by Michael T. Kaufman,
The New York Times
Feb. 3, 2003
Maury Maverick Jr., a cantankerous Texas liberal who regarded his passionate public pursuit of unpopular causes -- as a civil liberties lawyer, a legislator and a newspaper columnist -- to be his proud birthright, died Tuesday in his native San Antonio. He was 82.
The cause was kidney failure after surgery, his family said.
Mr. Maverick, whom the editor Willie Morris once termed "the last angry man in America," contested Jim Crow laws, supported labor unions and derailed an effort by the Texas Legislature to extend the death penalty to Communist Party members. He defended draft resisters, represented atheists and won a Supreme Court case against the F.B.I.'s seizure of publications from a Texas bookstore on charges that they were seditious.
The pugnacious Mr. Maverick was a born iconoclast. For one thing, he was descended from Samuel Maverick, a Texas founding father whose famously unbranded cattle gave rise to the word "maverick." For another, he was the son of Maury Maverick Sr., who as a Democratic congressman from Texas had been one of Franklin D. Roosevelt's leading allies in passing New Deal legislation.
The younger Mr. Maverick often wrote of growing up while his father voted against racist poll taxes, championed antilynching legislation, backed striking workers and helped draft the Social Security Act.
"The next time you cash your check, give my old man a high five," he wrote in one of his Sunday columns in The San Antonio ExpressNews.
In another column, he noted that his father, who died in 1954, had returned from World War I with crippling wounds that kept him from raising his hands. As a boy he routinely helped the congressman dress, and on one such occasion his father told him, "Never, never be for war." But, the son added, "then along came Hitler and that turned him back into hawk."
Mr. Maverick himself fought in the Pacific as a marine in World War II. Originally a backer of the Vietnam War, he was gradually persuaded to oppose it by conscientious objectors he defended.
After his military service he returned to San Antonio. He earned a law degree and won election to the Texas House of Representatives in 1950. There, he squared off against fellow legislators who backed anti-communist legislation, including the bill that called for the execution of anyone convicted of membership in the Communist Party. Mr. Maverick ridiculed this measure by offering another bill calling for life imprisonment for anyone merely suspected of being a Communist. As he intended, both initiatives failed.
As a lawyer, he was attracted to complaints like that of a boxer named Sporty Morgan who, as a black man, was barred under Texas law from fighting white opponents. Mr. Maverick eventually helped to desegregate sports in Texas by arguing that the ban denied Mr. Morgan an opportunity to make a living.
Mr. Maverick was known for his wit. In the 1960 presidential campaign, he was leading John F. Kennedy through a tour of the Alamo, where the men most revered in the state made their last stand against Mexican troops. Mr. Kennedy noted that he was behind schedule and asked Mr. Maverick to cod hint out a back door.
"There is no back door," Mr. Maverick replied. "That's why they were all heroes."
The remark was overheard and carried in newspapers, and a year later, when Mr. Maverick was running for the United States Senate seat vacated by Lyndon B. Johnson, Mr. Kennedy's vice president, it was retold and reprinted. But it did not do his campaign any good. He finished out of the running in a race that ended his career in electoral politics, leaving him free to flaunt his iconoclasm elsewhere.
Mr. Maverick is survived by his wife, Julia, and a sister, Terrellita.
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The New York Times
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