Jack Robertson

Jack Robertson 1916 - 2002

The following story appeared in the San Jose Mercury News on August 14th. We have requested permission to include it on our site.

Pillar of Education Dies

By Sara Neufeld
Mercury News - August 15, 2002
www.bayarea.com

There are more than 2,000 minority children on the Peninsula who never knew Jack Robertson, but they have him to thank for their quality education.

A Portola Valley lawyer who spent much of his life fighting to integrate Peninsula schools, Robertson died Tuesday of complications from a stroke. He was 85.

Robertson, along with attorneys Jerry Marer and Sidney Berlin, filed the landmark Tinsley desegregation lawsuit against the state and 10 school districts in 1976. It was among the first cases in the nation that sought to integrate schools across district boundaries.

After a decade in court, the lawyers won a settlement allowing a few hundred children a year who would have otherwise attended East Palo Alto's troubled Ravenswood schools to attend schools in Palo Alto and other surrounding affluent communities.

``I'm still running into people who say `thank you,' '' said Margaret Tinsley, the East Palo Alto mother whose name was listed first among the 34 parents listed as plaintiffs. ``I want to say, `I didn't do anything.' I want to say, `Thank the lawyers.' They put their whole hearts into it.''

In the Tinsley case and throughout most of his life, Robertson argued that all children suffered because Peninsula schools were effectively segregated. He was fervent in his belief that all children deserve equal educational opportunities.

Robertson's accomplishments extend far beyond the Tinsley case. He was a known leader in many circles: educational, legal, philanthropic and religious. His résumé lists more than two dozen professional and civic activities: president of the San Mateo County Bar Association, director of the United Way of the Bay Area, elder at First Presbyterian Church in Palo Alto.

As a child in Oregon in the 1920s, Robertson was exposed early on to public service, when his father -- a Republican -- became majority leader of the state Senate.

Robertson graduated from the Naval Academy in 1938 and went to work for Pan American World Airways, where he met his future wife, Helen Nicholson. She died in 1999, just shy of the couple's 60th wedding anniversary.

After returning from World War II, a labor dispute at Pan Am inspired Robertson to become a lawyer. He enrolled in 1949 in Stanford Law School, where he was in the same class as future Supreme Court Justices William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O'Connor.

Robertson went to classes at Stanford during the day while working a full-time job at Pan Am at San Francisco Airport at night -- finding time to play catch in the afternoon with his two young sons, Dave and Tom, and other neighborhood children.

Robertson's interest in public education began in the 1950s. He and his young family were living in Menlo Park, where his sons attended the Las Lomitas School District. Robertson wrote a letter suggesting that the district ``cool the rhetoric'' in a dispute over the superintendent. Before he knew it, he had been appointed to the school board.

In 1969, Robertson ran for a seat on the board of the Sequoia Union High School District. In an unpublished manuscript he finished last year, he wrote that he was ``spurred by my conscience and by newscasts which displayed the shameful treatment of black people and children in the South and recognition that although we did not have the same situation on the Mid Peninsula our schools were none the less segregated.''

At the time, Ravenswood High School was more than 90 percent black, while the district's other schools were more than 90 percent white.

Elected from 23 candidates, Robertson wrote, ``I felt my charge was to improve education for black children and other ethnic minorities.''

Robertson was the main proponent on the Sequoia board of a mandatory busing policy designed to desegregate Ravenswood High. But in the early 1970s, a new school board majority put an end to the policy. The result was nearly two decades of litigation.

By 1976, Ravenswood High was set to close, and Robertson -- teaming up with Marer and Berlin -- decided to shift his focus to the Peninsula's elementary and middle schools. Sequoia has eight feeder elementary school districts. The Ravenswood and Redwood City districts were the only ones with a substantial minority population.

Marer and Berlin said Robertson kept them going through the 10 years they worked on the Tinsley case together, without pay, from 1976 to 1986. ``At times, Sid and I would argue about strategy and tactics,'' Marer said. ``Jack would sit there and listen and then he'd figure out how to do it.'' Berlin called Robertson ``a brilliant man and a gentle, loving soul.''

Robertson made clear in his manuscript, ``The Conscience of a Community,'' that the mission of providing equal education on the Peninsula is not yet fulfilled. Over lunch, he and Marer would discuss their frustrations that education in Ravenswood has not improved despite extra money the district received as a result of their work.

Even so, Robertson's legacy is clear.

``There are children whom we have saved,'' Berlin said. ``We don't know who they are or what they'll do. But I have no doubt that because of Jack's motivation, we saved some children.''

JACK ROBERTSON

Born: Sept. 25, 1916, in Condon, Ore.

Died: Aug. 13, 2002, in Palo Alto.

Survived by: Sons Dave Robertson of Portola Valley and Tom Robertson of San Francisco; three grandchildren; and two step-grandchildren.

Services: A memorial service will be held at 3 p.m. Aug. 31 at First Presbyterian Church, Palo Alto.

Memorial: The family requests that donations be made to either Menlo-Atherton High School, Foundation for the Future, 555 Middlefield Road, Atherton, Calif. 94027, or First Presbyterian Church, Palo Alto, 1140 Cowper St., Palo Alto, Calif. 94301.