Maury Maverick, 82; Texan Defied Tradition as Lawyer, Legislator

Maury Maverick Jr., an iconoclastic Texas lawyer, legislator and columnist who stood out from the crowd and stood up for the underdog, has died. He was 82.

Maverick died Jan. 28 in his native San Antonio of kidney failure after surgery.

Unlike his forebears, he never added new words to the lexicon of American English. But he did set some important legal precedent to ensure civil rights for all.

His great-grandfather, Samuel Augustus Maverick, who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836, made the family name a word by refusing to brand his cattle. Cowboys coming upon any calf without a mark seared into its flank declared it “a maverick,” and the word was soon applied to human nonconformists, too.

His father, Maury Maverick Sr., was a liberal Democrat and congressman who worked for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation, served as mayor of San Antonio and nearly got lynched for permitting Communists to meet in the city’s Municipal Auditorium.

The father also contributed a word to the dictionary: “gobbledygook.”

As chairman of Smaller War Plants Corp. during World War II, the senior Maverick labeled pompously worded memos “gobbledygook” and ordered his employees to “be short and say what you’re talking about” or “be shot.”

Maury Jr., through his serial career as legislator, lawyer and free-lance columnist for the San Antonio Express-News for more than 20 years, acted with a maverick’s independence and avoided gobbledygook. He could quote Shakespeare, Homer, Mark Twain, Al Capone or Huey Newton with equal ease, but he always kept it short and said what he was talking about.

His columns were wide-ranging, with subject matter including purple martins -- the largest of American swallows -- pinto beans, overpopulation, Yasser Arafat as a “freedom fighter” and independence for Palestine. Some of them were published in the 1997 book, “Texas Iconoclast.”

“The writing is simple, straightforward and free of frills,” noted a Dallas Morning News reviewer. “Sometimes it is almost annoyingly simplistic; but every now and then, Mr. Maverick hits home with a point so simply and quietly and effectively made that it smacks you dead center. That’s when you either want to hug or throttle him.”

Maverick graduated from the Texas Military Institute, earned an economics degree from the University of Texas in Austin, served in the Marines during World War II and then received a law degree from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio.

He was in the Texas Legislature from 1950 to 1956 at the height of the McCarthy Era -- and voted 18 times against anti-Communism bills, including one that would have sent anyone convicted of being a Communist to the electric chair.

Occasionally Maverick unbalanced the red-baiting majority with wit. When a resolution was introduced to invite U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, (R-Wis.) to address the Texas Legislature, Maverick countered with an amendment to invite Mickey Mouse instead.

“If we’re going to invite a rat to visit our state,” he said, “why not invite a good rat?”

The highly touted “Red Scare,” Maverick believed, enabled racists and bigots to persecute blacks, Latinos, unions and even librarians and schoolteachers.

“Nothing in my life has been as cruel an experience as the McCarthy era while I was in the state Legislature,” Maverick told interviewers over the years. “They were killing the Bill of Rights.”

Disgusted with politics, he concentrated on practicing law. He handled scores of cases for the ACLU and the Texas Civil Liberties Union and was justly proud of the John Minor Wisdom Public Interest and Professionalism Award given him in 1991 by the American Bar Assn. for his pro bono work.

Maverick’s most famous case, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1965, became a landmark in limiting search and seizure. It was called Stanford vs. Texas and involved John W. Stanford Jr., who operated a bookstore out of his home.

Suspecting Stanford was a Communist, authorities used a general search warrant to seize 14 boxes of materials -- including writings by Karl Marx and also some by Pope John XXIII and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. Also in the boxes were Stanford’s marriage certificate, insurance policies and other private documents.

The Supreme Court justices, including Black, were outraged and ruled against Texas, citing “the 4th and 14th Amendment guarantee to John Stanford that no official of the state shall ransack his home and seize his books and papers under the unbridled authority of a general warrant.”

Earlier, Maverick had struck a major blow against race discrimination in professional sports.

As a legislator, he had introduced a bill to overturn Texas’ 1933 Jim Crow law banning professional boxing matches between blacks and whites. The bill never got out of committee, but a black boxer named I.H. “Sporty” Harvey, who died in Los Angeles in 1997, read about it and asked Maverick to file a lawsuit on his behalf. Rather than argue the unfairness of the law, Maverick stressed that the ban unconstitutionally deprived his client of the right to earn a living.

His legal brief in this case also clung to his fondness for plain language. His former law partner, Arthur Gochman, told Texas Lawyer in 1990: “You’re supposed to say ... ‘The trial court erred in holding that it was not discrimination to prohibit a black from fighting a white.’ Maury would say ... ‘This is a case about Sporty Harvey not being able to pick up his grocery money.’

The court agreed with him, and overturned the law in 1954.

Maverick is survived by his wife of 36 years, Julia, and a sister, Terrelita.