Civil Rights in the Texas Borderlands

Lawrence A. Nixon's name is appended to several of the most noteworthy voting rights cases in American legal history, but scholars have only partially told his story. Will Guzmán attempts to recover the El Paso doctor's life while also adding to the literature on the racial frontier. He asserts that Nixon has much to tell us about “borderlands history, African Americans in the West, and the engagement of the Black professional class in so-called racial uplift during the pre–civil rights movement” (p. 1). Nixon was born in Marshall, Texas, in 1883. He attended Wiley College in Texas and obtained his medical degree from Meharry Medical College in Tennessee in 1906. He practiced medicine first in Cameron, Texas, and later in El Paso. Guzmán's examination of Nixon's medical career and how his education and status as a doctor complemented his civil rights activism are especially compelling parts of the book. In fact, the author's discussions of Nixon's hospital work and participation in the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) are more interesting than the chapter on Nixon's role in the voting rights cases. I was also drawn to the section on Nixon's work to establish a hospital to battle tuberculosis in El Paso

Ancient history · Battle · Civil rights · Frontier · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Voting · American History and Culture · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society