Office of External Communications

Houston, TX 77204-5017 Fax: 713.743.8199

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 16, 2004

Contact: Eric Gerber
713.743.8189 (office)
713.617.7130(pager)
egerber@uh.edu

HOUSTON, Nov. 16, 2004 – This marks the 50th anniversary of a landmark Supreme Court case that established civil rights for a mistreated minority group. The Hernández v. Texas case, which confirmed the rights of Mexican Americans, will be explored at a conference at the UH Law Center Friday, Nov. 19. And if you’re thinking Brown v. Board of Education, you’re right. But this is also the half-century mark for a lesser known but no less powerful ruling -- Hernández v. Texas, which confirmed the rights of Mexican Americans.

This milestone case, often overshadowed by the historic Brown ruling, steps into the spotlight with a conference at the University of Houston’s Law Center Friday, Nov. 19. “Hernández v. Texas at Fifty” will offer an ambitious slate of civil rights, social science and criminal law scholars who will explore the circumstances surrounding this watershed case and the implications that it held for other civil rights issues.

“This is the first case ever argued in the U.S. Supreme Court by Mexican American lawyers, who prevailed despite long odds,” said conference organizer Michael A. Olivas, William B. Bates Distinguished Chair in Law at UHLC. “This conference will show just how courageous and hardworking these lawyers were for their client and the larger community. Even the Supreme Court, which unanimously overturned the state jury trial and the Texas Supreme Court, was impressed with their presentation. Their arguments were an assault upon the longtime Texas treatment of Mexican Americans. However, the case got swamped by the historic attention paid to Brown, and so we decided to look at its importance in today’s setting.”

A keynote address will be delivered by U.S. District Judge James De Anda, one of the original attorneys in the groundbreaking 1954 Hernández case. De Anda served as district judge from 1979-92 and is now in private practice.

Conference participants include Richard Delgado (University of Pittsburgh), George Martinez (SMU), Ian Haney-Lopez (Boalt Hall), Kevin Johnson (UC-Davis), Laura Gomez (UCLA), Juan Perea (Florida), Steven Wilson (Prairie View A&M ), Thomas Russell (University of Denver), Neil Foley (University of Texas), Clare Sheridan (University of California, Berkeley), Sandra Guerra Thompson (University of Houston) and Amilcar Shabazz (University of Alabama).

Presentations include: “Race and Colorblindness After Hernández and Brown,” “Race through the Looking-Glass,” “Still ‘White’ After All These Years: Mexican Americans and the Politics of Racial Classification in the Federal Judicial Bureaucracy, Twenty-Five Years After Hernández v. Texas” and “The First Adoption of Standardized Testing at the University of Texas.”

A detailed schedule of presentations can be found at http://www.law.uh.edu/Hernandez50/program.html.

The Hernández v. Texas case involved the prosecution of a Mexican-American worker, Peter Hernández, on murder charges. When the case was tried in Jackson County, no jurors of Mexican-American descent were impaneled. Complaints and appeals against discriminatory state jury selection and trial practices eventually made their way to the country’s highest court. In an opinion published two weeks before the Brown v. Board decision, the U.S. Supreme Court held that for the purposes of applying Equal Protection, Mexican Americans were a discrete group. The case became the basis for many other civil rights precedents. Nevertheless, Hernández v. Texas has not been given the standing it deserves, in large part because it has been overshadowed by the more compelling Brown case.

The cases appear next to each other in the 1954 Supreme Court Reporter.

The conference is sponsored by the UH Law Center, Arte Público Press and several Houston-area organizations. Selected papers from the conference along with materials from the original Hernandez case will be edited for publication in the UCLA Chicano-Latino Law Review and a subsequent Arte Público Press book to be titled “COLORED MEN and HOMBRES AQUI – Hernandez v. Texas and the Emergence of Mexican American Lawyering.”

There will be no charge for the conference, and students and scholars are welcome to attend without charge for any of the events. (There will, however, be a charge for attending the Friday night dinner.)

For more information about the conference, visit http://www.law.uh.edu/Hernandez50/.

For more information about the UH Law Center, visit http://www.law.uh.edu/.

For more information about Arte Público Press, visit http://www.arte.uh.edu/.

For more information about UH visit the university’s ‘Newsroom’ at www.uh.edu/admin/media/newsroom.