A special Black History Month exhibit and presentation at South Texas College of Law Houston featuring the Hon. Mark Davidson helped bring a meaningful close to the month of February.
Organized and coordinated by the Black Law Students Association (BLSA) in collaboration with the Agosto Justice Center for Leadership and Empowerment, the program featured the formal presentation of four cases involving historically significant lawyers and litigants — and the archival records associated with them — that have been part of a campaign to digitize and preserve Harris County’s legal archives.
Davidson served 20 years as judge of the 11th District Court of Harris County and was then appointed to serve as the multi-district litigation judge for all asbestos cases in the State of Texas.
Students, faculty, and staff learned about the first Black attorney to practice in Houston, the complicated divorce of two formerly enslaved Black people, the 1963 lawsuit that desegregated Rice University by challenging the language of the founding charter, and a land ownership dispute in Houston’s Trinity Gardens neighborhood handled by two historically consequential, Black local attorneys — Matthew W. Plummer and Barbara Jordan.
A panel of BLSA members worked with Judge Davidson to select the cases for the presentation.
“Historical court records are the final frontier for understanding history, especially Black history,” said Davidson. “This project started when I was asked to write an article, and I needed a topic. In the district clerk’s records depository building, I found a lawsuit brought by William Marsh Rice. I pulled the envelope out, pulled the documents out of the file, and it turned to confetti in my hands. I gathered it up, and went to our district clerk, Francisco Heredia, who had been on the job for only four days at the time. I dumped it on his desk and said, ‘This is one of your files, and there are 38,000 more like it.’ Since that time, Francisco, largely, along with some others, has worked diligently on this effort. We’ve helped preserve these records.”
Involved in the presentation of the presentation of cases were BLSA President Jordan Boykins and Student Bar Association (SBA) Vice President Kayla Baxter.
Davidson closed the presentation with these words about the value of historical court documents: “Working with these files, you begin to see what our records stand for, how young lawyers became old lawyers who became great lawyers, and you can see the work they did. And someday, perhaps the work that you’ve all done as lawyers will be read by people in 50, 60, 70, 80 years to show how you got your start in the law and the difference you made to make this world a better and more just place.”
