By Gwyneth K. Shaw
A $6 million gift from Bob and Colleen Haas will establish the Thelton E. Henderson ’62 Chair in Civil Rights Law, honoring the distinguished UC Berkeley Law alumnus and celebrating his name, legendary life’s work, and passion for molding a fairer and more just society for future students, faculty, and staff.
The gift from the Haases, who have funded transformative programs at UC Berkeley, commemorates not just Henderson’s influential career as a civil rights lawyer and longtime federal judge but also a deep friendship dating back 57 years.
That’s when Colleen Haas — then a Stanford Law student with a keen interest in civil rights that stretched back to her childhood — met Henderson, an assistant dean who started the school’s first program for minority admissions.
Henderson was well into an epic career: After graduating from UC Berkeley Law, he joined the U.S. Department of Justice and became the first Black lawyer in the civil rights division. Facing fierce, racist opposition, he confronted voting rights violations and crimes against Black residents in the South, including the infamous bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four young girls.
Colleen, who mainly grew up in California, had seen discrimination up close during her high school years back in her birthplace of Kansas City. At age 10, she’d been so disturbed by the fight over desegregating schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, that she sent a letter to President Dwight D. Eisenhower — and received a response from E. Frederic Morrow, the first Black person to serve in an executive position at the White House.
“By the time I went to Stanford Law, I knew social justice was my chosen work,” she says.
Henderson was pushing to diversify Stanford’s student body, and Colleen Haas — a scholarship student who was working at the San Francisco civil rights firm Garry, Dreyfus, McTernan, and Brotsky in addition to her studies — identified with his values.
“We just connected,” Colleen says. “I had an appreciation of what Thelton had done in his life to that point, and obviously he could see where my interests were. That became the basis of a very close friendship.”
Decades of memories
When she married Bob Haas, a fourth-generation UC Berkeley alumnus, Henderson became his friend, too. The relationship got stronger over the years, through Colleen’s work as a civil rights lawyer, Bob’s longtime career at Levi Strauss & Co., and Henderson’s ascendance to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in 1980, where he served until his 2017 retirement.
“It’s just a privilege to be able to say we’re friends — deep friends,” says Colleen, recounting decades of memorable moments, from birthday greetings to meals at UC Berkeley’s Faculty Club to condolences for the death of a beloved dog Henderson used to bring with him into his chambers.
“He’s a model of the best a person could be, and his life is a tribute to this country,” she adds. “So it’s with total happiness that we’re able to endow this chair.”
UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says he’s deeply grateful for the gift to honor Henderson and highlight the important field of civil rights law.
“Thelton Henderson is truly a hero,” Chemerinsky says. “He is a role model for all of us in how he has used law — as a civil rights lawyer and as a judge — to advance justice. He is truly one of the most decent people I have ever met.
“I am thrilled that as long as there is UC Berkeley Law there will be the Henderson Chair in Civil Rights.”
The gift also creates an untenured faculty position to teach in the area of civil rights law. One of the stipulations is that at the start of each academic year, the professor who holds the Henderson chair will speak to the law school classes they teach to give a brief biography of Henderson and discuss how students have taken their opportunity at UC Berkeley Law and translated it into creating a greater good for society.
The Haases hope that will keep Henderson’s story, and what he stands for, alive.
“Civil rights, social justice, public service, and being willing to take risks and be in the forefront of society, whether it’s in science or in taking stands on social positions, those are the essence of Berkeley,” Bob says. “Having a professor at the law school who is focusing on that is very much a part and parcel of what Berkeley really is.”
A distinguished judicial legacy
During his 37 years on the bench — seven of those as the first Black chief judge in the district — Henderson presided over many seminal cases. He earned a reputation for judicial acuity and sensitivity, as well as recognition as a steward of the environment: Henderson is credited for saving dolphins from the tuna industry and making the San Francisco Bay Area meet National Ambient Air Quality Standards.
In 1986, he wrote the opinion in a case that first outlawed sexual harassment in California. In 1995, his lengthy ruling on dire conditions at Pelican Bay State Prison, which he’d personally toured to get a look at how prisoners were treated, led to major restrictions on the state’s use of solitary confinement.
