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Desegregation is Not a Black and White Issue: Latino Advocacy for Equal Schooling before and after Brown
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 December 2023
Abstract
This article argues for the importance of reframing the history of school desegregation in the United States beyond Black and white and beyond the regional frames through which this history has been interpreted. In Western states, most Latino children attended schools segregated not by law but by custom starting in the early twentieth century; Latino students also encountered de facto segregation in the Eastern and Midwestern cities with large Puerto Rican populations by the 1950s. Parents, students, advocates, and activists protested the inequality of educational outcomes for Latino children over many decades, developing distinctive strategies to address the combination of racial and language-based discrimination faced by Latino students. Yet, because they were marginalized in political debates in the 1960s and 1970s and because most national-level historical scholarship on school desegregation focuses on Black and white participants, Latinos’ role in this aspect of our national civil rights history has remained obscured.
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- © Donald Critchlow and Cambridge University Press 2023
Footnotes
For their helpful feedback on the manuscript, I would like to thank Max Krochmal, Alvina Pillai, Aldo Lauria Santiago, Vicki Ruiz, participants in the Lees Seminar at Rutgers University–Camden, and three anonymous reviewers for the Journal of Policy History. I am grateful to Carlos Haro and Don Walz for sharing their recollections of the long era of school desegregation in Los Angeles, and to Brittney Ingersoll and Tasso Hartzog for their research assistance. Research for this article was supported by generous funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (grant number FEL-267650-20).
References
NOTES
1 Throughout this article, I use the term “Latino” to describe people of Latin American descent as a group. Where the subjects of discussion are either Mexican American or Puerto Rican (as opposed to a group of people of mixed national origins), I use those national-origin descriptors. In some instances, I use the term Chicano or Chicana instead of Mexican American, reflecting my sources’ usage. In the desegregation case in Denver, “Hispano” is the locally-used term employed in legal documents.
2 Birnberg, Gerald M., “Constitutional Law—Desegregation—Brown v. Board of Education Applies to Mexican-American Students …,” Texas Law Review 49 (1971): 337–46Google Scholar; Jose Cisneros et al. v. Corpus Christi Independent School District, 324 F. Supp. 599 (S.D. Tex. 1970) at 605.
3 See Donato, Rubén and Hanson, Jerrod, “‘In These Towns, Mexicans Are Classified as Negroes’: The Politics of Unofficial Segregation in the Kansas Public Schools, 1915-1935,” American Educational Research Journal 54, no. 1 (April 2017): 53–74 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Valencia, Richard, Chicano Students and the Courts: The Mexican American Legal Struggle for Educational Equality (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 7–13 Google Scholar.
4 Mendez et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County et al., 64 F. Supp. 544 (1946). The named plaintiff in the Mendez case, Silvia Méndez, was the daughter of a Mexican American father and a Puerto Rican mother. See McCormick, Jennifer and Ayala, César J., “Felícita ‘La Prieta’ Méndez (1916-1998) and the end of Latino School Segregation in California,” Centro Journal 19, no. 2 (2007): 13–35 Google Scholar.
5 There is a substantial literature on the Mexican Americans’ racial history and whiteness. See Gómez, Laura, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (New York: New York University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Gross, Ariela, “Texas Mexicans and the Politics of Whiteness,” Law and History Review 21, no. 1 (spring 2003): 195–205;Google Scholar Haney-López, Ian, “Race and Colorblindness after Hernandez and Brown ,” Chicana/o Latina/o Law Review 25, no. 1 (2005) 61–76 Google Scholar; Foley, Neil, “Over the Rainbow: Hernandez v. Texas, Brown v. Board of Education, and Black v. Brown,” Chicana/o Latina/o Law Review 25, no. 1 (2005): 139–52Google Scholar; Guglielmo, Thomas, “Fighting for Caucasian Rights: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and the Transnational Struggle for Civil Rights in World War II Texas,” Journal of American History 92, no. 4 (March 2006): 1212–1237 Google Scholar; Romero, Tom, “Of Race and Rights: Legal Culture, Social Change, and the Making of a Multiracial Metropolis, Denver 1940-1975” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2007), 144–87Google Scholar.
