We deeply mourn the passing of Robert Gnaizda, Public Advocates’ co-founder, on July 11, 2020 at the age of 83 in San Francisco. He died accompanied by his loving family. We offer our heartfelt condolences to Bob’s wife and partner in social justice work, Claudia Viek and all the members of his family.
Bob Gnaizda founded Public Advocates in 1971 with J. Anthony Kline, Sid Wolinsky and Peter Sitkin. Throughout his career spanning more than 50 years, Bob worked as a public interest lawyer who expanded civil and human rights and opportunities for people of color, women, and the underprivileged. His extraordinary mind, strategic acumen and ability to put into action his many ideas made him legendary among social justice circles and well beyond.
In the words of Guillermo Mayer, Public Advocates President and CEO, “Bob was an extraordinary person – brilliant, courageous, a true powerhouse of justice. 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 low-income communities. “
Besides founding Public Advocates, Bob took part in the early work of two other prominent non-profit organizations each of which persist today: The Greenlining Institute (est. 1993), which Bob co-founded and California Rural Legal Assistance (est. 1966).
From his early days at Public Advocates, throughout his many years with the organization, he brought more than 100 class actions in federal and state courts as well as before regulatory bodies that challenged discriminatory practices of government and corporations alike.
Born in Brooklyn and educated at Columbia University and Yale Law, Bob Gnaizda initially worked as a tax attorney. The trajectory of his professional life changed, though, after traveling to Mississippi in 1965 where he and two Black attorneys organized a hearing on voting rights in Clay County, an area the FBI deemed too dangerous for civil rights activity. Gnaizda went on to become the Statewide Litigation Director for California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), and also Deputy Director of the organization where he represented low-income and mistreated farm workers in California’s Salinas Valley during the era of UFW-founder Cesar Chavez.
“I had the great privilege of working with Bob to open the Salinas office of CRLA,” said Public Advocates Board of Governors member Marty Glick. “We worked together there for many years, and I can say that all who ever met and worked with Bob Gnaizda – allies and opponents alike—would agree that he was the single most imaginative and creative public interest advocate ever. His accomplishments are legendary. He did it all with a killer sense of humor and an engaging, caring, one of a kind personality. We will miss him,” said Glick.
At Public Advocates, Bob Gnaizda’s achievements included convincing the U.S. Commerce Department to correct its gross under-count of Latinos following the 1970 census. In fact, Bob was a pioneer in census count advocacy for disadvantaged populations generally.
He also brought the first successful lawsuits that challenged discriminatory hiring practices in police and fire departments. As those suits were proving productive in San Francisco, he filed a complaint with the state’s Fair Employment Practices Commission on behalf of Black, Latino, and women’s organizations, charging police and fire departments in 28 other California cities with bias. Using similar techniques, Bob helped integrate the upper-management of some of the country’s most powerful financial institutions and utilities as well.
Fellow Public Advocates co-founder, Sidney Wolinsky, once said Bob Gnaizda “probably has more ideas per hour than most of us have in a year.” Judge Tony Kline, another co-founder of the firm, described Gnaizda as “the most imaginative and effective lawyer that I’ve ever worked with [and] the most effective public interest lawyer in this nation.”
Gnaizda was California’s Health Director and Chief Deputy Secretary for Health, Welfare and Prisons under Governor Jerry Brown between 1975-76, and was the State Bar representative for the Federal Judicial Selection Committee.
After his brief stint in government, Bob returned to Public Advocates, and in 1979 he helped form the Greenlining Coalition. Acting as its General Counsel, he was Public Advocate’s chief connection to the coalition, which would grow to include dozens of organizations and regularly challenge “redlining”–the illegal, yet common practice of denying, limiting, or overcharging low-income and minority communities for financial services and products.
In addition to his legal genius, Bob mentored generations of public interest lawyers and law students. Among them is Public Advocates managing attorney Richard Marcantonio, who was Bob’s summer law student intern in 1986. “Bob had the confidence to give his interns significant responsibility, and inspired us to believe in ourselves. He was a mentor for years afterward, said Richard.”
In 1993, Bob left Public Advocates to co-found the Greenlining Institute. While there, he met regularly with the chair of the Federal Reserve Bank. Later, Gnaizda would be recognized for warning the Fed as early as 1999 (well ahead of financial collapse of 2007-08) about growth of predatory lending practices targeting low-income borrowers and the economic problems they were creating. Between 2009 and 2018, Gnaizda served as general counsel for the National Asian-American Coalition and its sister organization, the National Diversity Coalition.
Among the numerous honors Gnaizda has received are the NAACP Distinguished Service Award (1973), the Mexican American Political Association Lucha Award (1998); and the California State Bar Association’s Loren Miller Legal Services Award (2009), a lifetime achievement recognition for those who have done significant work in extending legal services to the poor.
“Bob will deservedly be respected and honored for his devotion to civil rights and justice, for his brilliant legal and strategic imagination, and his leadership in CRLA, the Greenlining Institute, and our beloved Public Advocates,” said former Public Advocates CEO Jamienne Studley. “I cherish his warm welcome to me and the next generation of advocates into the PA community, his kindness, the twinkle in his eyes, and his joy when the civil rights community gathered. He was a giant, a crusader, and a mensch.”
Reflecting on the roots of his public interest law career at his retirement in 2018, Gnaizda recalled an incident at Hebrew school when he was nine years old. He was facing expulsion for questioning the “wisdom and tolerance of God in His treatment of Moses.” Young Bob felt that allowing the Jews to wander for 40 years in the desert was equivalent to torture. Gnaizda’s mother stood up for him. He remained enrolled at the school, and, surveying the career that followed, his innate sense of fairness and his willingness to challenge authority remained intact.
Bob will be greatly missed by our Public Advocates family, but his memory will always be cherished. In the words of Public Advocates’ Board of Governors Chair, Bob Olson, “We will always remember and pay tribute to Bob Gnaizda by honoring, through the work we do each day, the passion and commitment to justice that distinguished Bob’s life and inspired his co-founding of Public Advocates nearly 50 years ago.”
