Judge Jack Tenner, a retired Los Angeles Superior Court judge who was involved in many of the city's civil rights struggles over the last 60 years, including fighting restrictive housing covenants in the 1940s and helping to elect some of the area's most prominent African American officeholders -- including the late Mayor Tom Bradley -- has died. He was 88.
Tenner died Oct. 13 at his home on Los Angeles' Westside of complications from Parkinson's disease, his family said.
The former jurist and longtime attorney, who was white, served on the bench for 10 years until he retired in 1990 and became a private judge and mediator. A specialist in personal injury, product liability, malpractice and wrongful termination, he was known for his fairness and powers of persuasion that brought warring parties to the settlement table. He handled complex, multimillion-dollar settlements as a private judge or mediator in cases such as the Erin Brockovich case involving water contamination by Pacific Gas & Electric in Hinkley, Calif.
In the 1990s he became known to the wider public for his commentary on the O.J. Simpson murder trial for the Larry King show on CNN.
Outside the courtroom, Tenner was known as a committed fighter for civil rights.
"Everyone knew Jack Tenner as a hero in our community," Rep. Diane Watson (D-Los Angeles), who knew him for 40 years, said in an interview last week. "If integration was at stake, Jack was involved. . . . You didn't have to convince him there was inequality -- he let you know."
Tenner was born in what is now Kiev, Ukraine, on Oct. 2, 1920, and fled the former Soviet republic with his parents five years later to escape the persecution of Jews. They immigrated to Canada and eventually settled in Chicago, where he earned his law degree at DePaul University. After passing the Illinois bar in 1942, he joined the Navy and fought in the Pacific during World War II.
He arrived in Los Angeles in 1946. After passing the California bar in 1947, he became involved in civil rights issues.
Until the mid-1950s, the Los Angeles County Bar Assn. had a whites-only membership rule. Black lawyers formed their own organization, the John M. Langston Law Club. When Tenner learned of the inequity, he "insisted he wasn't going to allow the Langston Law Club to be a segregated law club. He was the first white member," said Leo Branton Jr., a civil rights attorney who has represented Angela Davis, Nat King Cole and other prominent African Americans.