6 Wilson, Stephen, “Brown over ‘Other White’: Mexican Americans’ Legal Arguments and Litigation Strategy in School Desegregation Lawsuits,” Law and History Review 21, no. 1 (spring 2003): 148 Google Scholar.
7 On the erasure of Latinos in US history, see Ruiz, Vicki L., “Nuestra América: Latino History and United States History,” Journal of American History 93, no. 3 (December 2006): 655–72Google Scholar. Neither of the two most acclaimed histories of Boston’s desegregation battle provide more than a passing mention of the Puerto Rican and other Latino participants in the case, even though parents and advocates of the roughly 8,000 Latino children (8%–10% of the school population) attending Boston city schools at the time played an important role as intervenors in the lawsuit. See Lukas, J. Anthony, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (New York: Vintage, 1986)Google Scholar and Formisano, Ronald, Boston against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (1991; repr., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)Google Scholar; “Boston Public Schools, Once Beacons, Losing Students and Pride,” New York Times, September 20, 1981, 32; Boston Municipal Research Bureau, “State of Boston Public Schools Part II—Pupil Enrollments,” September 17, 1981.
8 Erica Frankerberg, Chungmei Lee, and Gary Orfield, “A Multiracial Society with Segregated Schools: Are We Losing the Dream?” The Civil Rights Project, Harvard University (January 2003): 31–34.
9 See, for example, Camarillo, Albert M., “Navigating Segregated Life in America’s Racial Borderlands, 1910s-1950s,” Journal of American History 100, no. 3 (December 2013): 645–62Google Scholar; Foley, Neil, “‘God Bless the Law, He Is White’: Legal, Local, and International Politics of Latina/o and Black Desegregation Cases in Post-World War II California and Texas,” in A Companion to Latina/o Studies, ed. Flores, Juan and Rosaldo, Renato (New York: Blackwell Publishing, 2007)Google Scholar; González, David-James, “Placing the et al. Back in Mendez v. Westminster: Hector Tarango and the Mexican American Movement to End Segregation in the Social and Political Borderlands of Orange County, California,” American Studies 56, no. 2 (2017): 31–52 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lozano, Rosina A., “Brown’s Legacy in the West: Pasadena Unified School District’s Federally Mandated Desegregation,” Southwestern University Law Review 36, no. 2 (2007): 257–90Google Scholar.
10 See, for example, Donato, Rubén, The Other Struggle for Equal Schools: Mexican Americans during the Civil Rights Era (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997)Google Scholar; San Miguel, Guadalupe, “The Impact of Brown on Mexican American Desegregation Litigation, 1950s to 1980s,” Journal of Latinos and Education 4, no. 4 (2005): 221–36Google Scholar; De Jesús, and Pérez, Madeline, “From Community Control to Consent Decree: Puerto Ricans Organizing for Education and Language Rights in 1960s and '70s New York City,” Centro Journal 21, no. 2 (2009): 7–31 Google Scholar.
11 See, for example, Erikson, Ainsley T., Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016)Google Scholar; Delmont, Matthew, Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016)Google Scholar; Dimon, Paul, Busing, Beyond: Reflections on Urban Education, the Courts, and Equal Opportunity (1985; repr., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Crain, Robert, The Politics of School Desegregation: Comparative Case Studies (1968; repr., New York: Routledge, 2017).Google Scholar None of these substantial historical studies of school desegregation at the national level engages with the history of desegregation involving Latinos or Mexican Americans in the West. Even Delmont, who discusses the Los Angeles desegregation case at length, does not have any index entries for “Mexican American,” “Hispanic,” or “Latino.” (He does mention Puerto Ricans in his discussion of the 1964 boycott in New York city.) An exception is Diane Ravitch, whose historical scholarship on school desegregation by the late 1970s addressed Latino communities’ distinctive responses to desegregation orders. See Ravitch, Diane, “The Evolution of School Desegregation Policy,” History of Education 7, no. 3 (1978): 229–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 See Molina, Natalia, “'In a Race All Their Own': The Quest to Make Mexicans Ineligible for US Citizenship,” Pacific Historical Review 79, no. 2 (May 2020): 69–170 Google Scholar; Martínez, George, “The Legal Construction of Race: Mexican Americans and Whiteness,” Harvard Latino Law Review 2 (1997): 321–48Google Scholar.
