 Hello. In this presentation, I'm going to discuss the history of civil rights in Texas. Specifically, I'll focus on the cases of Minerva Delgado, Felix Longoria, and Hemans Sweat. I'll go over these three events and explain how they changed civil rights for minorities in Texas after World War II. My name is Gene Preuss. I'm Associate Professor of History at the University of Houston downtown, and I'm pleased to welcome you to this presentation. Let's see how these cases influenced the progress minorities made in the history of civil rights in Texas. First, we'll start with Minerva Delgado. The case of Delgado v. Bastrop came before the federal district courts in Austin in 1948. Minerva Delgado was a six-year-old public school student, and her grandparents wanted to send her to a nearby school instead of sending her to the Mexican school, which was farther away. A few years previous, a young girl was sexually assaulted and died, and her grandparents were understandably worried about her walking to and from school alone. Attorneys from the League of United Latin American Citizens, LULAC, with assistance from the ACLU, American Civil Liberties Union, represented several Mexican-American families from the central Texas region, and they brought the case to the federal courts. The plaintiff's attorneys based their argument on a recent case in California, Mendes v. Westminster. In this 1946 case, a California court ruled that Mexican-American students could not be discriminated against, simply on the grounds that they were Mexican-American. The court ruled that the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Delgado allowed Mexican-Americans full citizenship rights, so there was no constitutional reason to segregate them in public schools. When the case in Texas came to court, it was pretty apparent that the central Texas school districts were segregating in violation of the student's 14th Amendment rights. So federal district judge Ben Rice agreed that the schools should not continue practice the segregation based on ethnicity, but he did allow school districts to use a provision from the 1930 Del Rio v. Salvatllera decision that allowed separate classes based on language deficiencies. The problem in Bastrop and in most Texas schools was there was no language test given to justify segregation. It was simply done based upon ethnicity. Next is what comes to be known as the Felix Longoria affair. In 1945, Longoria was killed in the Philippines in the closing days of World War II. When his remains were returned to his home in Three Rivers, Texas in 1949 for reburial, his family asked the local funeral home to hold a wake service for private Longoria. A wake is a religious prayer service for the deceased. The funeral homeowner and operator had no problem conducting a funeral and burial for Longoria, but they didn't want to hold the wake. The operator feared that holding a wake for a Mexican American family might offend the white residents of Three Rivers who also used the funeral home. According to reports, the funeral homeowner felt that the whites in the town wouldn't want to use a funeral home that had held a service for Mexican Americans in the chapel. The incident became an international cause celebra. Longoria's widow contacted the new Mexican American civil rights organization in nearby Corpus Christi, Texas, known as American GI Forum, led by Dr. Hector Garcia. Dr. Garcia got involved in the fray and petitioned the junior U.S. Senator from Texas, London Baines Johnson, to help. Johnson ordered his staff to conduct an investigation along with representatives from the Texas Good Neighbor Commission. This was a state organization that was founded to eliminate discrimination against Mexican and Mexican Americans because Mexico refused to allow agricultural workers into the state because of high numbers of cases involving prejudice. The investigation revealed that indeed discrimination had occurred or at least the appearance of discrimination had occurred. Johnson sought to resolve the Longoria issue by having Longoria's remains buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors with the family in attendance. This case brought national attention to American GI Forum and it also solidified London Johnson's ties to civil rights. The final case we'll look at is the case of human sweat. Sweat was a Houston postal carrier who in 1946 applied to go to law school. He had been active in civil rights and was an active member of the Houston NAACP. As a result he decided that he wanted to study law so he was encouraged to apply to UT law school. But of course because of the segregated laws that were in place at the time there was no way for him to legally be admitted to UT as an African American student. The NAACP wanted sweat to challenge the state's segregation laws and by 1949 the case had worked its way up through the federal courts and came before the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1954 the Supreme Court said that the state had failed to provide a separate but equal law school for African Americans in Texas. Actually the basis for the decision was that it was impossible to create a law school that was both separate and equal. The NAACP lawyers argued that by segregating professional schools such as a law school actually prohibited students from the opportunity to network with other aspiring professionals whom they would one day have to work with. Law school is more than just studying the law. There's also the people that you get to know. There's networking and that's involved professional contacts a student would make. In Switz case he wanted to be a lawyer and one day would have to argue before the bar against white attorneys and judges who might have gone to law school with him. If he were segregated at law school from white students