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Gus Garcia Wasn't Just Another Tall Texas Tale

Even by Texas standards, larger-than-life characters the likes of lawyer Gus Garcia exceeded all such expectations.

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  Even by Texas standards, larger-than-life characters the likes of lawyer Gus Garcia exceeded all such expectations.

   I first learned of his heroic courtroom brilliance through my father José’s vivid recollections.

   My father was my first and best history teacher. He would detail García’s various exploits to me, ending each with this approximate phrase to affirm his respect and awe: “Few men live a life of greatness and leave positive imprints on the lives of others, on society, and, in some unique instances, the world.”

   Many of my father’s lessons revolved around Mexican-American experiences that are still slighted in state textbooks. In his day, discrimination against Latinos was a given, overt and rampant throughout the state. Latinos were barred by custom from many schoolrooms and courtroom juries, and by vicious signs posted in Texas eateries, stores, public swimming pools, beaches and restrooms. In one case, a funeral home in Three Rivers refused to bury a Latino soldier, Félix Longoria, killed in World War II “because the whites would not like it.”

   García resurfaced in my life last month through a patchwork of old news accounts, historic photographs and film clips in the television documentary “A Class Apart,” about a landmark but little remembered civil rights case that was dusted off on PBS’s American Experience. He was the lead attorney in the case.

   “We were not considered intelligent,” explained the narrator.

   García’s life story shredded that lie over and over again.  After graduating from high school in San Antonio, he attended the University of Texas on an academic scholarship, earning a B.A. degree in 1936 and an LL.B. in 1938, passing the state bar the following year.

   “Gus was a member of the university debate team,” my father told me one day. “The Texans met Harvard in competition and Gus outdebated another great American, John F. Kennedy!”

   Drafted during World War II, García became a first lieutenant in the Army. He went to Japan assigned to the Judge Advocate’s office. When the United Nations was founded in 1945 in San Francisco he was part of a U.S. legal team.

   Then he returned to San Antonio, where he set up his legal practice, diving into several civil rights projects

   After the more celebrated 1946 Méndez v. Westminster Independent School District case ended segregation of Mexican-descent children in California, García filed a similar suit, Delgado v. Bastrop ISD, in Texas, along with Robert Eckhardt and A.L. Wirin of the American Civil Liberties Union. The Garcia team won.

   In the case explored in “A Class Apart,” Hernández v. State of Texas, García and fellow attorney Carlos Cadena challenged the conviction of a Mexican-American defendant by an all-white jury that intentionally excluded Hispanics, not an uncommon practice at the time. They argued that the defendant was denied a fair trial.

   It was the nation’s first Latino civil rights case to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. So invisible were Latinos then that the Justices asked Garcia if the people he represented “spoke English at all” and if they were U.S. citizens.

   “Garcia wrote a crucial chapter in our Latino history,” my father told me then. “Here he was confronting the 12 most powerful judges in the land at a time when our country didn’t even respect the remains of dead American soldiers because of their skin color!”

   So impressed were Chief Justice Earl Warren and his fellow judges that they allowed García an extra 16 minutes to voice his argument. Never before had the Court granted such permission. “Not even the great Thurgood Marshall, when he went before the Court to argue the historic  Brown v. Board of Education  case had been granted extra time,” my father told me.

   Sadly, as the PBS documentary concludes, the bottled demons García had battled for much of his life led to his untimely death at age 49, alone and broke on a park bench near San Antonio’s famed “Mercado.”

   (Texas native Andy Porras is publisher of Califas, a bilingual monthly journal in Northern California. Email him at [email protected])

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