Henry B. González: Thirty-Seven Years in the House
Near San Antonio, Texas
On the second of May, nineteen fifty-seven, two state senators stood up in the Texas Legislature and began to talk. They did not sit down for thirty-six hours. Senator Henry B. González of San Antonio and Senator Abraham Kazen were conducting what would become the longest filibuster in the history of the Texas Senate. Their target was a package of ten bills designed to circumvent the United States Supreme Court's ruling in Brown versus the Board of Education and preserve racial segregation in Texas public institutions. The two senators killed eight of the ten bills.
González had been born in San Antonio in nineteen sixteen, the son of Mexican immigrants. He had attended the University of Texas and earned a law degree from Saint Mary's University in nineteen forty-three. Before the filibuster, he had already become the first Mexican American elected to the San Antonio City Council, in nineteen fifty-three, and had spoken out repeatedly against the segregation of public facilities. The state Senate seat he held when he conducted the filibuster was the first won by a Mexican American in Texas in at least one hundred ten years.
In nineteen sixty-one, González won a special election to the United States House of Representatives, becoming the first Mexican American from Texas to serve in Congress. He stayed for thirty-seven years. He voted for the Civil Rights Acts of nineteen sixty-four and nineteen sixty-eight, and for the Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty-five. He called for the impeachment of three sitting presidents: Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George Herbert Walker Bush.
His son Charlie succeeded him in Congress in nineteen ninety-eight. Henry B. González died on the twenty-eighth of November, two thousand, in San Antonio, the city where he had been born and where he had started everything.
