Colston Westbrook
American academic
Colston Richard Westbrook (September 14, 1937 – August 3, 1989) was an American teacher and linguist who worked in the fields of minority education and literacy. At the University of California, Berkeley, he established a program of prison outreach and approved students from the Bay Area to serve as volunteers. Some of the participants from Berkeley and two former prisoners at Vacaville Prison were among the founding members in 1973 of the radical leftist group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Westbrook had previously served with a contractor in Vietnam for the US Army that provided services to the CIA. After returning to the United States, he worked for the Los Angeles Police Department in its Criminal Conspiracy Section and the State of California's Criminal Identification and Investigation Unit. In 1970 he started graduate work at University of California, Berkeley and taught at the university after completing it.
Early life
Westbrook was born on September 14, 1937, in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, where he was raised. He also grew up in this area. His father was Edward Cody Westbrook, who died in Germany while serving as a sergeant in the Army in World War II. His mother, Virginia Ruth (Colston) Westbrook, was first a housewife and then held various jobs while raising their five children. She stressed their education. His siblings were Cody, Naomi (married name Martinez), and Diane and Tanya Hill.
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This entry incorporates text from “Colston Westbrook” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.