TEXAS TIMES: A quiet hero remembered
by U.S. Sen. John Cornyn
The civil rights movement of the past 60 years has benefited from the involvement of many Texans, but one man stands out. His generosity and sense of equality have left a mark on this nation, which will always be felt.
Dr. Hector P. Garcia was a man of great moral clarity. When he saw injustice or human suffering, he acted. For that, he was occasionally reviled, and often honored. His life of service is an inspiration.
Hector Garcia was brought to Mercedes, Texas as a small child by parents fleeing the Mexican Revolution in 1917. He proved to be an able student, graduating from the University of Texas Medical School in 1940. He later joined the U.S. Army, serving as an infantryman, a combat engineer and a medical doctor during World War II. His distinguished service earned him the Bronze Star medal with six battle stars in Italy.
The U.S. military had always taken care to reward performance and merit, but when Garcia returned to Corpus Christi and began working with the Veterans Administration, he noticed a disturbing trend. To his disappointment, he found Mexican-American veterans were not receiving proper medical treatment and educational benefits.
“I had to learn the Constitution to become a citizen,” Garcia said. “I knew all the rights, all the things that it gave us.” In 1948, he founded the American GI Forum to push for equal treatment. A year later, the GI Forum and Garcia were catapulted into national prominence by what became known as the “Felix Longoria Affair.”
Felix Longoria, from Three Rivers, Texas, was a soldier killed by a Japanese sniper in the Philippines during World War II. He was originally interred there, but in 1949, his widow decided to move his body home.
The funeral director, however, declared she could not hold a wake in the town’s sole funeral chapel because the dead man was a Mexican-American.
Garcia contacted Texas’s junior U.S. Sen. Lyndon Johnson, who arranged a burial for Longoria with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery, with Garcia and the news media in attendance.
Afterwards, the GI Forum became a forceful advocate and publicist for equal rights, and Garcia became highly controversial. Frank Perales, who now heads the GI Forum chapter in San Antonio, recalls Garcia throwing a blanket over himself in the back seat of a car to elude pursuers.
But Garcia did most of his best work quietly. Judge James deAnda recalled accompanying the doctor to an abandoned railroad boxcar to treat a dying grandfather.
“He took care of the man, and we would go in other homes that were just about as humble,” deAnda said. “The people obviously had no means of paying or even getting to his office. He would see all these people and administer to them. They had just absolute faith in the man.”
At one point, Garcia overturned an attempt by his accountant to file collection notices against some patients. “If these people could pay me, they would pay me,” he told him. “And you writing them a letter is not going to give them any money.”
At President Johnson’s nomination, Garcia became the first Mexican-American to serve as an ambassador to the United Nations. He was also the first Hispanic on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Before he died in 1996, Garcia received dozens of additional awards and honors.
In 1984, President Ronald Reagan bestowed upon Garcia the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “That was the highlight of his life,” recalled Garcia’s daughter, Cecilia Akers. “He wore that medal everywhere he went.”
Earlier this year, Congress renewed the historic Voting Rights Act, and I received unanimous consent from my colleagues to add two Texas civil rights pioneers, including Garcia, to the official title. We’ll present an engraved copy of the bill to Garcia’s widow, Wanda, in San Antonio later this year.
Garcia’s story reminds us all that progress in our society is often made possible by the devotion of selfless men and women, who give and sacrifice for greater principles. We all benefit from Hector Garcia’s legacy, and it is a privilege to bestow this much-deserved honor upon him.
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