My Dad’s Civics Lesson
As folks know, Commentary from time to time mentions my Dad, Tony Campos, and his political activism. Heck, last week or so, it was about his work with LULAC and the Little School of the 400. A couple of weeks ago, Eleanor Klibanoff, of the Texas Tribune, reached out to me and wanted to interview me about my Dad and his single member city council district lawsuit against the City of Baytown back in the 1980s. His lawsuit was brought back into the news last year for all the wrong reasons. Ms. Klibanoff and I visited for a couple of hours. Yesterday, photographer Annie Mulligan came by and took a few photos.
This morning the Trib put out the story about my Dad’s lawsuit and here is how it starts:
As Texas lawmakers redrew the state’s congressional map this summer, Marc Campos’ mind was on his father.
In 1987, Tony Campos sued the city of Baytown in a landmark case that opened the door for Black and Hispanic voters to join together to bring voting rights challenges across the country.
It was his proudest accomplishment, next to having a family and flying behind enemy lines in World War II, Marc said.
Tony Campos died in 2023, the year before his case was overturned and two years before the Texas Legislature cited that new court precedent as they grabbed as many as five new seats for the GOP.
“It was painful to see my dad’s name in the news, for the wrong reasons,” said Marc, a longtime political consultant for Houston-area Democrats. “He was having memory issues the last few years, but he always remembered that suit.”
Forty miles away, Mark Henry watched the same proceedings and saw a very different story. As Galveston County judge, Henry helped overturn Campos’ ruling, getting the same court to approve of his dismantling of the county’s one majority non-white district, and rule that “coalition districts” couldn’t be allowed as a remedy to discriminatory maps.
This sharp reversal of four decades of court precedent was a seismic shift in voting rights, as celebrated in conservative legal circles as it was vilified in liberal ones. It will now be harder to challenge new voting maps in court, especially in multiracial urban areas where no one racial group dominates, and opens the door to redraw diverse, Democratic-leaning districts previously sanctioned by the courts.
But the ruling didn’t get widespread attention until this summer, when the U.S. Department of Justice, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and some Republican lawmakers cited it as their motivation for overhauling the state’s congressional map amid pressure from President Donald Trump.
Henry, a Republican who said he has wanted to take down the “legal fiction” of coalition districts for years, watched gleefully as the case he was involved in was used to bolster his party’s grip on Congress.
“I tell people, I’ve gotten more Republicans into the House of Representatives than the [National Republican Congressional Committee] ever has,” he told The Texas Tribune. “I’m thrilled we had a chance to change the shape of the U.S. House.”
The Baytown precedent
Marc Campos was a kid the first time his dad ran for Baytown City Council. The city in east Harris County, known for its oil refineries and petrochemical plants, was rapidly growing and rapidly diversifying, and Tony Campos wanted a chance to represent his neighbors.
“I remember he printed up signs and little handout cards,” Marc said. “He got his ass kicked.”
But Campos ran again, and again, and again. Every single time, he — and other Hispanic candidates — lost to white candidates vying for Baytown’s at-large council seats, each of which were elected citywide.
In the mid-1980s, Black and Hispanic residents together made up a quarter of the voters in Baytown. They tended to select the same candidates as each other, but different candidates than their white neighbors, analysis showed. Campos and other Black and Hispanic community leaders felt that 25% of the population should have been able to select their candidate of choice for at least one of Baytown’s six city council seats.
The Supreme Court had just recently ruled, in 1986, that North Carolina’s at-large system violated the Voting Rights Act by “submerging” Black votes in majority-white areas. Some wanted to challenge Baytown’s system on the same grounds.
In that North Carolina ruling, the justices had laid out a clear test for who could bring claims under the Voting Rights Act. A group had to be “sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district.” They also had to vote cohesively with each other, and differently than the majority, the court ruled.
