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

Michael A. Olivas, ed., "Colored Men" and "Hombres Aqui": Hernandez v. Texas and the Rise of Mexican American Lawyering. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2006. Sometimes an event comes to official societal attention like a bolt out of the blue and in the process, for a brief shining moment of justice, breaks the long, dark silence of caste oppression. So it was with an unlikely civil-rights case, Hernandez 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. A toilet sign in a county courthouse in rural Texas featured in the Court's unanimous decision and Chief Justice Earl Warren's landmark opinion, which is why it is also the apt title of this unique and compelling collection of essays edited by Michael A. Olivas.