It was a bright, sunny day at San Quentin for the June 3 ceremony formally celebrating the new $136 million Central Health Services Building – a milestone in California’s court-mandated effort to improve unconstitutionally poor healthcare in its prisons. Perhaps the true jewel in the crown of this special day was the unexpected, unheralded appearance of the man whose tenacity and commitment to this cause made the building possible: U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson.
Well noted at the ceremony was the role played by Federal Receiver J. Clark Kelso, who was also on hand to christen the first step in the Herculean construction efforts to bring California’s inmate healthcare up to acceptable standards. It was Judge Henderson who hired Kelso to lead this unprecedented, multi-million dollar effort. However, prior to the ceremony Judge Henderson insisted that his role be down played. And thus, while one involved person after another – from Kelso to the building’s locksmith – stepped forward to receive accolades, Judge Henderson sat quietly in the front row, observing with a serene smile.
Kelso acknowledged Judge Henderson’s role in making this project possible. But Judge Henderson’s aide had asked that no picture be taken of him receiving a plaque or a certificate. Such is the quiet nature of a man in the twilight days of an enduring and remarkable career. Judge Henderson’s life, from his collegiate years at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall to his meteoric rise as a young civil rights attorney in the South during the turbulent Sixties repeatedly calls forth a description as “the first.”
In his early years growing up in South Central Los Angeles near Watts, Henderson’s mother convinced him that he was going to be somebody in the world, ideally a doctor or a lawyer. He went to UC Berkeley on a football scholarship but a knee injury benched his football career and focused his energies on academics. One of only two African-American students in the Boalt Hall class of 1962, Henderson started his legal career when John Doar recruited him as the first black attorney at the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
He was assigned to the South to investigate voting rights abuses by local law enforcement. He soon confronted the challenge of being a black man in authority within the largely white world of the American legal system. His role included investigating in 1963 the Sixteenth Street Baptist church bombing that killed four girls. He grew to know Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders of the civil rights movement, after first winning over their initial skepticism of a government attorney.
Henderson became a bridge between the Kennedy Justice Department and the leaders of the civil rights movement that he came to know when they were all forced to lodge in the same segregated motels throughout the South. One decision Henderson made seemed reasonable at the time but blew up in his face, costing him his job. He loaned his car to Dr. King.
“When they asked I quickly agreed because King told me that one of their cars had a bad tire. And it would not be good for their car to break down in that neighborhood, ” he said in the documentary film Soul of Justice. Foes of civil rights seized on the act as evidence of the government’s bias. “When the controversy hit the fan I didn’t understand what was going on,” said Henderson. “I didn’t understand what the big deal was… I was momentarily confused and conflicted behind the whole ordeal…”
After his resignation Henderson did a stint in a private practice. Then he served as director of the East Palo Alto office of the San Mateo County Legal Aid Society, the first legal aid attorney in that city. In 1969, he became assistant dean at neighboring Stanford Law School where he established the minority-recruiting program, helped diversify the student body and assisted in creating Stanford’s clinical program.
Henderson had been distressed to learn that Stanford had graduated its first black lawyer only in 1968. When he left Stanford in 1976 to practice law, 20 percent of the entering class consisted of students of color. Henderson’s program became a nationwide model and of his recruits, Charles Ogletree, became a noted professor of law at Harvard.
During this time Henderson also served as consultant to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Office of Economic Opportunities, Carnegie Corporation and Ford Foundation. In 1977 he left Stanford to form a law firm that specialized in civil rights, civil liberties and other issues of constitutional law, and was a law professor at Golden Gate University. While at Golden Gate and in private practice with Sandy Rosen and Joe Remcho, Henderson was appointed to the
Judge Henderson’s name is synonymous with the highest principles of the law – civility, compassion and recognition of human dignity.”
Mary Lou Frampton, Director, Henderson Center of Social Justice
federal bench. He was selected by President Jimmy Carter in 1980 to sit in the Northern District of California, becoming the only African-American judge on that court for 10 years. He was selected as its first black chief justice in 1990 and served in that post until 1997.
Throughout his distinguished career on the federal bench Judge Henderson has ruled on many of the critical issues of our time. In the late 1980s, Judge Henderson presided over a long-running case concerning the fishing industries’ practice of snaring dolphins in its tuna nets. Judge Henderson ruled in favor of environmental groups’ charges that millions of dolphins were drowned because of the industries’ refusal to follow existing safety regulations. He also rejected attempts by the Clinton and Bush administrations to relax legal standards on fishing practices and loosen dolphin-safety labeling on tuna. And Judge Henderson’s decision placing California’s prison health care system under federal receivership followed a lengthy battle.
Judge Henderson says he acts from a conviction that the U.S. Constitution belongs to everyone… ”I’m determined to see better health in prisons… Even those at the bottom of the social heap nonetheless have human dignity,” said Henderson in Soul of Justice. In a landmark 1995 civil case, Madrid v. Gomez, Henderson ruled that the use of force and level of medical care at the notorious Pelican Bay State Prison was unconstitutional. During a subsequent oversight federal process, Henderson visited the prison personally. “Prisoners are human beings, too, and the guards decided not to honor that anymore…” he said in Soul of Justice.
On one visit Henderson believed that a prison riot had been staged for his benefit to further the guards’ point that prisoners are animals. In 1999 the UC Berkeley Law School established in his honor the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice with its prestigious Henderson Social Justice Prize.
In 2005, Judge Henderson found that substandard medical care in the California prison system had violated prisoners’ rights under the Eighth Amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment and had led to unnecessary deaths. In 2006, Henderson appointed Robert Sillen as receiver to take over the health care systems of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitations and replaced Sillen with Kelso in 2008.
One of Judge Henderson’s decisions had its ups and downs. In 1997 he ruled as unconstitutional Proposition 209, the state’s anti-affirmative action initiative. The ruling drew howls from Republican leaders ranging from Tom DeLay to Pete Wilson. The next year a court of appeal reversed Judge Henderson’s ruling.
Then, in 2003, his reasoning was vindicated when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action was indeed constitutional. However, in the year following the appeals court ruling the enrollment of people of color in the UC system plummeted by 60 percent. Said Judge Henderson: “There was only one African-American to graduate from Boalt Law School that year.“
David Marsh was a Contributing Writer to this story.
