Jesse Robinson; Pioneering Black Civic Leader

Jesse Lee Robinson, a Compton civic leader and management expert who was the first black to chair the Los Angeles County Grand Jury, has died. He was 81.

Robinson, who pioneered a black presence in the all-white city of Compton in the 1950s, died June 8 at St. Francis Hospital after a seven-year battle with cancer.

“The Compton Ku Klux Klan used to ride out in full regalia on horses and line up on the south side of Imperial Highway,” Robinson told The Times in 1987. “That was their way of telling the blacks in Watts that this was as far as you can come.”

But in 1949, Robinson bought a two-story house in Compton on an acre of land where he grew fruit trees and encouraged neighborhood children to help with the gardening in exchange for swimming in his pool.

In 1954, Robinson formed the Compton chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People in his living room and served as president. In 1963, he became the first black to serve on the Compton High School Board of Trustees. In the same year he founded the city’s Enterprise Savings & Loan and became chairman of the board. In 1974, he became the first black to head the county’s grand jury, which undertook a study of the problems of Compton.

In 1984, Robinson served as a track and field official at the Los Angeles Olympics, and urged that the Olympic torch route include Compton. He wrote a book about past Olympic athletes with roots in Compton, titled “Pride,” which was distributed to Compton schoolchildren. He also organized Compton’s Hometown Hero program saluting successful natives and residents and publicizing their careers in pamphlets distributed through Compton schools.

In 1987, the city that had sought to shut him out as a youth named a flower-bedecked plot of ground at Alameda Street and the Artesia (91) Freeway the Jesse Robinson Park in his honor.

“Jesse Robinson is one of the greatest guys around,” Councilman Maxcy D. Filer said at the time. “In every way--civic, humanitarian, philanthropic--he’s the best.”

Of all Robinson’s accolades--including citations from the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House of Representatives, the state Senate, the Los Angeles City Council and the city of Compton--it was his adopted city’s naming the park in his honor that overwhelmed him.

“That was something you would expect to happen to you after you die,” he told The Times when the honor was bestowed. “I feel that I owe the city something because of that. I don’t feel we are ever going to be even.”

Robinson was born Jan. 17, 1912, in Hattiesburg, Miss., the only child of a couple who soon separated. He lived with relatives while his mother made her way to Beverly Hills to seek work as a domestic. She moved him to Watts when he was 12.

“The difference between me and the kids of Compton today is that they don’t get a chance to see successful people,” Robinson told The Times in 1987. “My mother worked for some of the wealthiest people in Beverly Hills and I got to see what the good life is like, but I also saw that there is a price to pay. While I was eating in the kitchen, I would listen to the people eating in the dining room. Instead of talking about other things, they would talk about business.”

A track star at Manual Arts High School, Robinson was recruited to run the quarter-mile and half-mile for Compton College in 1931, which he later described as “an oasis in a desert of prejudice.” He later attended UCLA.

Robinson worked his way through school, playing the saxophone in swing bands.

“When I was 15 years old, my mother bought me a saxophone,” Robinson once said in discussing his early road to success. “Learning to play that thing took up all of my time. . . . You can’t be running track, getting your grades, blowing the horn and still be doing illegal things. Heck, I never smoked or drank until I was 30.”

Robinson married his high school sweetheart, Myrtle Comfort, on Christmas, 1936, and started a career with the U.S. Postal Service, figuring it offered a more reliable income than music. He began as a substitute worker and retired 32 years later, in 1967, as superintendent of training for Los Angeles County. Along the way he founded and chaired the area’s National Alliance of Postal Employees and the Post Office Garden Club.

After his retirement, Robinson founded Robinson Research, management consultants specializing in training employees, and taught business at East Los Angeles College.

He served as a co-chairman of the Greater Los Angeles Urban Coalition from 1970 to 1976, was an official for the Amateur Athletic Union for 25 years and wrote a sports column for the Compton newspaper. He was active with the Salvation Army, the American Heart Assn., the Grand Juror Assn., Grand People, Boy Scouts of America, the USC and UCLA athletic programs and Compton College.

Robinson is survived by his wife; a daughter, Elizabeth Robinson-Williams; his cousin, Greg Washington, who helped to care for him during his long illness, and several other cousins.

Services are scheduled for 11 a.m. Saturday at Grant African Methodist Episcopal Church, 10435 S. Central Ave., Los Angeles.

The family has asked that any memorial contributions be made to the Grant AME Church or to the Nickerson Gardens School Project.