Maury Maverick, Jr.

Fontaine Maury Maverick Jr. (January 3, 1921 – January 28, 2003) was an American lawyer, politician, activist, and columnist from the U.S. state of Texas. A member of the prominent Maverick family, he was the great-grandson of Samuel Maverick, the rancher who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence and famously refused to brand his cattle, and the son of Maury Maverick Sr., a two-term member of the United States House of Representatives. Career After graduating from the Texas Military Institute in 1938 and receiving a bachelor's degree in economics in 1942 from another institution, he served in the Marine Corps during World War II, serving in the Quartermaster Corps and eventually seeing action in the Pacific Theater of Operations. At the end of the war, Maverick returned to San Antonio, where he earned a law degree at St. Mary's University in 1949. The next year, Maverick was elected to the Texas House of Representatives as a Democrat. A committed liberal, he became well known during his term in office as a supporter of organized labor and civil rights for African Americans and an opponent of the persecution of suspected communists during the Red Scare. In one incident, he killed a bill to sentence convicted communists to the death penalty by inserting a poison pill amendment to sentence those who were only suspected of communism to life imprisonment. In 1956, he chose not to run for a fourth term. In 1961, Maverick made his last run for elective office, campaigning (along with seventy other Democrats) in a special election for the United States Senate seat vacated by Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. With the support of the Texas AFL-CIO, he ran fourth out of the five major Democratic candidates, with 10 percent of the vote, behind appointee Senator William Blakley (18 percent), future House Speaker Jim Wright (16 percent), and State Attorney General Will Wilson (11.5 percent), but ahead of State Senator Henry B. Gonzalez (9 percent). Having split the liberal vote, thus allowing the conservative Blakley to make the runoff against Republican John Tower (who received 31 percent in the initial round and was narrowly elected in the runoff), Maverick and Gonzalez, a friend and fellow San Antonian, stopped speaking to one another for almost the next twenty years.