News from Trinity University

Maury Maverick Jr.

Photo courtesy of San Antonio Express-News

SAN ANTONIO – The Maverick Lecture, presented by Trinity University’s history department and underwritten by the William and Salomé Scanlan Foundation, will be an annual lecture honoring the late Maury Maverick Jr., the legendary civil rights lawyer, former member of the Texas Legislature, former Marine, and iconoclastic newspaper columnist. The first speaker of the Maverick Lecture Series will feature award-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 3, in Laurie Auditorium. The lecture is free and open to the public.

The lecture series will explore topics that defined Mr. Maverick’s place in American civic discourse. These topics will include threats to constitutional liberty, with particular emphasis on the First Amendment, issues of poverty and race, Western occupation of Third World Countries, and the moral requirements of war.

A 1938 graduate of Texas Military Institute, Maury Maverick Jr. earned his bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Texas in 1942. During World War II, he served in the Marines Quartermasters Corps and saw combat in the South Pacific. He earned his law degree from St. Mary's University in 1949. Mr. Maverick also served in the Texas House of Representatives from 1950 to 1956, one of a handful of legislators who took a stand against rampant Red-baiting and discriminatory laws in the darkest days of the Communist-hunting McCarthy era.

Frustrated with his fellow lawmakers, Mr. Maverick quit politics and dove into his law practice, focusing on civil rights and civil liberties cases. He scored his first big legal victory in 1954 after an appellate court in Austin threw out a law that prohibited professional boxing matches between blacks and whites. Mr. Maverick made a successful end run around the prohibition: Instead of arguing the law was unfair, he claimed it denied his client, boxer I.H. "Sporty" Harvey, the chance to make a living.

Ten years later, Mr. Maverick won another case he took all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. His client, John W. Stanford Jr., a San Antonio bookseller, had been arrested after authorities seized supposedly seditious papers from his home. The evidence included works by Karl Marx, Jean Paul Sartre, Pope John XXIII, and a legal opinion penned by Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. Black's fellow jurists got a kick out of that while Mr. Maverick presented his case before the panel. "I saw William O. Douglas nudge Black in the ribs," he later recalled. "But Black wasn't laughing."

While working for the American Civil Liberties Union, Mr. Maverick also defended Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the world-famous atheist. In between his high-profile cases, he also defended a steady stream of conscientious objectors, draft dodgers, and others during the Vietnam War.

Over time, Mr. Maverick gradually eased out of his law practice to devote full time to his newspaper column and other writing. In the years leading up to his death, he wrote weekly columns in the San Antonio Express News, and performed legal work for liberal causes. Throughout his long life, Mr. Maverick never shied away from unpopular viewpoints.

For more information about the Maverick Lecture Series, contact Trinity’s Office of University Communications at 210-999-8406.