Beto O'Rourke - We've Got to Try - Notes

 In We've Got to Try Beto O'Rourke shines a spotlight on the heroic work and life of Dr. Lawrence Aaron Nixon and the West Texas town where he made his stand.  The son of an enslaved man, Nixon grew up in the Confederate stronghold of Marshall, Texas, then relocated to El Paso to begin his medical career.

In 1923 Texas made their Democratic Primary whites only.  When Dr. Nixon tried to vote in 1924 he was refused.  He sued and his case eventually reached the Supreme Court twice but it was not until 1944 that Texas's all white election was finally ruled unconstitutional.  Each yr Dr. Nixon would try to vote keeping his poll tax up-to-date.  His motto was we've got to try.

Beto talks to his fellow Texans.   He listens to the people unlike Republicans.  P. 70

Is it possible to register and turn out enough new Democratic voters in Texas to overcome Republican voter suppression?

 Beto talks about how hard hit Texas was during COVID.  P. 73

Texas is woefully short of health care workers.

Rural counties especially those near the border have a woeful short supply of doctors.  P. 74

More than 30 of Texas's 254 counties do not have a single doctor.  More than twenty have only one.  Seventy-one counties do not have a hospital.  Mostly rural counties of course.  P. 74

Texas is the least medically insured state in the country.  P. 74

Roughly 20% of the states 30 million people do not have health insurance.  The cost of expanding Medicaid would be less than the cost of society picking the ER tabs for those who do not have insurance.  P. 74

Beto believes that Medicaid expansion will eventually happen in Texas.  P. 78

Texas towns grew unevenly over the years due nonvoting by sections of people.  P. 90

Beto emphasizes local political leadership to showcase what can be done like in Arlington.  P. 94

Most state and city challenges can be traced to a lack of voting rights certainly historical in Texas as in most Southern states.

I'd like to visit Cotulla one day.  P. 100

Public schools are vital and strengthen our democracy.  P. 101

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was b born in Cotulla, Texas with the experiences of Lyndon Johnson.  P. 106

After the abolition of slavery in 1865 the prison population in the South grew exponentially due to that clause in the 13th Amendment legalizing it.  Beto highlights the brutal sugar cane industry in Sugar Land.  P. 109

On July 22, 1944 Dr. Lawrence Nixon walked into Fire Station No. 5---the same polling place where he had been denied the right to vote twenty years earlier ---and cast his vote in the Democratic primary, a landmark victory in the fight for social justice and the right to vote.  P. 157

The spirit of El Paso in the spirit of Nixon's "I've got to try."  P. 158

Physically and politically isolated from the rest of the rest of the country, El Paso along with its sister city Juarez has always had to go its own way looking inside itself and finding its own strength.  P. 158

Beto is proud of El Paso's place and history of reforming the State of Texas racially as when an El Paso baseball team won the state championship in 1949 and when Texas Western, now UTEP, was integrated.

Coach Nolan Richardson grew up in segregated El Paso, the city founded in 1873.  P. 163