Debunking Mexican American Apartheid: A Long, Dark Silence of Law, a Brief Shining Moment of Justice

Abstract

Review of Michael A. Olivas, ed., “Colored Men” and “Hombres Aquí:” Hernández v. Texas and the Rise of Mexican American Lawyering. The focus is on an unlikely civil-rights case, Hernández v. Texas, involving a drunken barroom brawl and a club-footed murder suspect, which in 1954 became the first ever tried by Mexican American lawyers before the U.S. Supreme Court, and the first to open up for persons of Latin American ancestry the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Keywords: Hernández v. Texas, Racial Segregation, Jury Selection, Mexican American Lawyers, U.S. Supreme Court, Fourteenth Amendment