Voting rights icon you’ve likely never heard of
He’s been compared with the likes of Cesar Chavez and Barbara Jordan. Yet, you wouldn’t know it from media coverage that Frumencio Reyes Jr., the 84-year-old attorney who pioneered voting rights and redistricting litigation, had died Dec. 6.
For many Houston Hispanics, Reyes’ omission in the Chronicle’s “In Memoriam 2023” article was galling — if unsurprising.
Judith Castillo, a doctoral student at the University of Houston working to preserve Latino history, sent the Chronicle a letter after noting that Frumencio was not honored. “It deeply troubles me to observe the continued absence of Latino representation in your publication,” she wrote, “especially in a city where 45% of the population identifies as Hispanic.”
Blanca Blanco, a former publisher of Viva! Magazine, a ’90s-era insert in the Houston Post, is a close friend of the Reyes family. She, too, noticed his name was missing. “Reyes was considered an icon of the Latino political circles, and a well-respected civil rights attorney. I would be remiss not to point out this legacy to the Chronicle.”
Intrigued by these letters, I Googled his legacy. Turns out, despite having notables such as Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, County Judge Lina Hidalgo and former Mayor Sylvester Turner pay tribute to him after his death, there are few in-depth pieces on him online. Like far too many trailblazers in this city, he’s a luminary whose story you’ve probably never heard.
Wanting to know more, I visited Janie Reyes, 83, Frumencio’s wife, at the historic Heights home they had shared. She told me anecdote after anecdote from their 66-year marriage, pulling out a hefty box packed with carefully organized clippings and letters chronicling their lives. Her youthful eyes lit up each time she mentioned his name.
They fell for each other in high school. It was an unlikely bond. Janie came from a well-off family in Edinburg. Frumencio, born on a ranch to a family of migrant farm workers in the northern Mexican city of Saltillo, was brought to the U.S. when he was 2. His family was poor but political: In Mexico, his mom had been very civically engaged, and his uncle was an elected senator.
“He was dirt-poor, but had such a presence and challenged the white community,” Janie remembered. “And I was a rebel with my own family.” Janie’s parents did everything to break them up and to keep her from sneaking out to visit him “in the hood.” But in 1957, the two decided to get married. She was 17. He was 18.
The priest at Frumencio’s Catholic church suggested another option: he’d take them home for a long talk with their families. As Janie recalled to me, Frumencio then responded: “We didn’t come here to get a lecture. We came here to get married.”
And so they did, with just two witnesses in attendance.
“He was a hell-raiser,” Janie said with a laugh. “But he made change.”
In the 1970s, Frumencio earned a
Hispanic scholarship and joined three other Hispanic students at Texas Southern University to study law. He saw an ad asking for volunteers to help with Leonel Castillo’s city controller campaign, and began to spend his weekends knocking on doors. By 1972, Castillo had become the first Latino elected to citywide office in Houston, and Frumencio was a legal adviser for the Political Association of SpanishSpeaking Organizations.
Frumencio was furious that Houston’s all-male, all-white City Council members were elected at-large, Janie remembers. Because the majority of voters were white and generally supported white candidates — the election of Castillo to controller being a notable exception — it was nearly impossible for non-white candidates to be elected. “You know, honey,” Frumencio told Janie, “all the people representing the Hispanic and Black communities live in places like River Oaks. They don’t give a shit about our communities because they don’t live there.”
So in 1973, right out of law school, he filed a lawsuit against the city of Houston to create single-member districts. The idea was that underrepresented communities that were concentrated geographically could elect someone from their own community to represent them.
“It was a long shot,” Janie said. “But he won.”
Over the years, Frumencio took on many more voting rights cases, some all the way to the Supreme Court. He fought for single-member district school board elections, against the 9-5-1 (nine district seats, five at-large seats, one mayor) Houston election scheme, and tirelessly challenged redistricting maps that disenfranchised Hispanics.
He also advised and mentored countless Latinos on their way to law school and beyond. When he persuaded the dean of TSU to recruit more Hispanic law students, a judge friend asked why he would want to increase the competition for his own law practice. Janie recalls him saying, “Because it doesn’t make sense to not want to have your own people get ahead.”
He received stacks and stacks of letters from people thanking him for his work. Frumencio shredded them. All he asked of people, Janie said, was that they help others in the community the way he had helped them.
Frumencio fell into a coma before last year’s December runoff election. “He would have been so happy,” Janie said, to see that there are now three Latinos on City Council, two of whom were from single-member districts.
Frumencio didn’t pull the ladder up behind him, Janie said. He set down more ladders.