13 See Thomas, Lorrin, Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth Century New York City (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 56–91 Google Scholar.
14 These are stories thoroughly documented and analyzed by scholars of Mexican American history that are scantily incorporated into many of the more familiar historical narratives of the West. See Orozco, Cynthia, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 151–80Google Scholar; Miguel, Guadalupe San Jr. “Let All of Them Take Heed”: Mexican Americans and the Campaign for Educational Equality in Texas, 1901-1981 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987)Google Scholar.
15 Independent School Dist. v. Salvatierra, 33 S.W.2d 792 (Tex. Civ. App. 1930); Rangel, Jorge and Alcala, Carlos, “Project Report: De Jure Segregation of Chicanos in Texas Schools,” Harvard Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Law Review 7 (March 1972): 334 Google Scholar; Wilson, “Brown over ‘Other White,’” 156–58.
16 Álvarez, Robert, “The Lemon Grove Incident,” The Journal of San Diego History 32, no. 2 (spring 1986): 116–35Google Scholar; Balderrama, Francisco, In Defense of La Raza: The Los Angeles Mexican Consulate and the Mexican Community, 1929-1936 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1982), 61 Google Scholar.
17 Mendez et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County et al.
18 Mendez v. Westminster School District, at 780. These statutes were first developed in the 1860s and evolved over time. Although Mexican American children were not included in the segregation statutes, the California Attorney General decided in the 1920s that Mexicans could be treated as “Indians” and the legislature amended the School Code in the 1930s affirming the establishment of “separate schools for Indian children, excepting Indians who are wards of the United States government.” Hendrick, Irving, Final Report: Public Policy Toward the Education of Non-White Minority Group Children in California, 1849-1970, School of Education, University of California, Riverside, March 1975, 88–91, 116–19, 179–80Google Scholar.
19 Thurgood Marshall and Robert L. Carter, “Brief for the National Association of Colored People as amicus curiae,” Westminster v. Mendez, 161 F2d. 774 (9th Cir. 1947). Pauli Murray describes in her memoir a paper she wrote while a student at Howard Law School in 1944 arguing that civil rights advocates should make a “frontal attack” on the Plessy doctrine. She later learned her paper had influenced the NAACP lawyers’ briefs for Brown. Although Murray does not discuss the Mendez case in her memoir, the logical conclusion is that she drew on this paper in writing the Mendez brief. See Murray, Song in a Weary Throat: Memoir of an American Pilgrimage (1987; repr., New York: Liveright Publishing, 2018), 285–86, 329–330 and Rosenberg, Rosalind, Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 169–71Google Scholar.
20 Mendez v. Westminster 161 F.2d 781 (9th Cir. 1947); see also Rangel and Alcala, “De Jure Segregation of Chicanos,” 336.
21 Aguirre, Frederick, “ Mendez v. Westminster School District: How it Affected Brown v. Board of Education,” Journal of Hispanic Higher Education 9, no. 4 (October 2005): 321–32Google Scholar; Kluger, Richard, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 399–400 Google Scholar.
22 “Segregation in Public Schools—A Violation of ‘Equal Protection of the Laws,’” The Yale Law Journal 56 (June 1947): 1060–62.
23 Aguirre, “Mendez v. Westminster,” 321–32, 329.
24 Minerva Delgado, et al. v. Bastrop Ind. School District, Civil No. 388 (W.D. Tex. June 15, 1948). See Guadalupe San Miguel, “Mexican American Organizations and School Desegregation,” Social Science Quarterly 63, no. 4 (December 1982): 704–5.
