Florentino Garza Fortitude Award

Introductory Remarks

by Judge Patrick J. Morris
at the annual installation of San Bernardino County Bar Officers,

October 14, 2002
at the Orton Center, University of Redlands

"Awards and honors come much too frequently within professional organizations.

"They and the plaques that represent them are commonplace on the walls of offices and are given, oft times, without careful thought to the purpose of the awards or the qualities of the honorees. In the ultimate corruption of honors many organizations award them annually as an exercise in fund raising.

"That is not the case with the award that I have the honor of announcing this evening.

"Your Executive Board contemplated long and hard about an award that would stand in stature next to the John B. Surr Award, recognizing distinguished and ethical lawyering, but would key on a most distinct set of virtues. Those are the special qualities reflected in the life and career of one of our most honored sons, Florentino Garza.

"This award is represented not by an engraved plaque full of 'whereas'es, but rather by a beautiful chaste hanging with two important features that draw you into it. One appeals to the eyes and the other to the mind.

"First, for the eyes, a black and white photograph of a young Mexican- American boy picking cotton. The picture was taken by one of the last century's most important documentary photographers, Dorothea Lange, who, together with Ansel Adams, chronicled America's passage from the Great Depression through World War Two. Her deeply empathic photographs documenting displaced farm families and migrant workers in the West and Southwest during the Depression and her deeply disturbing pictures of the Japanese Americans being moved into internment camps have exerted a profound influence on America's view of poverty and racism.

"This Lange photograph could be young Tino Garza.

"It was taken in 1936 in the Rio Grande Valley in Southern Texas, where Tino, the son migrant farm workers toiled daily in the cotton fields. Living in the fields, working 18 hour days and sleeping under canvas tarps at night, he had little time for school. He could not read or speak English. At the age of ten, when his mother died of tuberculosis, he was sent to a sanatorium with symptoms of the same disease. It was there that he was befriended by two Presbyterian missionaries and sent to mission boarding schools in Texas and New Mexico, where he learned English, deportment and manners. That was the start of his quest for education and knowledge that led him to Texas A&M, the University of New Mexico and finally the University of California at Los Angeles, where he was that law school's third Mexican-American graduate.

"Second, for the mind, a quote from the 17th century English philosopher, John Locke, from his essay on education: "Fortitude is the guard and support of the other virtues."

"These are words from one of the most influential thinkers who ever lived. His writings furnished ideas for three revolutions including our own against the British and the French Revolution that followed. He combatted the idea of the divine right of kings and was the author of the idea of government being a social contract between elected leaders and the people, resting on inalienable rights of life, liberty and property. Jefferson, Franklin and Adams borrowed from Locke the essential ideas contained in our Declaration of Independence.

"His 1690 writings on the nature of government heralds the idea of the rule of law, which is the foundation- stone of our profession and of all free societies. Writing on the nature of man, Locke rejected the notion of innate ideas and held that "there is nothing in the mind except what as first in the senses; the mind at birth is a tabula rasa waiting to be written on, so everything in the mind is the result of experience, including virtues.

"The childhood experiences of young Florentino Garza, including extreme poverty and deprivation, hard physical labor, racism and tragic personal losses, indelibly marked on the tablet of his mind the virtues of patience, tolerance, perseverance and moral strength. These are the essential elements of fortitude, defined in Webster's Dictionary as, "that strength of mind that enables a person to encounter danger or bear pain or adversity with great courage." Locke writes, "True fortitude, I take to be the quiet possession of a man's self, and to an undisturbed doing of his duty, whatever evil besets, or danger lies in his way. This...there are so few men attain to."

"Tino Garza's story is a true Horatio Alger tale that captures and clarifies the spirit, not only of our profession, but of the American experience---where the hero, filled with the virtues of bravery, generosity, kindness and diligence and guarded by the virtue of fortitude overcomes insurmountable obstacles and finds success.

"It is highly appropriate then, with the poignant beauty of Dorothea Lange's documentary photography and the insightful writings of one of the Worlds' great thinkers, John Locke, we celebrate the life and career of Florentino Garza with an award to be known as the 'Florentino Garza Fortitude Award.' "