Gilbert W. Lindsay - Biography

Biography

Gilbert William Lindsay, an African-American, was born on November 29, 1900, in Mississippi, where he worked in the cotton fields as a youth. He left Mississippi as a teenager and enrolled in a school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He then moved to Arizona, where he joined the Army and served in the 10th Cavalry and the 25th Infantry. As part of an Army program, he studied business administration at the University of Arizona. He moved to Los Angeles in 1923 or 1924 and became a City Hall janitor with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. He took a civil service exam for a clerkship, and he was given a basement office because, he said, his superiors did not want him to sit with whites. He took classes in governmental administration and political science at the University of Southern California and in business administration at UCLA during the 25 years he worked for the department.

About his years as a janitor, the Los Angeles Times quoted him as saying, "I used to scrub toilets for the city of Los Angeles with a mop—that was my job. . . I had the lowest job you can give a human being." but the Los Angeles Sentinel, a black-oriented newspaper, cited C.A. (Bob) Barker, a Los Angeles businessman, as saying, "He was a helluva janitor! That was an important job for Negroes at that time. He gave the janitor's job the same respect he gave the council position. Whatever Gil was doing was very important to him."

He was known as being a short man, standing five feet, three inches tall.

Lindsay's wife, Theresa, was from Greenville, Texas. It was said that Lindsay "began to decline mentally and physically" after Theresa died in 1984; they had been married 49 years. He had a son, Melvin; a daughter, Sylvia Thornton, a stepson, Herbert Howard, and an adopted daughter, Christina Willoughby.