Texas Democrats

Charles William Duncan Jr. (September 9, 1926 – October 18, 2022) was an American businessman, administrator, and politician best known for serving as U.S. Secretary of Energy in the Cabinet of President Jimmy Carter from 1979 to 1981. He had previously served as Carter's United States Deputy Secretary of Defense during the Iranian Revolution. Earlier, Duncan had run the family business, Duncan Coffee Company of Houston, Texas, for seven years, until the Coca-Cola Company acquired it in 1964. After seven years on the Coke board, Duncan became the corporation's president.

Harry Joseph Middleton Jr. (October 24, 1921 – January 20, 2017) was an American journalist, author, and library director who served as Lyndon B. Johnson's Presidential speech writer and staff assistant from 1967 to 1969. Middleton was also director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum from 1971 until 2002, and led the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation from 1993 until 2004.

Adlene Harrison (November 19, 1923 – February 19, 2022) was an American politician who served on the Dallas City Council from 1973 to 1977, and was acting mayor of Dallas in 1976. She also served as regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency from 1977 to 1981 and as the first chair of the Dallas Area Rapid Transit Board. She was the first Jewish woman to serve as Mayor of a major U.S. city. She was Dallas' first Jewish mayor and first female mayor; Annette Strauss would follow her in both categories. Harrison, a Democratic city councilwoman, succeeded Wes Wise as mayor when he resigned to run for the United States Congress. She served until the election of a new mayor, Robert Folsom, at the end of the year.
Harrison died on February 19, 2022, at the age of 98.

Jerry Don Thompson (born November 21, 1942) is Regents Piper Professor of History at Texas A&M International University in Laredo, Texas. He is a prolific author of books on a variety of related topics, specializing in the American Civil War, the history of the Southwestern United States, and Texas history. According to WorldCat, two of his books are available from more than six hundred major libraries worldwide – Confederate General of the West: Henry Hopkins Sibley, and Civil War in the Southwest: Recollections of the Sibley Brigade.

Charles Ruford Holcomb (born 1933) is a retired Texas judge who served on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals from 2001 to 2010.
He graduated from Robert E. Lee High School. He attended Lee College in Baytown and Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, for his undergraduate education. He served in the United States Air Force Reserve from 1951 to 1953; he then graduated in 1958 from South Texas College of Law.From 1959 to 1966, he was the city attorney, first for Deer Park and then for Orange in far southeastern Texas. In 1967, he was elected to the County Court at Law of Orange County and served until 1972. During the school term of 1970–1971, he was also adjunct professor of Government at the Lamar University extension campus in Orange.From 1972 to 1981, he was in private practice with Cox, Holcomb & Sinclair, contemporaneously serving Cherokee County as county attorney from 1974 until 1981, when he was elected district attorney for the same county, a position he retained until 1991.In 1992, he was elected as a Democrat for the position of Justice of the Twelfth Court of Appeals, a post he held 1998. From 1998 to 2000, he sat by assignment in trial and appellate courts as a senior judge. Judge Holcomb was elected to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in 2000 as a Republican. His term on the Court of Criminal Appeals began in 2001. Holcomb, then seventy-one, was required by law not to serve as an active judge after he turned seventy-five in September 2008.He faced two challengers for re-election in the Republican primary election in 2006, Judge Robert Francis of Dallas, and then State Representative Terry Keel of Austin. Keel challenged both Holcomb and Francis for technical flaws in their applications to be on the ballot. Holcomb's candidacy was affirmed by the Texas Supreme Court and he won re-nomination and reelection. After his re-election, the Texas Constitution was amended to allow judges who turn seventy-five during their term to serve-out a four-year term, meaning Holcomb could serve four years of his six-year term. Holcomb retired from the Court of Criminal Appeals in 2010 and decided to run for the Senate election in 2012, but the nomination instead went to Ted Cruz, who won the party runoff election against David Dewhurst.

Ruby Kless Sondock (born April 26, 1926) is a former Associate Justice of the Texas Supreme Court. She was the first woman to serve on the Texas Supreme Court.
Sondock initially attended the University of Houston Law Center in order to become a legal secretary, but she was admitted to the state bar a year before her graduation as valedictorian of her class (1962). Sondock was appointed to the Harris County Domestic Relations Court No. 5 in 1973 and to the 234th District Court in 1977. Sondock was the first woman to be appointed as a State District Judge in Harris County, Texas.
Sondock was appointed to the Texas Supreme Court following the death of Associate Justice James G. Denton on June 10, 1982. Sondock served from June 25 to December 31 of that year, completing Denton's term. Sondock declined to seek election to the Supreme Court and instead ran successfully for reelection to her District Court seat the following year. Sondock was the court's first female justice, with the exception of a special all-woman court convened in 1925 to hear a single case. Sondock formed part of the majority of the Texas Supreme Court in the landmark case of Helicopteros Nacionales de Colombia, S. A. v. Hall.
A distinguished legal mind, Sondock has received a number of accolades, including an annual lecture series on legal ethics. Former speakers at the Sondock Lecture on Legal Ethics at the University of Houston Law Center include U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch and Helen Thomas. On November 11, 2015, the Litigation Section of the State Bar of Texas inducted Sondock as a "Texas Legal Legend."

Herman Paul Pressler III (born June 4, 1930), is an American judge who was a justice of the Texas 14th Circuit Court of Appeals in his native Houston, Texas. Pressler was a key figure in the conservative resurgence of the Southern Baptist Convention, which he initiated in 1978. He has been accused of sexual misconduct or assault by at least six men, some of whom were underage at the time of the alleged activity.

Ben Hamill Procter (February 21, 1927 – April 17, 2012) was a historian who served from 1957 to 2000 on the faculty of Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas.
A native of Temple, Texas, Procter moved with his family to Austin, where he graduated from Stephen F. Austin High School. He obtained Bachelor of Arts and master's degrees from the University of Texas at Austin. He then received a second master's degree and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He served in the United States Navy during the last months of World War II. From 1979 to 1980, Procter was the president of the Texas State Historical Association. Before he became a history professor, he played football briefly with the Los Angeles Rams until his athletic focus was halted by an injury.Procter held the Cecil and Ida Green Emeritus chair in the TCU History Department. He received the Summerfield R. Roberts Award for best book contribution to Texas history. He was a Minnie Stevens Piper Foundation fellow, honored for teaching and research. He was a biographer of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst and U.S. Senator John Henninger Reagan.Donald R. Walker (1941-2016), professor emeritus of history at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, called Procter "among the most respected and admired members of the history profession in Texas. He will be missed by students, colleagues. and other historians. ... May he rest in peace."

John Ben Shepperd (October 19, 1915 – March 8, 1990) was an American lawyer, businessman, and politician who served as the Secretary of State (1950–1952) and Attorney General (1953–1957) for the U.S. state of Texas.

Eugene Murphy Locke (January 6, 1918 – April 28, 1972) was an American lawyer, businessman, politician, and diplomat from Dallas, Texas, who in 1967 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was ambassador to Pakistan in 1966-1967 and deputy ambassador to South Vietnam in 1967-1968 before becoming an unsuccessful candidate for governor of Texas in 1968.