All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975 [Reprint 2019 ed.] 9780520317048

Citation preview

CHARLES

WOLLEN BERG

All Deliberate

Speed

Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1853-1975

U N I V E R S I T Y OF C A L I F O R N I A P R E S S Berkeley

Los Angeles

London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England Copyright © 1976, 1978 by The Regents of the University of California First Paperback Printing 1978 ISBN: 0-520-03728-6 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 75-46047 Printed in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Contents

INTRODUCTION

1

1. "SEPARATE BUT EQUAL" IN CALIFORNIA

8

2. "YELLOW PERIL" IN THE SCHOOLS (i)

28

3. "YELLOW PERIL" IN THE SCHOOLS (il)

48

4. THE TRAGEDY OF INDIAN EDUCATION

82

5. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF "SEPARATE BUT EQUAL"

108

6. ALL DELIBERATE SPEED IN CALIFORNIA

136

7. SEGREGATION AND EXCLUSION IN CALIFORNIA SCHOOLS, 1855-1975: OBSERVATIONS

178

EPILOGUE

187

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

191

INDEX

192

Acknowledgments

This book originally appeared in a different form as a dissertation, and I especially appreciate the assistance of my dissertation committee, Merle Borrowman, Walton Bean and Irving Hendrick. Particular thanks go to Professor Hendrick for his generosity in sharing the results of his own research with me. Others who gave me valuable criticisms and suggestions were Geraldine Clifford, Dale Tillery, David Tyack, Carlos Cortes and Harold and Jacqueline Wollenberg. I should also acknowledge the great assistance received from the staffs of the Bancroft Library and other branches of the University of California Berkeley Library, as well as the State Library in Sacramento and the San Francisco Branch of the National Archives. Finally, thanks to Diana Vennard for her invaluable assistance in typing the manuscript.

Introduction

In 1872, after the regular Oakland schools were opened to black children for the first time, a black parent noted that "it was the happiest day of my life to see our children received with the same equality with the Anglo S a x o n . . . I think by children going to school and growing up together, the prejudice that has been so long in existence will be blotted out." 1 Today, over a century later, that statement still expresses the unfulfilled dream of school integrationists, that public school attendance can be used as a major force to "blot out" racism and discrimination in America. This book is in part a narrative history of that dream and the attempts to make it a reality in California. But the study also covers the sustained efforts to exclude minorities from the public education system and to segregate them in the public schools. My aim is to create a "usable history" that will place the current controversies over busing and ethnic balance in historical perspective. I hope to expose and explore a largely ignored past record in order to better understand a present problem. The book is often concerned with an inter-relationship between two supremely important American institutions: the schools and the courts. Both institutions have sometimes been instruments of ethnic oppression and 1

Pacific Appeal

(San Francisco), July 20, 1872.

1

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All Deliberate Speed

discrimination, yet both also have been perceived by minorities as potential allies in the struggle against racism and segregation. Educational opportunity is important to all Americans, but particularly so to minorities. They not only hope that education will reduce the general level of ignorance and prejudice, but they also see schooling as a vehicle for social mobility, a means by which their children can escape or ameliorate conditions of poverty and discrimination. During the past century, the courts have become the major field of battle in the struggle against school segregation. Ethnic minorities usually have had little economic power or political clout with which to fight discrimination, and their relatively small numbers have made successful armed insurrection impossible. But since the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1868, the courts have been a place where significant victories against institutional racism can be won. Court cases are used as the core of this study, then, not because I wish to write a legal history, but because the judicial system so often has been the battlefield for proponents and opponents of school segregation. In California, key court decisions have both determined and reflected the realities of ethnic experiences and relationships in the schools. The decisions have caused dramatic educational policy changes and reflected the intellectual, moral and political currents of the times. This book provides a social context for the judicial history of school segregation in California; the book seeks to explain what caused particular conflicts to arrive in court, why the court made particular decisions, and what effect those decisions had on the schools and ethnic groups involved. There are several reasons why California was chosen as the subject of this study. First, although the state has the nation's largest and the far west's oldest public school system, its educational history has been almost ignored by scholars. There is no acceptable institutional history of

