Robert Parker Jr. speaks with lawmakers ahead of a Wednesday press conference. (Photo by Laura Tesler/Oregon Capital Chronicle)
The decades-long plight of a Black legislative employee wrongfully accused of financial impropriety during his time battling the influence of oil companies in Salem has lit a flame under an unusual bipartisan duo of Oregon lawmakers.
Reps. Ed Diehl, R-Scio and Travis Nelson, D-Portland, two of the Capitol’s prominent conservative and progressive lawmakers, announced Wednesday that they would be introducing a legislative fix to begin the process of compensating Robert Parker Jr., an attorney and former legislative aide from the 1980s whose career was derailed by allegations of misusing his position in the Capitol for financial gain. Former Rep. Jeff Kropf, R-Sublimity and former Sen. Dennis Linthicum, R-Beatty, as well as Sen. Lew Frederick, D-Portland, joined Parker, Diehl and Nelson at a Wednesday news conference.
“The state of Oregon wronged Bob Parker,” Nelson said. “He was framed, and for decades, he was denied the type of income that a lawyer of his caliber could have earned.”
Nelson and Diehl, who is running for governor, say they want to go further than a symbolic gesture. An amendment Diehl put forth for House Bill 4172 would create a task force that would report to the Oregon Legislature by December on how much to compensate wrongfully accused individuals for whom the legislature has formally found to have suffered damages from discriminatory government officials.
Although there are only a few days left in this year’s legislative session, the lawmakers say they want to begin the conversation for compensating Parker with the hopes that leadership in Salem will take the issue more seriously. They exchanged handshakes and hugs with Parker ahead of their remarks.
“It isn’t a grievance commission. It’s not an ideological exercise. It’s about constitutional accountability,” Diehl said. “And when government power causes measurable harm, and when this body formally acknowledges that harm, justice requires more than words, it requires action.”
The Oregon Department of Justice and the Oregon Government Ethics Commission all investigated Parker’s activity. Allegations included claims that he asked a lobbyist for a loan to help start a nationwide insurance company for African Americans, accepted free basketball tickets and impersonated his boss, state Sen. Jim Hill, D-Salem, when a bank called Hill’s office to confirm Parker’s employment for a credit check. Hill eventually became Oregon’s first Black statewide elected official as state treasurer.
Parker strongly denied those claims and was ultimately cleared of any ethics violations or criminal wrongdoing, including by a grand jury on three separate occasions. News organizations such as KGW and The Oregonian/Oregonlive.com have previously reported on his story.
But amid the allegations, Parker resigned from his position, and state courts denied his admission to the bar for practicing law in the state. As many in Salem were beginning to recognize Oregon’s long history of anti-Black racism, the Legislature in 2021 passed Senate Concurrent Resolution 22, which issued Parker a formal apology and noted that an ethics investigation into him “contained references on Robert Parker’s race and Muslim faith and contained references to interracial dating, all being racially charged extraneous material not common to such reports.”
Although Parker filed lawsuits seeking redress, those stalled in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and faced an uphill battle given existing statute of limitations rules, according to a 2024 letter from the Oregon Department of Administrative Services.
The compensation bill is parked in the House Rules Committee, which isn’t limited by traditional committee deadlines as the Legislature approaches the Sunday deadline by which lawmakers must officially end this year’s short session. While legislative counsel has identified some technical issues with the bill, Diehl said that House Speaker Julie Fahey, D-Eugene, could introduce a bill in the committee that “reflects the same intent and corrects the drafting concerns.”
A spokesperson for Fahey was not immediately able to provide a comment.
From Michigan to Oregon
Parker was born in 1955, growing up in Flint, Michigan, in what the Senate resolution described as a “hardscrabble childhood that veered into experiencing severe poverty” after his father’s death when he was 13. After dropping out of high school and being forced to attend reform school, he obtained his GED, went to community college and the University of Michigan. Eventually, he graduated from North Carolina Central University School of Law.
After graduating law school, Parker went on to work for an insurance company and a prosecutor. In 1987, he accepted an offer from Hill to work as committee administrator for the Senate Business, Housing and Finance Committee, which Hill chaired, according to the resolution. He passed the examination for admission to the bar in Oregon with the goal of creating a landmark property and casualty insurance company for African Americans across the nation.
His hopes were quickly dashed. That year, Parker was working on legislation empowering local gas dealers for his committee, over the objections of powerful oil companies. The resolution asserts that opponents of that legislation sought to derail the bill by making allegations of unethical and illegal behavior by Parker.
Parker said Wednesday that he couldn’t quantify the loss he experienced in terms of monetary compensation, adding that he was on the verge of creating an African American-owned insurance company before the allegations hit. He said he avoided seeking psychological treatment during the three decades he was prevented from practicing law because he could not afford to do so and did not want to give fodder to the Oregon State Bar.
“I had to go through a lot, internalize a lot, and take care of a family without food stamps, welfare, unemployment or scams,” he said. “I didn’t want to be a criminal. I didn’t want to be a mastermind, I didn’t want to be someone outside of the parameters of the law.”
Despite being cleared by the grand juries, the Oregon Government Ethics Commission investigated him after Marion County’s district attorney sent it a letter detailing the allegations against him. It wasn’t an official complaint or motion, but the commission went forward with an inquiry, according to the resolution.
Parker eventually obtained a final order from the commission vacating its initial findings of wrongdoing. Although the Oregon Supreme Court had agreed to allow the Oregon State Bar to deny his admission, it reversed that outcome in a December 2021 ruling.
Differing visions of impact
While Wednesday’s announcement crossed party lines, and both Diehl and Nelson acknowledged a rare instance of the two working together in harmony in the Capitol, there were also some ideological differences on display.
Diehl has publicly railed against “woke stuff” in Oregon public schools, using a term that originated in African American Vernacular English in reference to awareness of social injustice and racial discrimination. Conservatives have used it as a catch-all to describe instances of left-wing bias in American education.
Diehl on Wednesday maintained that he would continue that rhetoric, adding that his support for the amendment is “about justice for Bob Parker, with specific things that happened to him.”
“I don’t care what color he is, what happened is wrong, and that’s it,” he said. “This is about equal protection, about our justice system, about a system in this building that I think sometimes doesn’t feel very democratic.”
Frederick, who spearheaded the 2021 Senate resolution, meanwhile, saw the amendment as the first step in creating space for more individuals to come forward with their stories about all kinds of discrimination people have experienced at the hands of government officials.
“I also hope that it encourages, or supports the idea that folks, before they begin to do something like this, they’ll say, ‘Wait a minute, if we do this, we don’t want to be in the middle of this in 20 years, because that can be creating some problems’,” he said. “So we’ll see how this works out, and I will continue to talk about things that my colleague calls woke, if that’s all right.”
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