Throughout the month of February, Texas Law is visiting the stories of law school history and historical figures and celebrating the impact they had on the university, on Texas, and on civic leadership in America.
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