Ralph Webster Yarborough was born in 1903 in the rural East Texas town of Chandler, about 50 miles east of Dallas. He was the seventh child of nine children of Charles and Nannie Yarborough and attended public schools in Chandler. Geographically, the environment in which Ralph grew up was similar to the Deep South, but uniquely Texan in population and industries. VO Key Quote “The smell of oil refineries settles on the cotton fields and makes the magnolia scent of the Old South barely perceptible.” After college at both West Point and Sam Houston State Teacher's College, Ralph taught in the Texas public school system for several years until he left to work for the American Chamber of Commerce in Berlin. Upon returning to the United States, he served in the Thirty-sixth Division of the Texas National Guard, where he rose to the rank of sergeant major. In 1927, Yarborough graduated from the University of Texas Law School and served as assistant attorney general to James V. Allred, who would later become governor of Texas and appoint Yarborough as a district judge in Travis County. In 1943 he joined the Army to fight in World War II and served in the field throughout Europe and Japan. After rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel; Yarborough was released in 1946. Returning to his law practice, Yarborough specialized in the nuances of Texas land laws, in particular, oil drilling rights and often took on major oil companies. Between Allred and Yarborough the two took on big oil companies, causing the state of Texas to retain half of all revenue from state-owned oil lands. The sum of all these cases over the course of their careers earned the state billions of dollars in oil royalties, especially benefiting Te... From 1957 to 1971, and served on (and later chaired) the Labor Commission and the public welfare of the Senate. He was a supporter of progressive education legislation including; the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the Higher Education Act of 1965, and the Bilingual Education Act of 1967. Yarborough also supported President Johnson's "Great Society" programs to eliminate poverty and overcome racial injustice. Yarborough refused to sign the infamous Southern Manifesto, a pledge to resist integration, and importantly was the only Southern senator to vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and one of the few to vote for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Ralph Yarborough spent his entire career advocating for the poor, infirm, and abused, and solidified his classification as a populist.