Colston Westbrook

Colston Richard Westbrook (1937–1989) 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.

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.

Westbrook attended Chambersburg primary and high schools, graduating with honors in 1955.

After graduation he and his elder brother, Cody, traveled from Pennsylvania to Richmond, California to live with their maternal grandmother.

Colston attended Contra Costa College, in San Pablo where he excelled, particularly at languages.

He was an honors student.

He was selected to travel to Rome, Italy to represent Contra Costa College under President Dwight D. Eisenhower's People to People Student Ambassador Program.

In an unusual path, Westbrook served in the Army, followed by the Air Force.

After an assignment in South Korea, he was assigned in 1960 to Travis Air Force Base in California.

Upon completion of military service in 1967, he taught English at the International Christian University in Tokyo.

During that period he became friends with Steven Mbandi and later visited him in his home country of Cameroon.

While in Tokyo he was recruited for a civilian position in South Vietnam with Pacific Architects and Engineers, a US government contractor for the Central Intelligence Agency's Phoenix Program.

He worked with PAE for five years there, as the United States became increasingly embroiled in warfare, in an effort to prevent South Vietnam from being overtaken by communists.

In 1968 Westbrook returned to the United States, where he began working with the Los Angeles Police Department's Criminal Conspiracy Section and the State of California's Criminal Identification and Investigation Unit.

During that time radical black militant organizations were a top target of those units.

According to writer Ward Churchill, circumstantial evidence suggests that Westbrook could have begun a working relationship at the time with Donald DeFreeze, an alleged informant for LAPD.

Years later Westbrook had contact with DeFreeze when the latter was in prison at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville.

By then working as a teaching assistant and later professor at University of California, Berkeley, Westbrook had set up a program of prisoner outreach for student volunteers.

They worked with members of the Black Cultural Association, an organization of black prisoners, to participate in discussion groups on politics and social justice, and assist in education.

Westbrook organized student volunteers to work with prisoners, who included DeFreeze.

In 1970 he started graduate work at University of California, Berkeley and taught at the university after completing it.

Westbrook enrolled in the Linguistics department at the University of California, Berkeley in September 1970.

By this time, he had mastered several foreign languages — Korean, Japanese, Italian, German, and French.

He also studied Swahili at Berkeley with Bwana Kaaya, from Tanzania.

He understood and had a working knowledge of Bakweri.

He worked in the fields of minority education and literacy.

While a student, he won a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the Sorbonne in Paris.

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.

When a journalist asked Westbrook in 1974 why he had gone to Vietnam, he answered, "Money, why else? I was told by the American Embassy in Tokyo I could make $10,000 working in Vietnam. They said it pays to be black in Nam".

PAE's services as a contractor included civilian cover for CIA operatives and constructing 44 Province Detention Centers.

Westbrook later denied working for the CIA.

In 1975, he completed his master's thesis on the dual linguistic heritage of African Americans, which he called "Black English dialectology."