While the North Carolina case was about Black voters alone, Baytown’s lawsuit was on behalf of Black and Hispanic voters combined. Campos, the perennial candidate, was selected as the plaintiff.
“He knew he was taking on the city establishment in Baytown,” his son said. “But he also knew he had the law, the Voting Rights Act, on his side.”
U.S. District Judge John Singleton agreed, directing Baytown to draw single-member districts, one of which should be “more than 50% minority, combined Black and Hispanic.”
The city appealed, but a three-judge panel on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Campos, finding “there is nothing in the law that prevents the plaintiffs from identifying the protected aggrieved minority to include both Blacks and Hispanics.”
This ruling, the first of any appeals court on the issue, opened the door for multiple racial groups to band together to bring voting rights lawsuits, and for the courts to remedy these violations with “coalition districts,” as they became known.
For Campos, this was an unparalleled victory, especially once the Supreme Court declined to hear the case. He decided not to run for one of the newly created seats, ceding to the new generation, but his role in getting those lines drawn on the map wasn’t forgotten. Over the years, people would stop him at the grocery store or out at events to thank him for putting his name on the lawsuit, his son said.
“It became a different Baytown, politically, after that,” Marc Campos said. “It opened the door to so many other people, different leaders, different agendas, trying to solve different problems.”
Other cities and counties got rid of their at-large systems, and Black and Hispanic voters began banding together to bring voting rights lawsuits in other areas. While 5th Circuit precedent only governs Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, other circuits adopted the same legal interpretation.
“It has never been easy to bring a coalition claim because of the type of evidence of cohesion needed,” said Sarah Xiyi Chen, a voting rights attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project. “But in situations where different groups are suffering a really similar type of harm, because the majority group is discriminating against them and is not permitting them to exercise their equal right to vote, then there needs to be a way to remedy that type of discrimination.”
Here is the entire Trib read: How two Texas legal battles led to the 2025 redraw.
If you read the Trib story, the photo of me is taken by my Dad’s desk that is still intact here at my place. He was a huge supporter of Hillary Clinton in 2008, there are his WWII photos on the wall, and a couple of drawings by his great grandson Dante.
Sure, it is bittersweet and like I say in the piece painful, but on the other hand, my Dad’s lawsuit helped others get fair representation in their communities.
I remember going with my Dad to meet with the City of Baytown officials and their legal team, after my Dad had kicked their arses in court, when they presented us with their first maps of Baytown with new single member districts. They had split up the Latino and African America communities into districts that pretty much guaranteed that Latinos and African Americans would be diluted and not have a chance at getting elected. I laughed at them, sarcastically replied no thanks, and on the spot redrew the map to give the minority communities an opportunity district. They accepted my redrawn map and ended their game playing.
Voting rights are taking a hit in America today. This Trib piece involving my Dad maybe can give some folks an understanding of what the fight is about. My Dad’s civics lesson so to speak.
The featured photo is Tony’s great grandson Dante, grandson David, and me at a restaurant last night celebrating my birthday.
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Calling all Harris County Democrats. Calling all Harris County Democrats. See this from the Chron:
Gov. Greg Abbott visited a Cypress BBQ restaurant Tuesday with Republican lawmakers to rally voters and turn Harris County “dark red.” He also promised that he would spend a chunk of his $90 million campaign account over the next year to do so.
“I have two priorities in this election. Number one is to win reelection. Number two is to win Harris County. So I got $90 million in my bank account, and I’m going to spend most of it in Harris County, Texas to make sure, precinct by precinct, we turn out voters who voted in the presidential election, turn out voters who never voted before,” Abbott said. “We got to win Harris County and make Harris County dark red.”
Abbott doesn’t know Harris County. He does not know what we look like. He doesn’t know our needs or what we are all about. The reason Abbott and MAGA have put a bull’s eye on Harris County is because we are solid blue.
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#SpringerDinger has 23 career postseason dingers. He is tied for the 3rd most. 19 of those dingers came as an Astro.