The New York Times - USA (2020-08-09)

26 N THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARIESSUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 2020

Robert Gnaizda, a lawyer who
gained a national reputation de-
fending the civil and economic
rights of the poor and minority
groups so successfully that law-
suits against their adversaries of-
ten proved unnecessary, died on
July 11 in San Francisco. He was
83.
The cause was listed as a heart
attack. His son Matthew said he
had been in declining health for
some time.
Mr. Gnaizda (pronounced guh-
NAYZ-duh) risked his life gather-
ing evidence in the South in the
1960s to help fight the intimida-
tion that kept Black citizens from
registering and voting. He was an
advocate for farm workers and
the rural poor, fought discrimina-
tion in hiring by police and fire de-
partments, and successfully chal-
lenged banks that victimized
Black and Hispanic borrowers.
“Bob Gnaizda was, in my opin-
ion, the most imaginative, cre-
ative and consequential public in-
terest lawyer of his generation in
the United States,” said J. Antho-
ny Kline, presiding justice of the
California Court of Appeal in San
Francisco. Justice Kline had
formed a pioneering public inter-
est law firm in California in 1971
with Mr. Gnaizda and two other
lawyers.
The marginalized plaintiffs Mr.
Gnaizda represented “were de-
voted to him because he incorpo-
rated them in strategic decision
making and ensured they re-
ceived credit for victories,” Jus-
tice Kline said by email, and “the
respect he had from many of his
adversaries enabled him to nego-
tiate settlements that became es-
tablished progressive norms with-
out the need to engage in expen-
sive and time-consuming litiga-
tion.”
Robert Leslie Gnaizda was born
in Brooklyn on Aug. 6, 1936, to
Samuel and Sandra (Ackerman)
Gnaizda. His mother, the daugh-
ter of Russian and Polish immi-
grants, ran a commercial real es-
tate business; his father, a Jewish
immigrant from Russia, became a

pharmacist. Robert was raised in

the Brownsville section, then a

gritty Jewish enclave, where he

defended vulnerable friends

against neighborhood bullies and

biked to Ebbets Field to cheer on

Jackie Robinson.

“Dodger fans had a reputation

for being rude and rowdy,” his son

Matt said. “But 10-year-old Bob

observed that the Black fans at

the stadium were extremely po-

lite, well behaved and well

dressed — unlike the other fans.

And this made him begin to ques-

tion the common stereotypes.”

As a teenager he worked in a job

training program for Black young-

sters, Matt Gnaizda said. “These

experiences — plus the discrimi-

nation he felt as a Jew — led him to

see that there was injustice in the

world,” his son said. “And he

wanted to do something about it.”

After graduating from

Stuyvesant High School in Man-

hattan, Mr. Gnaizda attended Co-

lumbia University, where he was

so struck that his classmates were

almost all white and male that he

was prompted to write an article

for The Columbia Daily Spectator,

the student newspaper.

“I asked two questions: One re-

lated to women, the other related

to Black students,” he said in an in-

terview in 2018 with Columbia

College Today, an alumni publica-

tion. “I wondered why a school at

the edge of Harlem had only one

Black student per undergraduate

class. And because my own

mother was outstanding at every-

thing she did, I wondered why we

didn’t have any women. But the

paper wouldn’t print it; they

thought it was too inflammatory.”

Mr. Gnaizda graduated from

Columbia in 1957. He considered

studying medicine but decided to

apply to law school at Harvard

and Yale and become a lawyer if

he was admitted by either. He was

accepted by both and chose Yale.

He earned his law degree in 1960.

Asked in the 2018 interview

what drove him to abandon corpo-

rate law when he was 28 to pursue

a social justice agenda, he replied

facetiously: “I think boredom. I

was a tax attorney, and the work

didn’t interest me much. I decided

to go to Mississippi in early 1965,

and there I realized that I had

some natural talents.”

By cultivating local white civic

leaders in conversations that

dealt as much with baseball as

with voting, he was able to gather

enough evidence during a public

hearing on the disenfranchise-

ment of Black people in Clay

County, Miss., to help propel pas-

sage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Mr. Gnaizda lived in San Fran-

cisco. In addition to his son

Matthew, he is survived by his

wife, Claudia Viek; another son,

Joshua; and a granddaughter. His

first marriage ended in divorce, as

did his second, to Ellen Eatough.

(Both his sons are from that mar-

riage.)

Mr. Gnaizda founded California

Rural Legal Assistance in 1966

and, five years later, Public Advo-

cates, a firm that defended under-

dogs, with Justice Kline, Sid

Wolinsky and Peter Sitkin. He also

helped found the Greenlining In-

stitute in 1993 to discourage finan-

cial institutions from discriminat-

ing against Black and Hispanic

home buyers. He was later gen-

eral counsel for the National

Asian American Coalition and the

National Diversity Coalition.

Through those and other orga-

nizations, Mr. Gnaizda accused

the Census Bureau of undercount-

ing Hispanic residents in 1970 and

pressured the San Francisco Po-

lice Department to hire more mi-

nority recruits in the 1970s.

