[And from the other coast, another timely
remembrance (Elaine Woo writes some of the most
thoughtful obituaries to be found in the national press):]
<http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-deanda14sep14,1,770513.story?coll=la-news-obituaries>http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-deanda14sep14,1,770513.story?coll=la-news-obituaries
OBITUARIES
James deAnda, 81; Worked to Establish Mexican Americans' Constitutional Rights
By Elaine Woo
Times Staff Writer
September 14, 2006
James deAnda, a retired federal judge who as a
lawyer on a pivotal 1950s case established that
Mexican Americans were entitled to the same
constitutional protections as other minorities,
died of prostate cancer Sept. 7 at his vacation
home in Traverse City, Mich. The longtime Houston resident was 81.
DeAnda was the last surviving member of the
four-man legal team behind Hernandez vs. Texas,
decided by the U.S. Supreme Court on May 3, 1954.
The Hernandez decision, which overturned a murder
conviction by an all-white jury, for the first
time gave Mexican Americans status as a distinct
legal classification entitled to special protection under the Constitution.
The youngest member of the team, deAnda
researched and wrote the briefs for the case, the
first tried by Mexican Americans before the nation's highest court.
He went on to wage successful legal battles
challenging substandard schooling for Mexican
American children in Texas and helped found a
leading Latino civil rights organization: the
Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational
Fund. He became a federal judge in 1979.
"He was our Thurgood Marshall," Michael A.
Olivas, a University of Houston law professor and
the editor of a recent book about the Hernandez
case, said in comparing deAnda with the first
African American Supreme Court justice.
The Hernandez case was eclipsed by Marshall's
triumph as lead attorney in Brown vs. Board of
Education, the landmark school desegregation
ruling handed down two weeks later, May 17, 1954.
Yet the Hernandez case represented a watershed
moment in Latinos' struggle for equal rights -
one that has influenced other high court
decisions, including the Bakke affirmative action case in 1978.
"I can't think of another case as important for
the Hispanic community as Hernandez," said Norma
Cantu, a former assistant secretary for civil
rights in the Clinton administration's Education
Department who now teaches law at the University of Texas in Austin.
"The legacy of the Hernandez case includes voting
rights, education and employment cases. All of
these efforts to work within the system to secure
a place at the table resulted from Judge deAnda's
work" in that case, Cantu said.
Described as modest and unassuming, deAnda often
failed to received credit for his contributions
to the Hernandez victory. "He has flown under the
radar" of history, Olivas said, "but he was right
in the thick of it. He was an equal partner to all the others."
Born in Houston, deAnda was the son of Mexican
immigrants. He attended Texas A&M University and
served in the Marines during World War II, before
receiving a law degree from the University of Texas in 1950.
He passed the bar that year, but white firms
would not hire him, especially after they learned
that his heritage was Mexican. He knocked on
doors looking for work but did not succeed until
1951, when attorney John J. Herrera offered him a
chair in his Houston office and $25 a week.
One of the new lawyer's first assignments was to
prepare a challenge of a grand jury indictment in
Fort Bend County based on the exclusion of
Latinos from juries. DeAnda found that no Latino
had ever served on a grand jury there, despite a sizable Latino population.
He believed he had solid grounds for a motion to
quash the murder indictment against Aniceto
Sanchez, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals
disagreed. It maintained that Mexican Americans
were white and that because the jury was white,
there had been no discrimination.
DeAnda was incensed. "I wanted to take the case
to the U.S. Supreme Court, but neither my client
nor I had the money," he told Olivas in an interview many years later.
The opportunity he sought came two years later,
when Herrera asked a junior associate to help him
defend a migrant cotton picker named Pete
Hernandez, who had been accused of fatally
stabbing another man during a bar fight in the east Texas town of Edna.
When Hernandez was found guilty by an all-white
jury in Jackson County, the attorneys appealed on
the grounds that no citizen of Mexican descent
had served on a jury there in 25 years. Once
again, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals could not be swayed.
The court relied on the same reasoning it had
used in the Sanchez case: that Mexican Americans
were not a separate classification from whites
and therefore were not entitled to special
consideration under the equal protection clause
of the 14th Amendment. The constitutional
amendment, passed after the Civil War and the end
of slavery, had been used chiefly to uphold the rights of African Americans.
This time, deAnda and Herrera had the resources
to continue the legal battle. Two civil rights
groups - the League of United Latin American
Citizens and the American GI Forum - stepped
forward with enough money to take the case to the
Supreme Court. Herrera invited two seasoned civil
rights lawyers, Gustavo C. Garcia and Carlos
Cadena, to join the case and present the oral arguments.
The high court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren,
"looked beyond the surface into the heart of Jim
Crow Texas," Olivas said. Warren was especially
struck by the signage cited as evidence by the
Hernandez team, including one from a local
restaurant that read "No Mexicans Served."
Another such nugget was discovered by deAnda
after he had gone in search of the men's room in
the Jackson County Courthouse. A Spanish-speaking
janitor told him the only lavatory he could use
was in the basement. There he found the facility
posted with a sign that read "Colored Men" and
"Hombres Aquí" (Spanish for men here).
"It was devastating," deAnda said of the impact
of that sign - an irrefutable symbol of the
perceived inferiority of Mexicans that clashed
with the Jackson County judges' pronouncements
that they were the same as whites. Warren cited
the signs in the written opinion as evidence that
Mexican Americans occupied a classification of
people distinct from whites in east Texas society.
He further noted that "it taxes our credulity to
say that mere chance resulted in there being no
members of this class among the over six thousand
jurors called in the past 25 years. The result bespeaks discrimination."
The court unanimously overturned Hernandez's
conviction. He was retried and convicted again,
but this time the jury included two Mexican Americans.
The second conviction was considered "a triumph,"
Olivas said. "The point is: All Mexicans ever
wanted was to be part of the process."
DeAnda went on to handle a series of important
school desegregation cases, among them Hernandez
vs. Driscoll Independent School District in 1956.
It challenged a school system that required
children from Spanish-speaking families to spend
three years in the first grade because of a
presumed need to learn English. The lawsuit was
brought on behalf of a Latino child whose parents
had deliberately taught her only English but who
had been denied entry to the white school. DeAnda
won the case, and the school district abandoned its two-track system.
In 1979 deAnda was appointed by President Carter
to the federal bench in the Southern District of
Texas. He was the nation's second Mexican
American federal judge and served for 13 years, including four as chief judge.
DeAnda is survived by his wife, Joyce, and four
children. He practiced law with Solar and
Associates in Houston until late last year, when he was diagnosed with cancer.
According to Olivas, deAnda was delighted by the
Supreme Court's action in June striking down a
Texas redistricting plan that discriminated
against Latino voters. The victory depended on
deAnda's work half a century earlier that gave
Latinos visibility in the eyes of the court.
It also brought another milestone.
"For the first time, both sides in a Supreme
Court case were argued by Latino lawyers," said
Olivas, who spoke to deAnda shortly before he
died. "He took such enormous pleasure out of that."
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