25 Hernandez v. State, 251 S.W. 2d 531 (1952) at 532–35; Hernandez v. Texas, 347 US 475 (1954). See Wilson, “Brown over ‘Other White,’” 162–63.
26 Hernandez v. Texas, 478. See Wilson, “Brown over ‘Other White,’” 164; George Martínez, “Legal Indeterminacy, Judicial Discretion, and the Mexican American Litigation Experience: 1930-1980,” University of California at Davis Law Review 27 (1994): 555; Haney-López, “Race and Colorblindness after Hernandez and Brown,” 61–76; Johnson, Kevin, “ Hernandez v. Texas: Legacies of Justice and Injustice,” UCLA Chicana/o Latina/o Law Review 25 (2005): 174–75Google Scholar; Clare Sheridan, “‘Another White Race’: Mexican Americans and the Paradox of Whiteness in Jury Selection,” Law and History Review 21, no. 1 (spring 2003): 131; Rangel and Alcala, “De Jure Segregation of Chicanos,” 333–48.
27 “Equal Education for All,” Washington Post and Times Herald, May 19, 1954, 14; Michael Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (Oxford, 2004), 290–312; Mark Tushnet and Katya Lezin, “What Really Happened in Brown v. Board of Education,” Columbia Law Review 91, no. 8 (December 1991): 1867–1930.
28 “Obstacles to Federal Jurisdiction: New Barriers to Non-Segregated Public Education in Old Forms,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 104, no. 7 (May 1956): 974–75; Papale, A. E., “Judicial Enforcement of Desegregation: Its Problems and Limitations,” Northwestern University Law Review 52, no. 3 (July–August 1957): 309–11, 319Google Scholar.
29 “Rights Lawyers Widen Program,” New York Times, March 5, 1962, 18. NAACP lawyers’ approach to the issue of de facto segregation can be traced back to a 1930 NAACP document known as the Margold report, which argued that “segregation coupled with discrimination resulting from administrative action … is just as much a denial of equal protection of the laws as is segregation coupled with discrimination required by express statutory enactment.” See Ware, Leland, “Setting the Stage for Brown: The Development and Implementation of the NAACP’s School Desegregation Campaign, 1930-1950,” Mercer Law Review 52, no. 2 (March 2001): 640 Google Scholar. Historian Michael Glass offers an excellent analysis of the thorny debate over de facto segregation; see Glass, “From Sword to Shield to Myth,” Journal of Urban History 44, no. 6 (2018): 1207–9.
30 Glass, “From Sword to Shield to Myth,” 1204–9.
31 Romero v. Weakley, 131 F. Supp. 818, 820 (S.D. Cal.), rev’d 226 F.2d 399 (9th Cir. 1955); Guadalupe Salinas, “Mexican-Americans and the Desegregation of Schools in the Southwest,” Houston Law Review 8, no. 5 (May 1971): 942.
32 On the participation of Latinos in the 1963 March on Washington, see Thomas, Lorrin and Santiago, Aldo Lauria, Rethinking the Struggle for Puerto Rican Rights (New York: Routledge, 2018), 64–65, 81 Google Scholar.
33 “Some City Schools Held Segregated,” New York Times, April 25, 1954, 84; “Racial Unity Set for City Schools,” New York Times, December 24, 1954, 15. On increasing segregation of New York schools, see “Breakdown of City’s Schools by Race,” New York Amsterdam News, September 10, 1960, 6; Taylor, Clarence, Knocking at our Own Door: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle to Integrate New York City Schools (New York; Columbia University Press, 1997), 80 Google Scholar.