Introduction

3

public education in California, let alone any challenging, interpretive studies.2 In recent years, some excellent historical work has been published on school systems on the east coast, but there is no reason to assume that California's educational history has always conformed to eastern models. David Tyack has noted that "Some writers imply that urban education is New York or Boston writ large; but any resident of Portland, Oregon, could testify that such is not the case." 3 The same could be said for residents of Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego. It is hoped that this book will stimulate further interest in the field of California educational history. California also has the nation's largest population of ethnic minorities and, next to Hawaii, the nation's most ethnically diverse population. The term "ethnic minority" is neither precise nor satisfying, but for purposes of this study, let us assume that in California it means people of Asian, Latin American and Polynesian descent, as well as blacks and American Indians. By this definition, nearly one-third of the state's population is "minority," including as many as 3.5 million people of Latin American (mostly Mexican) descent, at least 1.5 million blacks, almost 600,000 Asians and approximately 100,000 American Indians. During the past decade, a fair amount of historical material about these peoples' experiences has been published, as some California writers have attempted to reverse the overwhelmingly Anglo emphasis of the state's earlier historians. But sometimes these attempts have resulted in works written simply to prove that Even the most comprehensive existing histories of California education are in need of massive revision. See William Warren Ferrier, Ninety Years of Education in California 1846-1936 (Berkeley, 1937) and Roy W. Cloud, Education in California: Leaders, Organizations and Accomplishments of the First Hundred Years (Stanford, 1952). 5 David Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, 1974), 5. 2

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non-whites were present at a particular time and place, and minorities often have been pictured only as passive, helpless victims of society. Much the same could be said for some recent works of educational history. 4 This study will treat minorities as active participants in a social process. There is no doubt that all of the ethnic groups covered here have been victims of discriminatory and oppressive practices in the schools and the society at large, but at various times each group has rebelled against such conditions and won at least limited victories. Some groups also have been able to use the public education system to gain substantial economic and social mobility, though often at considerable cultural and psychological cost. It must be emphasized that we are dealing with several, separate minorities, each with its own unique heritage and experience. The amount of prejudice and illtreatment each group has suffered has varied greatly according to time and place and according to what degree the rest of California society regarded the group as a physical, cultural or economic threat. General social and economic conditions, political conflicts, even diplomatic rivalries have affected the position of different minorities at different times. Moreover, the minority's own culture and heritage helped determine the way it responded to discrimination and the group's degree of success or failure within the schools. This study cannot 4

For an excellent analysis of recent trends in the writing of the ethnic history of California and the west, see Lawrence B. De Graff, "Recognition, Racism, and Reflections on the Writing of Western Black History," Pacific Historical Review (Feb., 1975), 52-67. Many of the recent "revisionist" educational historians have exposed the racism and oppression non-white and immigrant minorities have been subjected to in American schools but the revisionist emphasis on the evils of "social control" often results in a picture of minorities as helpless, if saintly victims. See Joel Spring, Education and the Rise of the Corporate State (Boston, 1972) and Clarence Karier, Paul Violas and Joel Spring, Roots of Crisis: American Education in the "Twentieth Century (Chicago, 1973).

Introduction

deal with all the various minorities in California society, but it does cover groups which, taken together, comprise the great bulk of the state's non-white population. The book not only reflects my scholarly interests, but also some of my personal experiences and concerns. I am a product of California public schools and a resident of Berkeley, a community which has gone further in the direction of school integration than any other city of its size in the United States. I teach at an Oakland community college with a diverse, multi-ethnic student body. From time to time, I have been involved in what used to be called Civil Rights activities, as well as other liberal-to-radical causes. As might be expected from this background, I am a social integrationist who believes that multi-ethnic schools are generally a good thing, and I have no particular objection to the use of buses to achieve school integration, providing that the busing costs and distances are within reason. In spite of these beliefs (some might call them prejudices), I have resisted the temptation to treat this subject as a morality play pitting the "good" integrationists against the "evil" segregationists. In fact, some of those supporting integration have displayed attitudes as racist and repugnant as the most unreconstructed segregationist. Integration has been proposed as a means of enforced assimilation and conformity of recalcitrant minorities, and it has been supported on the grounds that non-whites can learn only when in classrooms with Anglos. On the other hand, some of those arguing for separate schools have had the best of motives: to maintain a valuable heritage or to prevent the break-down of a positive sense of community or neighborhood. Perhaps the terms "integration" and "segregation" have become too loaded with subjective and emotional connotations to portray correctly the controversies which have raged over the role of minorities in Cali-

