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Remembering his early law experience as an Earl Warren fellow, Bishop says, “My role as an Earl Warren Fellow and cooperating attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund thrust me into a role as attorney for a class of 6,000 black inmates for racial issues and 10,000 black and white inmates for non-racial issues at the Georgia State Prison at Reidsville. After I had been litigating for four years, a federal judge ordered the state to improve prison conditions at a cost of $110 million. However, the state continued to offer the excuse that the legislature had not appropriated the money. I became so frustrated that I quit the case to run for the legislature. I realized that I could win a case on paper and maybe affect my clients, but if I could pass one good law in the legislature, I could affect the entire state. It was a great way to make Dr. King’s dream a reality. And of course, as a member of Congress, one bill—an appropriations bill for example—can affect the nation or even the world. The Earl Warren experience definitely set the stage and prepared me for what has now been over 30 years of service in public office.”

Helping Mexican Americans
Secure Rights

In the early 1800s, steady migration westward brought white settlers to a region that at the time was Northern Mexico, a place where the Nahua people had lived for centuries. In 1846, tensions between the two groups eventually led to the Mexican-American War. Two years later, the war was ended by the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hildago, which awarded more than 500,000 square miles of land to the U.S. in return for a payment to Mexico of $18 million. The agreement, which was described as a “treaty of peace, friendship, limits and settlement between the United States of America and the Mexican Republic” guaranteed the people of Mexican origin who were living in these areas all the rights of U.S. citizens. Instead, the Mexicans were poorly treated. Their land was taken from them in a system that taxed the land so highly that Mexican Americans could not afford to pay the taxes and were forced to sell. Mexican Americans were excluded from participation in the political process by patronage and gerrymandering. Many Mexican American children did not attend school, and those who did were sent to separate schools with shabby facilities and significantly underpaid teachers. In the workplace, discrimination was rampant: workers were poorly paid, and their families often lived on the lowest rung of the economic ladder. Chicanos were abused by law enforcement officers, treated unjustly in the courts and brutally murdered by people who took the law into their own hands.

Details of this history are outlined in the 1978 annual report of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF; www.maldef.org), which describes how the situation slowly began to change for Chicanos in the mid-1940s. Later, in the early 1960s, during the civil rights movement, it became clear that a legal approach to the plight of Mexican Americans was needed, and in the spring of 1967, three lawyers, including Pete Tijerina, who had been working to help Chicanos gain rights and who became MALDEF’s first executive director, met with representatives of the Ford Foundation. MALDEF grew out of that meeting, and a year later, Ford awarded the group a five-year grant of $2.2 million, twice the amount that had been requested. In 1973, the Ford grant was renewed. The 1974 Carnegie Corporation annual report noted that MALDEF was the “only national organization concerned primarily with the civil rights of Mexican-Americans and the training of Chicano lawyers,” and announced a $288,400 grant to help fund a MALDEF program in education litigation. By 1979, the Corporation had awarded a total of $538,400 to MALDEF and announced an additional two-year grant of $334,700.

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