Life After The War
In 1945, with the war over, García and his family returned to Southern Texas, settling in Corpus Christi, where the League of United Latin American Citizens had been formed to defend the rights of Hispanic Americans seven years earlier. He opened a private medical practice with his brother José Antonio, where he treated all patients regardless of their ability to pay. In 1947, he was elected president of the local chapter of LULAC. In the same year he was hospitalized with life-threatening acute nephritis. While recuperating, he heard the local superintendent of schools bragging about the segregation in his district. At that moment, he made a private oath that if he recovered he would dedicate his life to the equality of his people.
Read more about this topic: Hector P. Garcia
Famous quotes containing the words life and/or war:
“Bourgeois society is infected by monomania: the monomania of accounting. For it, the only thing that has value is what can be counted in francs and centimes. It never hesitates to sacrifice human life to figures which look well on paper, such as national budgets or industrial balance sheets.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)
“No spoon has yet destroyed a mouth, but the knife of war cuts portions that are hard to swallow. Perhaps the big mouths of the privileged are able to cope with them, but they dull the teeth of the little people and ruin their stomachs.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)