Attorney, newspaper publisher, and world-class athlete Thomas Lucius Berkley was born Thomas Lucius Berkley on August 9, 1915, in DuQuoin, Illinois. His father, Braxton B. Berkeley from Tennessee, was a coal miner and labor union organizer, and his mother, Sophia Jane Holmes, from Tennessee, was a teacher. Thomas was reared in the Imperial Valley, California, where his family moved when he was young. His siblings were Ruby Berkley Goodwin, Helen Irene Berkley Peters, and Charles C. Berkley.
After high school, Berkley enrolled in Fullerton Junior College in 1934, and in 1936, he was chosen as captain of the basketball team. However, he transferred to the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) where he was a member of the Track and Field team and an outstanding hurdler for the men’s 110 meters. Berkley received a Bachelor of Arts in political science in 1938. That year, he had prepared for competing in the 1940 Summer Games in Tokyo, Japan, and then Helsinki, Finland, but the games were canceled due to World War II. Berkley diverted his energies by enlisting in the United States Army and because of his college degree, received the ranked of Second Lieutenant where he specialized in operational planning.
While in the Army, Berkley attended both Boalt Hall at the University of California at Berkeley and Hastings School of Law at the University of California at San Francisco, receiving a Doctor of Law degree in 1942. By this point Berkley had married Velda Maureen and the couple had three daughters, Gail Berkley Armstrong, Theon Berkley King, and Miriam Rhea Berkley.
Now a successful attorney in San Francisco, Berkley in 1953 led the development of Berkley Square, a 250-house racially integrated housing tract in Las Vegas. In 1963, he and Velda founded the Oakland Post News Group (OPNG), whose Oakland Post, was the most prominent weekly African American newspaper in Northern California and the first paper dedicated to the significant concerns of the African Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area. With a circulation of over 55,000, the Oakland Post News Group (OPNG) eventually included five Bay Area newspapers, including the Richmond Post and the Spanish language paper, El Mundo, all housed at 630 14th Street in downtown Oakland.
In addition to Berkley’s newspaper chain, he also founded the Center for Urban Black Charities in Oakland, a philanthropic organization and he was a co-founded of the West Coast Black Publishers Association. Meanwhile, Berkley in 1967, was appointed to the Oakland Board of Education. He also served on the California World Trade Commission and from 1969 to 1981 he was Chair of the seven-member Oakland Port Authority Board of Commissioners which managed the Port as well as the Oakland International Airport. Berkley was the first African American in the United States to serve as a commissioner of a major port.
Thomas Lucius Berkley died on December 27, 2001, in Oakland, California, of diabetes complications. He was 86. In 2002, the Oakland City Council approved a resolution officially renaming the stretch of 20th Street from Castro Street to Harrison Street “Thomas L. Berkley Way.” OPNG was bought by Paul Cobb, the former Oakland Citizen’s Committee for Urban Renewal director, in 2004.