The Supreme Court Decision Of 1954 In The Case Of Hernandez V. Texas

ernandez versus the state of Texas was one of the first Mexican American civil rights cases heard here by the United States Supreme Court (author, year). This case was one of the most important cases that considered Mexican Americans to be their own racial group in the United States. Pete Hernandez was a Mexican American agricultural worker, who was accused for the murder of Joe Espinosa in Edna, Texas in Jackson County (author,year). Hernandez’s lawyer knew that this was going to be a challenge since Mexican-Americans seemed to be excluded in the jury’s selection in seven counties in Texas. When on trial, Hernandez’s legal team did claim that other Mexican Americans were excluded from the jury commission.

Legal Brief (About 2 pages) Case Name: Case Number: If you like you can copy/paste this for your notes: “Quotation” In Text Citation: Works Cited citation Why this is important/Why I want to use it: Paragraph #1: Facts of the case Ernesto Miranda was born in March (1940) in Mesa, Arizona, he skipped class, often went to a prison for teens after burgering, then later he went to California to join the army and start a new life. On “March 2, 1963”, he pushed an 18 year old woman into the backseat of his car. He drove her for 20 minutes, then he sexually assaulted her and robbed his victim as he did with 3 others. He drove 20 blocks from her house and let her free.

The decision of this case provided constitutional sanction until overruled by the Brown v. Board of Education case. This case introduced the “Separate but Equal” Act. The Plessy v. Ferguson case legalized segregation in public accommodations, education, and

Before the decision is discussed, the background for the case must be explained. “In the 1950’s, Linda Brown was a young African American girl in Kansas who had to walk through a railroad switchyard to get to school. There was a school much closer to her house, but she could not go there because it was an all white school. (Background Summary)” This was a very effective motivator for Mr. Brown, as he felt that his child was being discriminated against and put in danger because she was forced to go to a specific school.

In 1951 in the town of Edna, Texas, a field hand named Pedro Hernández murdered his employer after exchanging words at a gritty cantina. From this seemingly unremarkable small-town murder emerged a landmark civil rights case that would forever change the lives and legal standing of tens of millions of Americans. A team of unknown Mexican American lawyers took the case, Hernandez v. Texas, all the way to the Supreme Court, where they successfully challenged Jim Crow-style discrimination against Mexican Americans. AMERICAN EXPERIENCE presents A Class Apart from the award-winning producers Carlos Sandoval (Farmingville), and Peter Miller (Sacco and Vanzetti, The Internationale). The one-hour film dramatically interweaves the story of its central

What is the historical significance of the Zoot Suit Riots in Chicano Culture? It was June 1943 in Los Angeles six-months after the Sleepy Lagoon Murder; and racial tensions were high as well as were war time anxieties. At the time, Los Angeles had the highest population of Mexican Americans in the country. Just 100 years earlier the area was owned by Mexico and everything from streets to business was in Spanish. Many of the people living in the area were descendants of the Mexicans who had founded the city, but they were now second class citizens forbidden from eating in the restaurants, going to clubs, and other racial discrimination.

Plessy V. Ferguson The Plessy V. Ferguson trial was a civil rights case in Louisiana in the 1890’s concerning an African American man who refused to sit in a Jim Crow car. The courts ruled that Louisiana's separate but equal doctrine was constitutional; Ferguson won. This case affected humanity in a negative way culturally and politically. The trial established standards of “the separate but equal laws”.

Brown and four other cases related to school segregation all came into in big court case to the supreme court in 1952. Before the case took place, the justices were split up on how to run the schools segregation with chief justice Fred Vinson postponing the opinion that Plessy verdict should stand. But before the hearing Vinson had passed away, then was replaced with Earl Warren. “In the decision, issued on May 17, 1954, Warren wrote that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” as segregated schools are “inherently unequal.” As a result, the Court ruled that the plaintiffs were being “deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.”

For nearly a century, the United States was occupied by the racial segregation of black and white people. The constitutionality of this “separation of humans into racial or other ethnic groups in daily life” had not been decided until a deliberate provocation to the law was made. The goal of this test was to have a mulatto, someone of mixed blood, defy the segregated train car law and raise a dispute on the fairness of being categorized as colored or not. This test went down in history as Plessy v. Ferguson, a planned challenge to the law during a period ruled by Jim Crow laws and the idea of “separate but equal” without equality for African Americans. This challenge forced the Supreme Court to rule on the constitutionality of segregation, and in result of the case, caused the nation to have split opinions of support and

In the 1800s, both African Americans and Mexican Americans faced similar treatments from whites. One of the main things that both groups had to face was racial discrimination mainly because they both were not viewed as racially equal by most whites. For example, the U.S. court validated legislations that institutionalized race separations between blacks and whites, such as the Jim Crow Laws. The Plessy v. Ferguson was a Supreme Court Case that gave states the right to pass laws allowing or required racial segregation in public and private institutions like schools and public transportation. The laws not only affected black people, but it also affected Mexicans.

The historical monograph, City of Inmates, by Dr. Kelly Lytle Hernández, let’s us dive into the beginnings of Los Angeles and lets us discover on how the city transformed into what is now the capital of incarceration in the United States. Hernandez criticizes how instead of prisons being utilized as tools to keep society save from criminals, they have also been instances of it being used to keep middle to high class white American ideals safe from the poor working class, implying how even though one of Los Angeles first accomplishments was to eliminate the spanish casta system, it never truly got rid of the casta system since there is still a force continuing to enforce the social hierarchy, but modified throughout the years to racially target

Supreme Court Decisions Setting Precedent Discrimination may not seen as big a problem today, but people had to fight for that problem, and court cases set precedents for today. The case of Plessy versus Ferguson and Brown versus Board of Education helped change the way we view discrimination today. The case of Plessy versus Ferguson decided that segregation was legal as long as everything was equal. But on the other hand, Brown versus Board of Education included separate but equal schools made African-American children feel inferior to the white children. 1896, Supreme Court heard the Plessy versus Ferguson case.

Title: Mendez v. Westminster (1946) Abstract: The Mendez v. Westminster (1946) was the stepping stone to ending school segregation in California. The lawsuit was led by Gonzalo Mendez and five other parents who were denied enrollment of their children in an Anglo school. This led them to protest and then file a class-action lawsuit against the Westminster School District of Orange County California. Accusing them of segregating Mexican and Latin decent students.

In 1948, a plane that was carrying 32 people, the majority of whom were Hispanic farm laborers, crashed in California. One of the plane’s wings caught fire, and before the American pilot or co-pilot were able to do anything about it, the excessive heat which had enveloped the entire plane became too hot for the passengers to survive. Many of the Hispanic farmers decided to jump from the plane rather than burn to death. Unfortunately, neither the jumpers nor the ill-fated souls who remained aboard survived that plunging inferno. The majority of the Hispanic passengers were either being sent back to Mexico due to their contracts being up, or because they were in the United States illegally.

"Laws and Injustice: Fighting for Human Rights in Mexico. " New Politics.3 (2007): 74-9. Web. Tilly explains the lack of efficiency of the prosecutors in pursuing crimes in Mexico, questioning the enforcement of justice. Stating that very few people rely on the ability and ethics of judges, public prosecutors and police. Mentioning that the media has been constantly reported that well known criminals who are released precisely because the prosecution does a poor job of investigation in cases pursued, leaving legal crannies where lawyers of the accused can maneuver to reverse the charges.