Robert Gnaizda, Lawyer Who Fought for Social Justice, Dies at 83

“I asked two questions: One related to women, the other related to Black students,” he said in an interview with Columbia College Today, an alumni publication, in 2018. “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 everything 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 corporate 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 disenfranchisement of Black people in Clay County, Miss., to help propel passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Mr. Gnaizda lived in San Francisco. 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 marriage.)

He founded California Rural Legal Assistance in 1966 and, five years later, Public Advocates, a firm that defended underdogs, with Justice Kline, Sid Wolinsky and Peter Sitkin. He also helped found the Greenlining Institute in 1993 to discourage financial institutions from discriminating against Black and Hispanic home buyers. He was later general counsel for the National Asian American Coalition and the National Diversity Coalition.