but his legacy lives on in the many organizations he created and influenced, in the generation of advocates he mentored and inspired, and in the countless victories he won for people of color and lowincome communities,” said Guillermo Mayer, Public Advocates’ president and chief executive.
Gnaizda died of natural causes on July 11, surrounded by family members.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Aug. 6, 1936, Gnaizda told an interviewer that his passion for civil rights began as a child, when he went to Ebbets Field and saw Jackie Robinson, the first Black man in Major League Baseball, playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
After graduating from Columbia University and Yale Law School, Gnaizda started out as a tax attorney. But he said his career path changed after he went to Mississippi in 1965 and, along with two Black lawyers, conducted an unofficial hearing on voter suppression in an area the FBI considered too dangerous for voting rights activity. The evidence they gathered helped to win passage of the Voting Rights Act.
He helped to found California Rural Legal Assistance a year later and became its statewide litigation director, advocating for the rights of farm workers and their families during a period of intense conflict between growers and the United Farm Workers union led by Cesar Chavez.
California Rural Legal Assistance is now the largest organization of its kind, with more than 43,000 clients.
Public Advocates, where Gnaizda served as general counsel, said one of his first achievements was persuading the Census Bureau to correct a substantial undercount of Latinos in the 1970 census.
He also led the organization’s campaign aimed at hiring discrimination against minorities and women in police and fire departments. Public Advocates said Gnaizda’s initial suit against San Francisco was the first successful case of its kind, and he followed it with complaints to a state civil rights agency against 28 other cities in California. He later took on hiring practices at utilities and financial institutions.
While at Public Advocates in 1979, he joined other organizations to form the Greenlining Coalition, which fought the practice known as redlining, discriminatory pricing and regulations that excluded minorities from living in certain neighborhoods.
In 1993 Gnaizda cofounded the Greenlining Institute, a separate civil rights organization based in Oakland, and worked to combat discrimination in lending and other financial practices. He tried to warn federal officials about the looming crisis in mortgage loans and home financing in the mid2000s, and appeared in the 2010 documentary film “Inside Job.”
Gnaizda became general counsel for the National Asian American Coalition and the National Diversity Coalition in 2009 and stayed there until retiring from the practice of law in 2018. Despite his past service in Brown’s administration, he represented organizations that successfully sued the governor in 2015 for taking $331 million from a state fund intended to help distressed homeowners and using it to balance the state budget.
His organizing had a lighter side, said Kline, the state appeals court justice, who recalled Gnaizda’s founding of the International Giraffe Appreciation Society in the 1980s — saluting creatures “who don’t do any harm and who stick their necks out.”
Gnaizda and the society’s board of directors, all children, held their meetings in local playgrounds, Kline said. But he said Gnaizda also contacted zoos abroad on the organization’s behalf, traveled to London and elsewhere to see how they treated giraffes and was always taken seriously.
One of his guiding principles as a lawyer, Gnaizda told a State Bar interviewer in 2009, was that he tried not to approach his cases ideologically.
“I don’t see the other side as evil — just wrong,” he said, including the white lawyers in Mississippi who defended voting discrimination in 1965. “I always try to see the other side.”
He received the NAACP Distinguished Service Award in 1973, the Mexican American Political Association Lucha Award in 1998 and the State Bar’s Loren Miller Legal Services Award in 2009 for lifetime service to the poor.
Gnaizda is survived by his wife, Claudia Viek, and his sons, Joshua and Matthew Gnaizda. Memorial plans are pending.