I am concerned that some members of the university community do not share the belief that failure to make the university more culturally diverse not … - Vilma Socorro Martínez

In Texas, as many of you know, children were required to be educated in either the white or the colored school. Officials in Texas, and I have in mind Pecos County and Nueces County, which have large percentages of Mexican American people, could not decide whether Mexican Americans were white or colored, so we got no schools. In most other schools, as in Uvalde, we were in fact put into a third category of school, called the Mexican school.

In order to prevail in Texas, we have to argue what is now known as the northern de jure segregation cases. We culled through the school board minutes going back to 1919. We traced the development of their school construction policies, their school assignment policies. We noticed that even toys were provided on the basis of race; twice the amount was spent for children in the Anglo schools as for children in the Mexican school, even though there were double the number of children in the Mexican schools as in the Anglo schools.

This list of voting abuses shows the persistence, determination, and the resources of local officials bent on making it as difficult as possible, and in some cases actually impossible, for minorities to exercise their right to an effective vote.