He fought redlining by banks

that refused to lend to residents of

minority neighborhoods. He fos-

tered investment in those commu-

nities by leveraging the lenders’

lack of public-spiritedness against

them when they needed govern-

ment permission to merge with

other banks.

From 1975 to 1976, he was depu-

ty secretary of health and welfare

for Gov. Jerry Brown of California.

But years later, when Mr. Brown

was governor for a second time.

Mr. Gnaizda didn’t hesitate to sue

him for diverting the proceeds the

state had received from lawsuits

relating to national mortgage

fraud settlements. The state was

eventually ordered to repay the

money.

Mr. Gnaizda was interviewed

for the Oscar-winning documen-

tary “Inside Job” (2010) about his

efforts in the mid-2000s to warn

the Federal Reserve of the im-

pending subprime mortgage cri-

sis.

His penchant for representing

victims of bullying led him into

some unusual cases. There were,

for example, the two 7-year-olds in

California who sued Pacific Bell

Telephone in 1985 for failing to in-

form them that they would incur a

50-cent charge every time they di-

aled a Santa Claus line. (He also

founded a Giraffe Appreciation

Society, whose directors, all chil-

dren, paid tribute to the rumi-

nants “who don’t do any harm and

who stick their necks out.”)

What distinguished Mr.

Gnaizda as a zealous public inter-

est lawyer, his son Matt said, was

that he “never saw the other side

as evil; he saw them as people

who he disagreed with on certain

issues, but could be convinced to

change their behavior.”

Mr. Gnaizda agreed that many

of his lawsuits were successful be-

cause he didn’t force his oppo-

nents into a corner. “They were

just on a different side, and when

they lost, they would usually keep

their word,” he said in the Colum-

bia College Today interview

Rebecca Kee, who worked with

Mr. Gnaizda at the National Diver-

sity Coalition, put it this way:

“Bob will sue you, and somehow

you’ll still like him.”

Robert Gnaizda, 83, Who Saw Injustice

And Did Something About It, Is Dead

Robert Gnaizda in 2007. He

tried to warn the Federal Re-

serve of the mortgage crisis.

PETER DASILVA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Mr. Gnaizda, far right, at a news conference in 1975. From 1975 to 1976, he was deputy secretary of

health and welfare for Gov. Jerry Brown of California. Years later, Mr. Gnaizda sued Mr. Brown.

VIA MATT GNAIZDA

A lawyer who gained

a national reputation

defending poor and

minority plaintiffs.

By SAM ROBERTS

Lorenzo Wilson Milam, who de-

voted much of his life to building

noncommercial radio stations

with eclectic fusions of music, talk

and public affairs, died on July 19

at his home in Puerto Escondido,

Mexico. He was 86.

Charles Reinsch, a former man-

ager of KRAB-FM in Seattle, Mr.

Milam’s first station, announced

the death. Mr. Milam moved full

time to Mexico from San Diego af-

ter having several strokes in 2017.

He also struggled with the ef-

fects of polio, which he had con-

tracted as a teenager, and which

led him to use crutches and leg

braces for much of his life and a

wheelchair later on.

Mr. Milam loathed commercial

radio stations, which he saw as

purveyors of mindless junk. With

KRAB and about a dozen other

stations that he helped start in the

1960s and ’70s, he created a free-

wheeling, esoteric vision of com-

mercial-free community radio as

the voice of the people it served.

He wanted his stations to have

inexperienced contributors, both

on and off the air. He encouraged

locals to help him program the sta-

tions and contribute a few dollars

to keep these shoestring opera-

tions open.

“What’s wrong with commer-

cial radio?” Mr. Milam said in a

1967 interview on “Mike Wallace

at Large,” a CBS News radio pro-

gram. “They play material that

will be accepted by the masses. I

say, ‘To hell with the masses.’ ” He

added, “We play things that aren’t

commonly accepted because no

one else will put it on the air.”

KRAB’s on-air menu featured

ethnic and classical music, read-

ings (poetry, newspaper articles,

children’s books, histories and sci-

entific journals), commentary

(some of it rantings by radicals on

both the left and right), panel dis-

cussions, radio plays, interviews

and programming produced by lo-

cal groups, among them a fringe

White Citizens’ Council.

Mr. Milam did not want a poem

or piece of music diminished by

the sound of an announcer break-

ing in at the end. To let listeners

absorb the intensity of what they

had just heard, he sometimes let

as many as 10 minutes of silence

pass before another program be-

gan.

The silences — which on a com-

mercial station would have been

filled at least partly by ads — were

an element of Mr. Milam’s non-

commercial policy.

“Broadcast time is too valuable

to be sold,” he said on the Wallace

program. “I think it should be giv-

en away — and I think it should be

given away with a rose.”

Mr. Milam was not the architect

of noncommercial radio. The first

such station was said to be KPFA-

FM in Berkeley, Calif., founded in

1949 by Lewis Hill, who also estab-

lished the Pacifica Foundation, its

parent organization. Mr. Milam

volunteered at KPFA in the late

1950s while he was taking gradu-

ate courses at the University of

California, Berkeley.

