Beginning this week, visitors to the Law Library will pass beneath a reminder of Harris County’s civil rights history and a leader who pressed for equal access to the law for all.
Read moreJuneteenth National Independence Day: A Legal Public Holiday
Yesterday, President Biden signed into law an act declaring June 19 a legal public holiday designated as “Juneteenth National Independence Day.” Learn more about this holiday and ways to celebrate in this blog post.
Read moreHarris County Law Library Renamed to Honor Civil Rights Leader Robert W. Hainsworth
Robert W. Hainsworth, Attorney
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Houston, TX (February 9, 2021) — Today, Harris County Commissioners Court adopted a resolution, introduced by Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis and led by Harris County Attorney Christian D. Menefee, to rename the Harris County Law Library in honor of Robert W. Hainsworth.
In 1951, Mr. Hainsworth filed a lawsuit challenging the “one-table rule,” which was a Law Library rule requiring African-American attorneys to use a single, designated table while working in the library. While the courts denied his call for equality, it is only fitting that the Law Library be rededicated to acknowledge the victory of his vision. Today’s Law Library is a place where everyone has a seat at any table.
“Mr. Hainsworth’s determination in the fight for equality is an inspiration for us all, especially those attorneys and self-represented litigants who so often use the Law Library,” County Attorney Menefee said. “He was a trailblazer. His work on this case and in later founding the Houston Lawyers Association shows that he was relentless.”
“I am very proud to support renaming the Harris County Law Library after Robert W. Hainsworth, especially during Black History Month,” said County Commissioner Ellis. “Hainsworth’s fight to desegregate the courthouse and law library paved the way for generations after him. It is only fitting that we would name our law library, which helps to make the legal system more accessible to all, in his honor.”
“We are planning projects with community partners to create a permanent exhibit in the library and to offer educational programs to raise awareness about Robert W Hainsworth and his work for equality in Harris County,” said Law Library Director Mariann Sears.
Today’s Law Library rededication was widely supported by local leaders and legal organizations at Commissioners Court, including the Houston Lawyers Association (HLA), the Houston Young Lawyers Association, the Houston Area Law Librarians, the Houston Bar Association (HBA), HLA president R.J. Blue, HBA president Bill Kroger, and several former HLA leaders.
About the Harris County Robert W. Hainsworth Law Library
The Harris County Robert W. Hainsworth Law Library opened its doors in 1915 as the Harris County Law Library, and it has continued to serve Harris County’s legal information needs for more than a century. After becoming a part of the Office of the Harris County Attorney in 2011, the Law Library greatly expanded its technology offerings and services to the public. Visit www.harriscountylawlibrary.org for more information.
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Jovita Idar: Texas Activist, Advocate, and Ally
Jovita Idar may be the most influential Texan you’ve never heard of before today. Idar was at various times an activist, a journalist, a nurse, and an educator, always lending her effort and intellect where she felt they were needed most.
Idar was born in late 1885, into a privileged Tejano family in Laredo. The second of eight children, her childhood home was vibrant, and the conversation was often unflinchingly political. Due to her parents’ relative wealth and social standing, she was able to obtain a high-quality, private Methodist education. Like many educated women of her era, she earned a teaching certificate and set off upon her graduation to be a school teacher.
Disgusted by the conditions of the school, which she felt made learning virtually impossible, Idar shifted her sights to what we might these days call “big structural change.” Seeing an opportunity to leverage freedom of the press into a platform from which to fight for civil rights, she moved back home in 1911 and joined her father in the family business, running a newspaper called La Cronica. That same year, she worked with her family to hold the First Mexican Congress, after which she published an opinion piece in La Cronica calling for women’s suffrage.
After a brief stint in El Cruz Blanco (a local version of the Red Cross active in the landscape of the Mexican Revolution), Idar moved to a different Laredo paper, El Progreso. It was there, as a staffer, where her most cinematic claim-to-fame took place. El Progreso published an opinion piece Idar wrote criticizing then-President Woodrow Wilson for dispatching United States military forces and the Texas Rangers to the Mexican border. Taking umbrage, Texas Rangers appeared at the headquarters of El Progreso. Idar stopped them that day by advocating for the paper’s rights under the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of the press, and fearlessly blocking their entrance to the building with her own body.
Idar’s accomplishments are literally too many to list here, including founding La Liga Femenil Mexicanista, fighting for the eradication of the Texas “Juan Crow” laws, and even working as a Spanish language translator in a Bexar County hospital to ensure Tejano access to medical care. But it is important to note that her political philosophy was at all times driven by a belief that equality of the sexes was crucial to the liberation of all marginalized peoples.
National Taco Day: Let's Taco 'Bout Tacos
How your Harris County Law librarians spend their weekends.
This Sunday, October 4, Americans will set aside their differences and join together in honor of the humble but mighty taco. We owe this annual celebration to a Texan, Roberto L. Gomez.
Gomez, a San Antonian, was a force in the 1960 “Viva Kennedy!” JFK campaign movement in the southwest. Once Kennedy was in office, Gomez used his connection to the President’s brand to promote various Mexican foods familiar to the San Antonio community, starting in 1961 when he sent President Kennedy a 48 pound tamale, guarded by a motorcade, as a birthday gift. Gomez continued to build on this idea, and in 1965 he sent President Johnson, a dedicated Texan, a 55 pound taco. Shortly thereafter, Gomez helped found the National Taco Council. In 1968, San Antonio’s Congressman Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez stood on the floor of Congress and called for the first National Taco Day to occur that year on May 3. After some hopping around, in 2004 National Taco Day landed on October 4.
Some have speculated that the taco, in its perfect simplicty, must have come to us from deep in the past. In reality, it’s a modern miracle; an early example of fast food, born of industrialization and the need for a quick lunch break.
The taco’s origins are in 18th century Mexico, where silver miners toiled in caves. To extract silver, they would wrap a bit of gun powder in a piece of paper, then slide that into a crack in the rock face. They referred to the gun powder and paper wrap as a “taco.”
Then at some point in the 19th century, a genius Mexican mind, now anonymous due to the fog of history, decided to mimic this by wrapping meat inside a tortilla, and called their culinary innovation a “miner’s taco.”
Fast forward to San Antonio in 1905, where historians have found the first recorded mention of this food taco in the United States. The taco, a true and authentic Mexican food, likely came to San Antonio with Mexican migrants coming for work. It was one of the exotic examples of Mexican cuisine served by so-called “Chili Queens,” whose pushcarts provided Americans with an opportunity to sample culinary life south of the border.
If you travel to Mexico, don’t expect to find a hardshell taco. The crunchy, u-shaped taco shell was an innovation of United States entrepreneur Glen Bell in the 1950s, as he came up with the idea to sell gringo-friendly “Mexican food” to the masses through a franchise business he called Taco Bell.
Another American franchise operation, Subway, made international news yesterday when an Irish court ruled its baked loaves are too confectionery to legally be called “bread.” Is there a similar legal defintion in the United States of a taco?
The answer is that while lawmakers here have yet to define what a taco is, a Worcester County Superior Court in Massachusetts ruled in 2006 that a taco is NOT a sandwich. Thus the taco continues to reign supreme in its own right.
Further Exploration:
