May 3, 1954
In Hernandez v. Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court held that Mexican-Americans and all other racial and ethnic groups were guaranteed equal protection of the law under the Fourteenth Amendment. Pedro Hernandez was an agricultural worker in Edina, TX charged with murder. His lawyers argued that he could not receive a fair trial because non-Caucasians were excluded from jury pools in the county where he was tried. A unanimous Supreme Court agreed and ordered that he be retried by a jury selected without discrimination on the basis of race or ethnicity. In his majority opinion, Chief Justice Warren explicitly pointed out that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was not limited to the racial categories of “Negro” and “white.”
