Don Yarborough
American politician (1925-2009)
Donald Howard Yarborough (December 15, 1925 – September 23, 2009) was an American Democratic politician who was among the first in the U.S. South to endorse the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yarborough was an attorney in Houston, Texas. He ran for governor of Texas in 1962, 1964 and 1968.
Background
Yarborough was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. His father was the president of a bank in New Orleans that went bust during the Great Depression, so Don was sent to Mississippi temporarily. His father eventually got a job with the government and moved the family to Washington, D.C. His family also spent time during the years after the depression living with relatives in Coral Gables, Florida. The family eventually moved together to Houston when he was twelve. His mother, Inez Black Yarborough, was head of the Women in Yellow volunteer corps at the Jefferson Davis Hospital in Houston.
Upon graduating from San Jacinto High School at seventeen, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, entered officer's training school, and became a company commander at the age of nineteen. He served one year in China at the close of World War II. After the war, Yarborough enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin, where he belonged to the Kappa Alpha Order fraternity, and worked part-time to supplement the money he received under the G.I. Bill of Rights.
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This entry incorporates text from “Don Yarborough” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.