this would prejudice these white attorneys who he argued against and the judges he argued the law before. Texas in applying the Jim Crow segregation found in the separate but equal provision of the 1896 plus versus Ferguson decision had failed in its duty to provide equal law schools for African American students. When the state tried to establish a law school in a basement in Austin for a couple of African American students that simply did not provide an equal law school. Likewise Texas lawmakers then try to overcome the issue by creating a state university for African Americans with a law school in it and in March 1947 Texas Senate Bill 140 created the Texas State University for Negroes which later became Texas Southern University. Now let's look at Lyndon Johnson's role in all this. While he was a young man still in college he was set to become a school teacher. Johnson taught at a segregated Mexican American elementary school in Cotula Texas and also served it as its principal. He saw the discrimination the children faced and Johnson often referred to this experience when he talked about civil rights as president. Later he served as the legislative aide for US Congressman Richard Kleberg. Kleberg was a South Texas congressman and an heir to the King Ranch. Kleberg had a cousin, another US congressman named Robert Eckhart. Eckhart represented the area north of Houston and he had a reputation for being very liberal. Eckhart was one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs in the Delgado versus Bastrop case. So he was a man with a very liberal reputation that had connections to Lyndon Johnson. When Johnson was first elected to Congress he secured the first public housing grant for three housing projects in Austin. One for poor whites, one for Mexican Americans, and one for African Americans. As I mentioned earlier he intervened in the Longoria case. He called for the investigation by the Texas Good Neighbor Commission. It's interesting to note that one of his assistants, Liz Carpenter, was a sister of the Texas Good Neighbor Commission Executive Secretary, Tom Sutherland, who had led the investigation into cases of discrimination in the Longoria and Delgado cases. So it's clear from the evidence that LBJ was deeply involved in supporting civil rights for Mexican Americans very early in his life. There is another person from the area, a young man named Laurel Fred Cavasos, Jr. Cavasos was born in 1927 on the King Ranch. His father was the foreman of the San Diego Trudist Division of the Ranch. In 1980, Cavasos became the first Hispanic and first alumnus to be named President of Texas Tech University. In 1988, Cavasos was chosen by President Ronald Reagan to be Reagan's final Secretary of Education. Cavasos stayed in this position into the early George H. W. Bush administration. It's interesting that the Cavasos has come out of South Texas in the Corpus Christi Kingsville area where you have organizations like American GI Forum and LULAC actively promoting Mexican American civil rights. While Cavasos was President of Texas Tech and during his term as Secretary of Education, his focus was on increasing educational opportunities for minority students. The early 1980s was also a time when the U.S. Census Bureau predicted that the Hispanic population would boom and predicted that by 2050 the Hispanic population would become the predominant minority group in the American Southwest and perhaps the largest minority group in the United States. It turns out that those predictions were true. Cavasos anticipated this demographic shift in the early 80s and focused his efforts on educational reform in the increasing needs of Hispanic African Americans and Native American students. By examining the examples of the Felix Longoria Fair, Heman-Swett's attempt to get into UT Law School and Mexican American children in the Delgada vs. Bastrop case, we see that Texas played a major role in post-World War II civil rights. The examples also help us understand that civil rights was not just a black and white issue. It was much more complex, much more layered, much more nuanced. If we just look at civil rights as a black and white issue, we ignore the efforts that Hispanics and Native Americans made. We must also realize that civil rights was fought on many battle fronts, not in just a handful of civil rights Supreme Court cases. It was fought in communities, at the civil and federal level, and at the state and national level. Civil rights struggles were local struggles that happened across the nation throughout the land. We also realize that many important civil rights cases began in Texas, or at least were influenced by cases in Texas. California's Mendez decision and the Texas Delgada case influenced the Swett decision, which in turn was the basis for the Brown vs. Board of Education and the Hernandez vs. Texas decision, both of 1954. If we note that Texas is also a battleground in the civil rights struggle, it makes us wonder if Texas should be considered a western state or a southern state. Many people look at the popular mythology that everyone in Texas rides a horse or wears cowboy hats. Of course, that's not true. But while it's obvious that Texas has a western flavor, it's also true that Texas adopted many of the prejudice thoughts and practices of southern states. And many of the prejudices people had against Hispanics and other minorities were reflections of similar prejudices against African Americans. I hope this presentation gives you a better understanding of how the civil rights struggle in Texas contributed to the gains and equality that minority groups were fighting for in the state. It should also give you a better understanding of how the civil rights struggles in Texas contributed to the larger picture of American civil rights history. Thank you.