First Latino Justice on California s High Court Dies at 90 gvwire.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from gvwire.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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In 1940s Orange County, future California Supreme Court justice Cruz Reynoso was just a teen trying to fight racism when he wrote to the U.S. postmaster general.
His family lived in a rural part of La Habra, where the Ku Klux Klan had held the majority of City Council seats just a decade earlier and Mexicans were forced to live on the wrong side of the tracks. Reynoso’s parents and neighbors had to travel a mile to the post office for their mail because the local postmaster claimed it was too inconvenient to deliver letters to their neighborhood.
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.
2021/05/09 06:41 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 p. 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)
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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.
Reynoso passed away May 7 at an elder care facility in Oroville, according to his son, Len ReidReynoso. The cause of death was unknown. Reynoso was 90.
In a legal career that spanned more than half a century and took him from his first job in El Centro to Sacramento, the soft-spoken family man helped shape and protect the first statewide, federally funded legal aid program in the country and guided young, minority students toward the law.