34 “Negroes, Puerto Ricans over One Third of Public School Register,” New York Amsterdam News, May 13, 1961, 26; Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door, 81–83, 86–87, 97–108, 116; Michael Glass, “From Sword to Shield to Myth,” 1205–6; Fitzpatrick, “Puerto Ricans in Perspective: The Meaning of Migration to the Mainland,” International Migration Review 2 (Spring 1968): 11. “SCHOOL STRIKE! N.Y. City Parents September Sit-ins,” New York Amsterdam News, July 23, 1960, 19; “New York Takes Integration Step,” The Chicago Defender, April 28, 1961; “Negroes and Puerto Ricans Boycott PS 81,” New York Amsterdam News, September 16, 1961, 24.
35 Back, Adina, “Exposing the ‘Whole Segregation Myth’: The Harlem Nine and New York City’s School Desegregation Battle,” in Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940-1980, ed. Theoharis, Jeanne and Woodard, Komozi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 72 Google Scholar and passim.
36 “Puerto Rican Parents Organization Formed,” New York Amsterdam News, February 6, 1965, 33.
37 “Puerto Ricans Seek School Board Say,” New York Amsterdam News, August 25, 1961, 16.
38 “Spreading Protest: Negroes’ Push Spurs Other Minority Drives against Discrimination,” Wall Street Journal, July 25, 1963, 1; “Rights Drive Set by Puerto Ricans,” New York Times, August 23, 1963, 10.
39 “City Will Permit Pupil Transfers for Integration: Negroes and Puerto Ricans to Be Granted Choice on a First-Come Basis,” New York Times, August 26, 1963, 1. Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door, 138–39; Thomas and Lauria Santiago, Rethinking the Struggle for Puerto Rican Rights, 66–68.
40 “Boycott Cripples City Schools; Absences 360,000 above Normal; Negroes and Puerto Ricans Unite,” New York Times, February. 4, 1964, 1.
41 “Galamison Group Modifies Position on a New Boycott … Puerto Ricans Backed,” New York Times, February 19, 1964, 1; “6,000 Cross B’klyn Bridge in Unity Anti-Bias March,” New York Amsterdam News, March 3, 1964, 1.
42 H.R. 7152, the civil rights bill supported by the Kennedy administration, was introduced to Congress in June 1963. After Kennedy’s assassination, President Johnson managed to quell the opposition of Southern Democrats; he signed the Civil Rights Act in July 1964. Select Subcommittee on Education, US Congress, Racial Discrimination in Federally Assisted Education Programs, Hearing (Los Angeles, August 12, 1963).
43 Crawford v. Los Angeles Board of Education, Los Angeles County Superior Court No. 822, 854 (1970).
44 “Mexicans Plight Decried on Coast: Californians Urge School Changes to Aid Minority,” New York Times, August 11, 1963; Lyndon B. Johnson’s Daily Diary Collection, August 9, 1963, LBJLibrary.net; Francis-Fallon, Benjamin, The Rise of the Latino Vote (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 88–89 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
45 Witnesses’ testimony used the term “de facto” to describe the segregation they encountered in Los Angeles schools. A district court decision issued two months earlier in Pasadena (Jackson v. Pasadena 59 Cal. 2d 879) asserted that an absence of de jure segregation did not relieve the school board from the obligation to operate an unsegregated school system.
46 Rangel and Alcala, “De Jure Segregation of Chicanos,” 365–66; “Text of Civil Rights Commission Statement on School Desegregation,” New York Times, September 13, 1969, 28.
47 Rangel and Alcala, “De Jure Segregation of Chicanos,” 346; “South Intensifies Resistance to US Guidelines for School Integration,” New York Times, May 23, 1966, 16; Wilson, “Brown over ‘Other White,’” 205.
48 New York City school superintendent William Jansen told a reporter a few weeks after the Brown opinion, “We have natural segregation here—it’s accidental.” “P.S. Super OK’s N.Y. Segregation,” New York Amsterdam News, June 5, 1954, quoted in Glass, “From Sword to Shield to Myth,” 1200. Almost a decade later, during a Congressional hearing in Los Angeles, California Representative Hawkins asked a member of the Los Angeles board of education, “Do you believe that there is any segregation existing in the schools?” To which the board member answered, “There is no deliberate segregation.” “Is there any type of segregation?” asked Hawkins. The board member replied, “If you chose to call it what is referred to as de facto segregation, segregation in that sense, but I still feel that this [de facto segregation] is a natural gravitation of people within areas. These are community living patterns.” Select Subcommittee on Education, US Congress, 1963, 48.
