Resource: Interview with Mr. Larry Daves

In Video 1, Larry Daves describes how he and small group of recent University of Texas Law School students first went to Nacogdoches in the early 1970s to assist voter registration efforts in Black communities; the virulent anti-Black racism and poor material conditions the students observed in East Texas; how they started a legal services office; effects of single-member districting; and his first criminal trial. He also describes his current work with the Piñon Canyon Expansion Opposition Coalition as it resists U.S. Army plans to turn much of Southeastern Colorado into a training area for a ground war against China. In Video 2 and the first part of Video 3 he recounts the capital murder trial of Herman and Thurman Davis. In Video 3, Mr. Daves describes his successful representation of undocumented immigrant children barred by Texas statute from attending public school, a case that he filed in federal court under Judge William Wayne Justice, and that ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court as Plyler v. Doe. Video 3 also describes Daves’ unsuccessful representation of Mexican American women workers who lost their jobs and organized as Fuerza Unida when Levi’s closed its San Antonio plant. Video 4 concerns Daves’ upbringing in New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle, including high school in Amarillo, his family’s early encounters with law enforcement and juvenile incarceration, and finding his way to Washington University and then U.T. Law School.