“If Lew Hill fathered the move-

ment, Lorenzo Milam reared it,”

Jesse Walker wrote in “Rebels on

the Air: An Alternative History of

Radio in America” (2001).

Mr. Milam left KRAB in the late

1960s and helped start commer-

cial-free stations in St. Louis, San

Francisco, Dallas, Portland, Ore.,

Los Gatos, Calif., and elsewhere.

KRAB went off the air in 1984.

“He was so excited about radio

and truly believed in it,” Mr. Rein-

sch, who is also KRAB’s archivist,

said in an interview. “He had this

fantasy that he would change the

world with it.”

Lorenzo Wilson Milam was

born on Aug. 2, 1933, in Jack-

sonville, Fla. His father, Robert,

was a lawyer and real estate in-

vestor. His mother, Meriel, was a

homemaker.

Mr. Milam was stricken with po-

lio in 1952, after his first year at

Yale. His sister, who was also

named Meriel, also contracted the

disease and died a few months lat-

er, leaving him with memories

that he excavated in his book “The

Cripple Liberation Front March-

ing Band Blues” (1984).

“The iron maiden continues to

pump dead lungs for over an hour

before the night nurse discovers

the drowned creature, gray froth

on blue lips,” he wrote. “My sister,

who never did anyone any harm,

who only wished joy for those

around her, now lies ice and bone,

the good spirit fled from her.”

Mr. Milam learned to use a

wheelchair at a Jacksonville hos-

pital. He was also treated at a re-

habilitation facility in Warm

Springs, Ga., founded by Presi-

dent Franklin D. Roosevelt.

He studied English literature at

Haverford College in Pennsylva-

nia, where he struggled to navi-

gate the campus on crutches. He

graduated in 1957 and worked at a

Philadelphia television before

moving to Berkeley. In 1959 he de-

cided he wanted to return east to

start a community station in

Washington. His goal for it was

lofty: He wanted it to help avoid

World War III.

Mr. Milam envisioned influenc-

ing government policymakers

and generals with vigorous for-

eign policy debates and a docu-

mentary program on the hazards

of nuclear radiation.

“After a few months of this, they

would be saying to themselves,

‘We must be idiots to think that

war is the answer to our prob-

lems,’ ” he was quoted as saying in

“Rebels on the Air.”

But he was unable to get a li-

cense from the Federal Communi-

cations Commission after inform-

ing the agency that the station

would be Pacifica-like.

“I filed the application, and it

took me over a year of sad waiting

to find out that Pacifica was con-

sidered to be a front for the Com-

munist Party,” he told The Pitts-

burgh Post-Gazette in 2014.

Mr. Milam turned his attention

to Seattle and received a license

for KRAB in 1962. His successes

there and elsewhere led him to

write the whimsically titled “Sex

and Broadcasting: A Handbook

on Starting a Radio Station for the

Community” (1975).

But the failure in 1977 of a Dallas

station that he had started with

partners, KCHU-FM, after oper-

ating for just two years, led him to

back away from community radio.

Over the next 40 years, he fo-

cused on writing and editing. He

published The Fessenden Review,

a literary journal, and RALPH:

The Review of Arts, Literature,

Philosophy and the Humanities,

an online book review magazine.

He described his career in “The

Radio Papers: From KRAB to

KCHU” (1986) and wrote passion-

ately about disabilities in “The

Cripple Liberation Front” and

“Cripzen: A Manual for Survival”

(1993).

In later years, his polio re-

turned.

“All disabled people know fear,”

Mr. Milam told New Mobility, a

magazine for wheelchair users, in

2000. “We know that we’re very
      vulnerable. We know we’re going
      to get more and more disabled and
      we’re going to get more and more
      dependent and we’re probably go-
      ing to get more and more scared.”
      “How do we handle being an
      old, scared geezer?” he asked.
      He is survived by a daughter,
      Kevin; a grandchild; a sister, Pa-
      tricia; and a brother, Robert. His
      marriage to Clare Marx ended in
      divorce.
      KRAB came to define Mr. Mil-
      am’s sense of mission. Having
      been thwarted in his first efforts to
      start a station, he turned KRAB
      into a centerpiece of listener-sup-
      ported radio.
      “It took me from being a loser
      poet and failed Washington, D.C.,
      broadcaster to being something of
      value for my society and my cul-
      ture,” he wrote in “The Radio Pa-
      pers.” “It took me from vague
      hopes of good programming in
      1959 to a purveyor of what is and
      can be the best in men’s souls.”

Lorenzo Wilson Milam, 86, a Guru of Community Radio

Lorenzo Wilson Milam in the studios of his first station, KRAB-

FM, the noncommercial Seattle station he helped start in 1962.

VIA KRAB ARCHIVE

By RICHARD SANDOMIR

Offering an eclectic

mix of music and talk

and a dream of

changing the world.