49 Wilson, “Brown Over ‘Other White,’” 178; San Miguel, Let All of Them Take Heed, 175–77.
50 Francis-Fallon, The Rise of the Latino Vote, 159–70. Even after the Census Bureau introduced a “Spanish Origin” question on the census form in 1970, Latinos were still primarily designated as “white.”
51 Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity, US Senate, “Hearings—Equal Educational Opportunity, Part 4—Mexican American Education,” August 18–21, 1970 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1971), 2524. On MALDEF, see San Miguel, Let All of them Take Heed, 170–72, 175–76; Rangel and Alcala, “De Jure Segregation of Chicanos,” 366.
52 Ross v. Eckels, 317 F. Supp. 512 (1970).
53 Miguel, San, Let All of them Take Heed, 175, 179; Brian Behnken, Fighting Their Own Battles: Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Texas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 201–3Google Scholar; Rangel and Alcala, “De Jure Segregation of Chicanos,” 349.
54 “Schools Consider Plea by Chicanos,” Houston Chronicle, August 16, 1970, printed in Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity, 2560–61.
55 Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity, Part 4—Mexican American Education, 2561.
56 Ross v. Eckels 434 F.2d 1140 (5th Cir. 1971) at 1150.
57 Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity, Part 4—Mexican American Education, 2528.
58 See Lee, Sonia, Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 165–210 Google Scholar; De Jesús and Pérez, “From Community Control to Consent Decree,” 7–31.
59 San Miguel, Let All of Them Take Heed, 175; Rangel and Alcala, “De Jure Segregation of Chicanos,” 366.
60 Arias, M. Beatriz, “Desegregation and the Rights of Hispanic Students: The Los Angeles Case,” Center for the Study of Evaluation, UCLA: Evaluation Comment 6, no.1 (October 1979): 14–18 Google Scholar; Salinas, “Mexican-Americans and the Desegregation of Schools in the Southwest,” 942; Gary Orfield, “Lessons of the Los Angeles Desegregation Case,” Education and Urban Society 16 (May 1984): 338–53; “Texas School Official Confused by Conflicting US Stands on Busing,” New York Times, August 8, 1971, 47.
61 Olden, Danielle, “Becoming Minority: Mexican Americans, Race, and the Legal Struggle for Educational Equity in Denver, Colorado,” Western Historical Quarterly 48, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 62–63 Google Scholar.
62 Olden, “Becoming Minority,” 59–64.
63 Lee, Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement, 173–74.
64 US Bureau of the Census, Census of Population: 1970 Subject Reports, Puerto Ricans in the United States (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1973)Google Scholar.
65 Intervenors are distinct from plaintiffs, though they are allowed to introduce evidence, rebut evidence, and file an appeal. Tregar, Betsy Jane, “Bilingual Education in Boston: Litigation, Legislation, Regulation, and Issues for Implementation” (EdD diss., Harvard University, 1983), 57–59 Google Scholar; Cruz, Tatiana, “‘We Took ‘Em On’: The Latino Movement for Educational Justice in Boston, 1965-1980,” Journal of Urban History 43, no.2 (2017): 242–43Google Scholar. On the Milwaukee case, see Báez, Tony, Fernández, Ricardo, and Guskin, Judith, Desegregation and Hispanic Students: A Community Perspective (Arlington, VA: National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education, 1980), 27–31 Google Scholar.
66 Jose Cisneros et al. v. Corpus Christi Independent School District et al.; Birnberg, “Constitutional Law—Desegregation,” 341. See also San Miguel, Let All of them Take Heed, 181; and John Trevino, “Cisneros v. CCISD: The Desegregation of the Corpus Christi Independent School District” (EdD diss., Texas A&M University, 2010).
