Marcus Hanschen

Thelton Eugene Henderson, a senior federal judge in the Northern District of California, has been selected as the 2008 Alumnus of the Year by the California Alumni Association. Henderson (who was profiled by author Diane McWhorter in California last spring) will be honored at the annual Charter Gala Banquet on April 5, 2008.

Judge Henderson has ruled on numerous controversial and high-profile cases, on behalf of prisoners' rights to humane treatment, on behalf of dolphins threatened by tuna nets, on behalf of Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange, on behalf of gays subjected to added security scrutiny in the tech industry, and on behalf of women in a landmark discrimination suit against State Farm Insurance.

Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1933, Henderson was raised in Los Angeles. The star football and baseball player was recruited by UC Berkeley, where he earned a bachelor's degree in political science in 1955. In 1962 Henderson received a law degree from Boalt Hall and joined the Justice Department as the first African-American lawyer in its civil rights division. Working with his mentor and fellow Cal grad, John Doar, Henderson traveled often to the South to monitor law enforcement on civil rights cases. There, he investigated the famous case of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four young girls. He also experienced firsthand the South's fierce racist opposition to civil rights for blacks.

Returning to the Bay Area, he became director of the Legal Aid Society in East Palo Alto. That position brought him to the attention of Stanford Law School, where he was hired as assistant dean and established a minority recruitment program. He left Stanford in 1977 to establish a law firm specializing in civil rights, and also taught at Golden Gate University.

In 2001–02, Leah McGarrigle of The Bancroft Library's Regional Oral History Office conducted extensive interviews with Judge Henderson (available on ROHO's website). What follows is an introduction by Henderson's friend, Berkeley sociologist Troy Duster, then excerpts from the oral history.

Read extensive interviews with Judge Henderson at Bancroft Library's Regional Oral History Office.

Watch documentary Soul of Justice: Thelton Henderson's America Journey.

Boalt Hall School of Law has also honored its distinguished alumnus Judge Henderson. In September 2006, the Center for Social Justice was re-named the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice. More

When our paths first crossed as very young men, both near the beginning of our careers, I was struck then, as I am now nearly four decades later, at how political events of some magnitude just seemed to happen around Thelton. In his story, one will read about how his loan of a Justice Department rental car to Martin Luther King became a significant political happening. Now, nearly halfway through the first decade of the new century, there is the story of how Thelton's "routine" stewardship of a California prison would bring him in to a dramatically public collision with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. And in between, there have been scores of similar tales of seeming happenstance that were converted into events of political magnitude.

If you just heard Thelton tell the story over coffee, you would conclude that—there he was, minding his own business, or just doing the commonly decent thing. Suddenly, he would say, things got blown out of proportion, and his actions inexplicably become the subject of a New York Times editorial. While it is undeniably true that extraordinary things happen to ordinary people, it is also true that extraordinary people seem to convert "ordinary happenings" into events of significant moment. So how much of this is the person, and how much of it is the times? The answer lies in the relationship between two.

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