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fornia schools. It may be more accurate to say that throughout the state's history there has been a conflict between those who have seen the schools as universal and unifying institutions and those who have seen the schools as particularist and separated institutions. The former may wish to create tolerance and equal opportunity or to achieve enforced conformity and assimilation, while the latter may seek to protect valid community or cultural values or to promote discrimination and oppression. The current concepts of "community control" and "neighborhood schools" are consistent with the particularist model, while "busing" and attempts to achieve "ethnic balance" coincide with the universalist ideal. One side emphasizes the importance of local values and the maintenance of local power, the other emphasizes national values and appeals, usually through the courts, to the power of national institutions. Such a formulation has the virtue of showing that neither side has a monopoly on good or bad motives, but it does not communicate the strong passions that the issue of school integration has created throughout California history. Parents see integration affecting the lives and futures of their children. It is an issue that touches on profound fears and conflicts within the American psyche; it can affect property values, business prospects, professional status, and the next election. Integration sometimes pits the highest idealism of the American political value system against the direct self-interest of the individual citizen. But the passionate proponents and opponents of school integration share at least some common convictions. They are united in their belief that the schools do make a difference, that their children's values, associations, and futures are changed by the schools, for better or for worse. And in California both sides have accepted the courts rather than the streets as the arena in which the battle will be waged. In an age when the public is

Introduction

7

supposedly losing faith in the ability of American institutions to function effectively, it should be noted that there is no reduction in the number of school segregation cases making their way through the judicial system. Ironically, the continued courtroom debates about busing and racial balance may be a sign that Americans have not lost their belief in the potency of the schools and the courts and the ability of these institutions either to save the nation or cause social havoc.

1 "Separate but Equal" in California O N AN E V E N I N G in July 1872 a small group of black parents met in the basement of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in San Francisco to discuss attempts earlier that day to register their children in the city's regular (white) public schools. As expected, all the children were turned away. For example, Harriet Ward had taken her daughter Mary Frances to Broadway School, but Principal Noah Flood refused to let the child enroll. He politely informed Mrs. Ward that the San Francisco Board of Education required that black students attend separate, all-black institutions and suggested that she take Mary to one of the city's two public "colored schools." 1 That brief encounter at Broadway School was the basis of California's first school segregation court case. On September 22, 1872 the Wards' attorney appealed to the State Supreme Court to allow Mary to enter Broadway School and to end the practice of segregation of black school children throughout California. Eighteen months later the court handed down a decision, upholding Principal Flood's action and establishing the principle of "separate but equal" in California school law. Ward v. Flood was thus the beginning of more than a century of litigation over the issue of school segregation in Cali1 Ward v. Flood, 48 California 42-46 (1874); The Elevator (San Francisco), July 20, 1872.

8

"Separate but Equal"

9

fornia. It was also part of a remarkable effort by black parents to win equal educational opportunity for their children. To understand both of these stories, we must go back to the 1850s and the origins of California "Jim Crow" laws. "JIM CROW," CALIFORNIA STYLE

