A few years ago, I found myself at the Texas Supreme Court building looking for information about the first Black attorney in Texas history. As I toiled away in the building’s basement archives, poring over the latest in a seemingly never-ending series of dusty record books, I thought about how my quixotic quest had started more than two years before.
The Texas Bar Journal had published a feature called “We Were First,” which told the stories of the state’s legal pioneers: the first Asian-American judge, the first woman admitted to the bar, and so on. A member of the