67 Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity, Part 4—Mexican American Education, 2510.
68 Ross v. Eckels 317 F. Supp. 512 (1970). An earlier California case, Romero v. Weakley (131 F. Supp. 818 [1955]), had made a similar complaint about the segregation of African American and Mexican American students, reasoning that Mexican Americans were “white.” After the Ninth Circuit remanded the case to the district court “to cure the insufficiency” of fact (Romero v. Weakley, 226 F. 2d 399), the case appears to have settled out of court. See Salinas, “Mexican-Americans and the Desegregation of Schools in the Southwest,” 942.
69 Jose Cisneros et al. v. Corpus Christi Independent School District, at 604–8.
70 Cisneros v. Corpus Christi, at 617–21.
71 US v. State of Texas, 321 F. Supp. 1043 (E.D. Texas 1970) at 24.
72 US v Texas Education Agency, 467 F.2d 848 (5th Cir.1972) at 2, 36, 49. The judges in these two cases represent a remarkable coincidence of “aptronyms,” names appropriate to a person’s occupation.
73 Keyes v. School Dist. No. 1, 413 US. 189 (1973) at 197.
74 Keyes v. School Dist. No. 1, at 198 and 199.
75 Keyes v. School Dist. No. 1, at 197.
76 In searches of two major social science databases covering the five years following each case, the Denver case, Keyes, was referenced in about half as many publications as the Detroit case, Milliken v. Bradley, 418 US 717 (1974).
77 Glazer, Nathan, “Is Busing Necessary?” in The Great School Bus Controversy , ed. Nicolaus Mills (New York: Teachers College Press, 1973), 194–95Google Scholar.
78 “More on the President’s ‘Anti-Busing’ Program,” Washington Post, March 22, 1972, A22. Busing did not conform to party alignment: New York’s liberal Republican Senator Jacob Javits opposed the antibusing provisions of the bill, “a clear and unconstitutional repudiation of the principles of racial equality.” “Busing Bill Approved by Senate,” Washington Post, May 25, 1972, A1. “Democrats Vote Pro-Busing Plank,” New York Times, June 27, 1972, 1.
79 “Biden: A Liberal Breaks Ranks,” The Washington Post, September 28, 1975, 30. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP called Biden’s 1975 bill “incredible, appalling”; “In Our Opinion,” Chicago Defender, September 27, 1975, 6. For links to a series of solicitous letters on his busing bill from Biden to Mississippi Senator James Eastland (a Southern Democrat and avowed segregationist), see “Tensions Ripple through Biden Campaign as His Past Working Relationship with a Segregationist Senator Comes to the Forefront,” Washington Post, June 20, 2019.
80 Bell, Derrick, “Serving Two Masters: Integration Ideals and Client Interests in School Desegregation Litigation,” Yale Law Review 85, no. 4 (March 1976): 470–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
81 Robert L. Carter, “A Reassessment of Brown v. Board,” in Shades of Brown: New Perspectives on School Desegregation, ed. Derrick Bell, 27; see also Derrick Bell, Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (New York: Oxford University Press), 115. Carter coauthored the amicus brief in the 1947 Mendez v. Westminster case with Thurgood Marshall.
82 “We think it neither necessary, nor proper, to endure the dislocations of desegregation without reasonable assurances that our children will instructionally profit.” Bell, “Serving Two Masters,” epigraph, 470.
83 “Complaint in Intervention,” filed January 23, 1975, by the Massachusetts Chapter of the Lawyers Guild and the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund.
84 Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity, Part 4—Mexican American Education, 2395, 2409–13, 2443–4, 2469–75, 2482 and 2638; Part 8—Equal Educational Opportunity for Puerto Rican Children, 3782–88, 3819–28.
85 Olden, “Shifting the Lens: Using Critical Race Theory and Latino Critical Theory to Re-Examine the History of School Desegregation,” Qualitative Inquiry 2, no. 3 (2015): 257.
