Hon. Thelton Henderson

As the first African-American lawyer at the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division in the early 60’s, Judge Thelton Henderson was fired for lending Martin Luther King his government rental car to make sure Dr. King could make the March on Selma (worried a bad tire would ultimately put King in danger if he got stranded). He became a trusted advisor to King, opened a legal aid office, helped diversify law schools, and spent 37 years as a federal judge. To this day Thelton continues to mentor at his alma mater Berkeley Law School (’62). On the federal bench, Thelton developed a powerful reputation for his judicial acuity and sensitivity. 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 led to vital restrictions on the state’s use of solitary confinement. In 2006, he ruled that the state was violating constitutional standards with deficient prison medical treatment and appointed a receiver to manage the prison health care system. Thelton has said of his career, “My passion focused on cases in which individuals were getting short-changed or were underdogs against a system that seemed stacked against them.”