ABSTRACT
DEMANDING HISPANIC EQUALITY: HERNANDEZ V. TEXAS Sometimes even deeply fl awed men and women leave an outsized mark on their times and on the lives of the people around them. In mid-20th-century Texas, two men, one a murderer and the other a lawyer whose personal demons would soon overwhelm him, changed the legal place of millions of Hispanics in Texas and throughout the nation. In 1950, Texas was a segregated society, requiring separation of blacks and whites in most public places. But Hispanics occupied a tenuous middle ground, legally considered white, their actual rights-what schools their children would attend, whether they sat on juries, or were allowed to vote-were determined by Anglos, i.e. non-Hispanic whites.