In 1852 there were only 2,206 black people in the state, about 1 percent of the total population, but already California had accumulated a considerable body of discriminatory legislation. 2 Mixed marriages were forbidden by law and people with as little as "one-sixth African blood" were denied the right to vote, hold public office, and testify in court against white persons. The legislature had passed a tough fugitive slave law providing for the apprehension of escaped bondsmen and their return to the South, and Governor Peter Burnett was calling for a ban on immigration of free blacks into the state. It is true that in 1849 Californians had approved a state constitution that abolished slavery, but according to a contemporary observer, the voters "were not concerned with slavery in the abstract... not one in ten cares a button for its abolition, nor the Wilmot Proviso either; all they look at is their own position; they must themselves swing the pick, and they won't swing it beside Negro slaves."3 Although many California blacks were still swinging picks in the mining regions, by the mid-1850's most were probably living in urban centers such as San Francisco, Sacramento or Stockton and were engaged in service or laboring occupations. The bulk of the states' black population originally had come from the northeastern United 2 Eugene H. Berwanger, The Frontier Against Slavery; Western AntiNegro Prejudice and the Slavery Extension Controversy (Urbana, 1967), 72; Rudolph M. Lapp, Archy Lee, A California Fugitive Slave (San Francisco, 1969), vi. 5 Berwanger, Frontier, 61.

All Deliberate Speed

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States, and in California they probably enjoyed a higher per capita income than blacks anywhere else in the country. In 1870 the number of "paupers" per 100 Negroes in California was less than half that of whites. California blacks were generally literate, fairly prosperous people, and they were not willing to accept a status of civil or legal inferiority. Under the leadership of newspaper editors and other small businessmen, they organized meetings and circulated petitions to protest against discriminatory legislation. Annual conventions of black residents were held in the middle 1850's, primarily to urge repeal of the limitations on legal testimony, and in 1857 a successful court battle was fought to free Archy Lee, who had been arrested as a fugitive slave. But the restrictive laws remained on the books throughout the fifties, and in 1858 only a disagreement between the State Assembly and Senate over formal wording prevented the proposed ban on free black immigration from becoming lawf4 "COLORED SCHOOLS"

No specific mention of race was included in the state's earliest school laws, but in 1854, when San Francisco black parents appealed for public schooling for their children, it was assumed by all parties that such schooling would take place in a segregated, all-black institution. On May 22, 1854, the city's Board of Education established the state's first public "colored school" in the basement of St. Cyprian Church near the corner of Jackson and Virginia Streets. 5 Forty-five children registered in the new 4

Lapp, Archy Lee, vi; and "Negro Rights in Gold Rush California" (unpublished manuscript in Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California, 1964), 1-24. 5 Delilah L. Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles, 1919), 173; William W. Ferrier, Ninety Years of Education in California: 1846-1936 (Berkeley, 1937), 97-98.

"Separate but Equal"

11

institution, a figure that grew to about 100 by 1860. In that year, San Francisco School Superintendent George Tait told the board that "the room occupied by this school for the past few years is disgraceful to any civilized community." The board accepted Tait's recommendation to construct a new building for the school, and when it was finished in 1864, Tait claimed that "the colored children richly deserve their present comfortable and neat school house after having endured unmurmuringly for many years in their squalid, dark and unhealthy quarters." 6 Other California communities soon followed San Francisco's lead in forming "colored schools." In 1855 Sacramento's school board extended financial aid to a previously private school for black children, and in 1856 the city built a new school house for the institution. Similar actions were taken by other school boards, so that by 1873 there were twenty-one public "colored schools" in the state and a few private institutions, including Phoenixonia Institute, a secondary level boarding school in San Jose.7 The growth of the "colored" school system in California produced a small body of influential black teachers. Whites sometimes were hired in the segregated schools —Sara Brown, daughter of the abolitionist leader John Brown, was the teacher in Red Bluff's "colored school"— but most often black educators were employed. 8 Probably the most notable was Jeremiah Sanderson, born of Scottish and Negro parents in New Bedford, Rhode Island, and a colleague of Frederick Douglass in the New England abolitionist movement during the 1840s. After 6

Ferrier, Ninety Years, 100; Roy W. Cloud, Education in California: Leaders, Organizations, and Accomplishments of the First Hundred Years (Stanford, 1952), 44. 7 Beasley, Trail Blazers, 174-176; J. F. Cowdery, The Word White in California School Laws (San Francisco, 1874), 2. 8 Beasley, Trail Blazers, 177.

