First Latino justice on California's high court dies at 90
Source: Associated Press
First Latino justice on California's high court dies at 90
By DAISY NGUYEN
May 8, 2021
OROVILLE, Calif. (AP) — Cruz Reynoso, a son of migrant workers who worked in the fields as a child and went on to become the first Latino state Supreme Court justice in California history, has died. He was 90.
Reynoso died Friday at an elder care facility in Oroville, according to his son Rondall Reynoso. The cause of death was not disclosed.
In a legal career that spanned six decades, Reynoso played a prominent role in the movement to uplift the poorest workers in California, especially farmworkers from Mexico like his parents, and guided many minority students toward the law.
As director of California Rural Legal Assistance — the first statewide, federally funded legal aid program in the country — in the late 1960s he led efforts to ensure farmworkers’ access to sanitation facilities in the fields and to ban the use of the carcinogenic pesticide DDT.
One of the biggest cases won by CRLA while Reynoso was its director centered on Spanish-speaking students who were incorrectly assessed by their schools and placed into classes for the mentally challenged when, in reality, they were simply new English learners. The 1970 class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of Latino students in the Monterey County town of Soledad ended the practice of giving Spanish-speaking students IQ tests in English.
-snip-
Read more: https://apnews.com/article/california-business-courts-race-and-ethnicity-e521be6273694952222ef71ca005e9c4
FILE - In this April 11, 2012 file photo, Retired California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso, who led a 13 member task force that looked into the pepper spraying incident that occurred at the University of California, Davis last November, discusses the report during a town hall style meeting held at the campus in Davis, Calif. Reynoso, the son of migrant farmworkers who became a giant of civil rights law and was the first Latino justice of the California Supreme Court, died on Friday, May 7, 2021, with his members of his large family at his side. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File)
= new reply since forum marked as read