86 Francis-Fallon, The Rise of the Latino Vote, 72–74; Mauricio Castro, “‘The Republican Party Congratulates You, and Needs You!’: Cuban Americans, South Florida Politics, and Republican Outreach In the 1970s,” Paper presented at the Purdue Political History Conference, West Lafayette, IN, June 2022.
87 Rangel, and Alcala, , “De Jure Segregation of Chicanos,” 390; Carlos Blanton, The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836-1981 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press), 127 Google Scholar. US Commission on Civil Rights, Confronting Racial Isolation in Miami (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, June 1982), 51–52; Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity, Part 4—Mexican American Education, 2410–12.
88 Báez, Fernández, and Guskin, Desegregation and Hispanic Students, 16, 36–43.
89 Haro, Carlos, Mexicano/Chicano Concerns and School Desegregation in Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Center Publications, UCLA, 1977), 53 Google Scholar, 57–58.
90 Fernández, Ricardo, “Closing Comments,” in Desegregation and Education Concerns of the Hispanic Community: Conference Report, June 26–28, 1977 (Washington, DC: Department. of Health, Education, and Welfare, National Institute of Education, 1977), 72–74 Google Scholar.
91 “‘Anti-Busing’ Bill Gets California Governor’s O.K.,” Chicago Daily Defender, October 3, 1970, 31; John Caughey, “The Racial Mix, No Barrier to School Integration,” [n.d., 1976?], J. W. Caughey Papers, School Desegregation, box 2, folder 4, CSUN Oviatt Library.
92 John L. Martínez, “Petitioners Memorandum of Points and Authorities Re the Hispanic Minority,” May 19, 1977, Caughey collection, CSUN, box 2, folder 5, 17–18.
93 “What is Mexican?—The Arrogance of Fear,” Sin Fronteras, June 1977, Chicano Resource Center, L. A. County Library.
94 In 1977, Latinos comprised 34.9% of the student body, whites 33.7%, and African Americans 24.7%. See Egly, Paul, “ Crawford v. Los Angeles Unified School District: An Unfulfilled Plea for Racial Equality,” University of La Verne Law Review 31 (2009): 267 Google Scholar.
95 Haro, Mexicano/Chicano Concerns, 52.
96 Reagan won 489 electoral college votes to Carter’s 49. See David Broder, “A Sharp Right Turn,” New York Times, November 6, 1980, A1.
97 Francis-Fallon, The Rise of the Latino Vote, 364–71. During the campaign, Reagan promised voters in East Los Angeles he “would oppose any legislative attempts to eliminate” bilingual education; after he was elected, having won about a quarter of Latinos’ votes, Reagan’s aggressive budget cuts included bilingual education programs.
98 “The Battle of Bilingual Education,” The Washington Post, August 10, 1980, BW19; “The War of the Words: A Decade Later, Bilingual Education’s Dilemmas Persist,” Washington Post, July 7, 1985, A1.
99 In California in 2017, 54.2% of Latinos attended highly segregated schools, defined as 90%–100% nonwhite (57.7% of students in the state were Latino); in New York, 55.4% of Latinos attended highly segregated schools (26.4% of students in the state were Latino); in Texas, 54.3% of Latinos attended highly segregated schools (52.3% of students in the state were Latino). The percentage of Black students in highly segregated schools was higher in 2017 in New York and Illinois (65.2% and 58.4%, respectively), although the number was considerably smaller, as Black students comprised 17% of each of those states’ enrolled students, compared with a Latino enrollment of 26.4% and 25.8%, respectively. Only Mississippi and Louisiana have student populations that approach 50% Black (49% and 44%), but in those states the proportion in highly segregated schools was lower (44.7% and 41.2%, respectively) than the highest figures for Latinos. See Erica Frankenberg, Jongyeon Ee, Jennifer Ayscue, and Gary Orfield, “Harming our Common Future: America’s Segregated Schools 65 Years after Brown,” The Civil Rights Project, UCLA, May 10, 2019, 15–19, 28–30.