In 1997, Henderson struck down California’s anti-affirmative action Proposition 209, though he was later overruled by an appeals court. In 2006, he ruled that the state was violating constitutional standards with insufficient prison medical treatment and appointed a receiver to manage the prison healthcare system.
Henderson was on the judicial panel that ruled California’s overcrowded prisons violated the Constitution and ordered 40,000 people released from prison, a decision later affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 2011 Brown v. Plata decision.
When Henderson retired, he was still actively overseeing the Oakland Police Department — the result of a 2003 settlement in a civil rights lawsuit brought by 119 city residents after a whistleblower detailed how a group of offices known as the “Riders” regularly beat minority residents and planted drugs and other evidence.
He has been showered with awards over the years, including the American Bar Association’s Thurgood Marshall Award, the State Bar of California’s Bernard E. Witkin Medal, the Anti-Defamation League’s Pearlstein Civil Rights Award, the National Bar Association’s Distinguished Service Award, the Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Award for Professionalism and Ethics from the American Inns of Court, and the Judge Learned Hand Award from the American Jewish Committee. In August 2017, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California dedicated the Ceremonial Courtroom in the San Francisco Courthouse to him.
Henderson, who also earned an undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley, was named the school’s Alumnus of the Year in 2008 and received the Citation Award — UC Berkeley Law’s highest honor recognizing exceptional contributions to the school, the bar, the bench, legal scholarship, the state, the nation, and the world — in 2000. Henderson joined the California Hall of Fame last year.
UC Berkeley Law had already named the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, formed after Proposition 209’s passage, for him when Professor David B. Oppenheimer, Chemerinsky, and center Executive Director Savala Nolan ’11 approached Henderson about joining the school after he left the bench. For several years, Henderson spent a few days each week at the law school, teaching seminars in Constitutional Law, mentoring students, and visiting classes to lecture on the judicial process.
Building for the future
Henderson says the endowed chair is “hugely significant to me” and a wonderful addition to the existing honor of having the Henderson Center named after him.
“To have an endowed chair of civil rights at one of the best law schools in the country — and the world — is huge for me,” he says. “I’m almost wordless.”
Henderson says his relationship with Colleen and Bob is a “very special and wonderful friendship” with many personal memories as well as professional ones. For example, he says, the couple reached out to then-Sen. Alan Cranston about nominating Henderson to the judiciary.
“They’ve been very good to me, very generous to me, and a very important part of my growth and my life,” Henderson says.
Oppenheimer saw the connection firsthand at Henderson’s retirement party, when he and his wife Marcy sat with the Haases and chatted about their long friendship. The acquaintance deepened during the pandemic, when the two couples would meet for “virtual cocktails” with Henderson and his wife Maria, and continues now with in-person dinners.
“I realized how deeply Bob and Colleen loved and admired Thelton. It was thus no surprise when they decided to endow a chair in civil rights law in his honor,” Oppenheimer says. “UC Berkeley Law has long been associated with civil rights law, and has produced many great civil rights lawyers. But to have a chair dedicated to civil rights law, and honoring a lawyer and judge who has been a civil rights icon since the 1960s, is thrilling.”
Bob and Colleen’s Berkeley philanthropy, which includes a historic $24 million gift in 2020 to support undergraduate students, has focused on underrepresented scholarly fields and students, including the disabled, the undocumented, the formerly incarcerated, and former foster children.
“A consistent reward that we get as donors is hearing testimonials of how it’s transformed their lives, how they would have never been at Berkeley or in college were it not for our help, and then learning about what happens to these talented people in the future and how they continue to make a difference in society,” Bob says. “It’s a multiplier effect.”
Their first gift to UC Berkeley Law is in keeping with that tradition, he says.
After last fall’s federal elections, Colleen reached out to her old friend, writing in an email that he was the first person she thought of given his life’s work. His reply, she says, was emphatically positive, referencing some of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous words. Henderson developed a rapport with King as a Justice Department lawyer.
“He ended the note: ‘I continue to believe that indeed we shall overcome and that we shall get to that mountain top, as Martin Luther King Jr. told us we would,’” she says.
A printout is framed near her home computer.
“Every day I look at it and it helps me breathe,” she says.