Thread by @alvarombedoya

1/ May 12, 1950: 70 years ago #onthisday, a Hispanic man stood on the Senate floor and denounced Joe McCarthy.

Many think that Joseph Welch or Margaret Smith were first to confront McCarthy in the Senate.

Dennis Chávez, the first U.S.-born Hispanic senator, came before them.

2/ To appreciate what Chávez did, look at Senate of 1950.

When New Mexico sent Chávez to the Senate in 1935, there were no other Hispanics. Or African Americans. Or Native Americans. Or Asian Americans.

One senator called him “the Senator from Mexico.” Seriously:

3/ Who was that, btw? That would be Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, a five foot, two inch tall unabashed racist who would, true story, refer to himself in the third person as “the Man.”

4/ But the Senate wasn’t just ethnically homogenous. It was also full of aristocrats like Leverett Saltonstall, a Republican from Massachusetts who traced his family to the Mayflower.

Saltonstall would, true story, debate Chávez as to whose family arrived first in this country.

5/ The Chávez family got here first. They arrived in what's now New Mexico in 1598.

What they had in history, they lacked in wealth: The Chávez house had dirt floors and no running water. He had to leave school in the seventh grade to work and help support his family.

6/ Then there was McCarthy. McCarthy was Roman Catholic. The majority of Chavez’s constituents were Roman Catholic. McCarthy was wildly popular among… yep, Roman Catholics.

So much so that another prominent Massachusetts family, the Kennedys, were closely aligned with him.

7/ Chávez's peers thought that going against McCarthy would be "political suicide."

Yet, on May 12, 1950, that's exactly what Chávez did.

You can read his full remarks in the Congressional Record: books.google.com/books?id=sjWix…

What did he say?

8/ Chávez made clear that dissent was our strength, not our enemy.

“I contend that we are a nation of dissenters. Our Nation was created by dissenters. Our ancestors were not satisfied."

9/ And so if you curb dissent, you threaten “our democratic way of life.”

"The United States cannot gain strength from a population of ‘safe’ people, people who have never thought or dreamed or spoken anything that is not dictated by higher authority."

10/ The effect was electric. None other than **Senator Margaret Chase Smith herself** credited Chávez with mobilizing what had been a “paralyzed” Senate.

Read her 1963 tribute to Chavez here: books.google.com/books?id=JcvjW…

A highlight:

11/ Chávez wrote the first employment discrimination bills in the Senate. He was an tireless advocate for the poor, Native Americans, and gender pay equality. A driving force behind the Pan American Highway, the NIH.

Where is this in history books? It's not even on Wikipedia.

12/ I think that Latinx kids across the country need to know that a brilliant kid like them rose from basically nothing, from poverty, to become the fourth most senior member of the Senate, the chair of its most powerful subcommittee, and the chair of its Public Works Committee.

13/ Last year, thanks to @GloriaTristani (Senator Chávez's granddaughter) and @UNM_Law, I was lucky to give the Fourth Annual Sen. Dennis Chávez Lecture on Law & Civil Rights.

The full lecture, "Privacy as Civil Right," will run in the @NMLawReview: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

14/ I'll talk more about the lecture from a privacy standpoint another day. It ties together a lot of threads on the #ColorofSurveillance.

But for me, for now, I wanted to share with you a little bit of extraordinary history that happened #OTD exactly seventy years ago. (end)