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coming to California in 1854, Sanderson was active in the fight against discriminatory legislation. He served as the teacher in Sacramento's "colored school" and later moved to San Francisco to take a similar position. In 1863 he was named principal of the San Francisco institution, but two years later the Board of Education reassigned him as a teacher at a new evening school for "colored" students. The problem was that Sanderson's black assistant had resigned, and a white woman was hired in her place. The board felt it improper to have a black principal over a white teacher; thus Sanderson was transferred and a white man hired to replace him. In 1868 Sanderson became the teacher in Stockton's new "Negro school." By now his reputation as educator was so great that black parents from all over the state sent their children to Stockton to be taught by him. He was paid $60.00 per month, while white teachers in the regular Stockton schools were receiving $75.00.9 Although separate "colored schools" were established before California's school codes contained any mention of race, it was not long before the law caught up with common practice. The school laws of 1851 and 1853 had provided for the distribution of state educational funds in proportion to the number of school-age children in a particular community. In 1855, the year after San Francisco's "colored school" was established, the law was changed and the first mention of race was included. State funds now were to be distributed "in proportion to the number of white children . . ,"10 If the new law were taken literally, school districts apparently could not use state funds for the education of black children. But, as we have seen, this did not prevent 9

Lapp, "Jeremiah B. Sanderson: Early California Negro Leader," Journal of Negro History (Oct., 1968), 321-333. 10 Emphasis added. The Law Establishing and Regulating Common Schools in the State of California (San Francisco, 1853), 14; (Sacramento, 1855), 28; Cloud, Education, 44.

"Separate but Equal"

13

districts from establishing separate schools. In San Francisco in 1858 the "light-skinned daughter" of a prominent black resident was even allowed to enroll in a regular (white) public school. Protests from parents and school officials eventually persuaded the San Francisco Board of Education to rescind that decision, but occasional black pupils were allowed to attend regular schools in other California communities. 1 1 In 1859 State Superintendent of Public Instruction Andrew Jackson Moulder reported that "in several counties attempts have been made to introduce Negroes into our public schools on an equality basis with the whites." 1 2 SEPARATION BY LAW Moulder, a Democrat and native of Virginia, was described as a "fine-type Southern Gentleman." H e vehemently opposed "mixed schools," and warned that "to force African, Chinese and Diggers into one school . . . must result in the ruin of the schools. T h e great mass of our citizens will not associate in terms of equality with these inferior races; nor will they consent that their children do so." However, the superintendent was willing to support separate schools "for the benefit of the inferior races . . . providing the white citizens do not object." 1 3 The legislature agreed, and during the early 1860s school legislation consistent with Moulder's recommendations was adopted. By 1863 "Negroes, Mongolians and Indians" were not to be admitted to the regular public schools, "and whatever satisfactory evidence is furnished to the Superintendent of Public Instruction to show that said prohibited persons are attending such schools, he may withhold from the district... all Lapp, "Negro Rights," 20. California Department of Public Instruction, Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (Sacramento, 1859), 14-15. 15 Ibid.; Cloud, Education, 37-38; Ferrier, Ninety Years, 98. 11

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Speed

share of the State School Fund." However, the law allowed, but did not require, districts to establish "a separate school for the education of Negroes, Mongolians, and Indians, and use the Public School fund for the support of the same." 14 During the middle and late 1860s, the law was often changed, usually in the direction of fairer treatment for non-whites. Discriminatory measures were identified with the Confederate cause, and the pro-Union Republican Party supported some weakening of California's "Jim Crow" laws. In 1863 blacks were given the right to testify in court against whites, and in 1864 the new school law required districts to establish a separate school for "Negroes, Mongolians and Indians" upon written application of "the parents or guardians of ten or more colored children." 15 The old school law had allowed, but not required, districts to provide education for non-whites; now school boards were forced to provide such education at least in communities with ten or more "colored" children. The question of what happened in districts where there were less than ten "colored" children was partially answered by the legislature in 1866. These districts were permitted, but again not required, to allow such children "to attend schools with white children provided that a majority of the parents of the children attending such schools make no objection in w r i t i n g . . . 1 6 In 1870 districts with less than ten "colored" children could educate them "in separate schools or in any other manner." 17 The liberalizing trend was supported by the leading school man of this era, John Swett, State Superintendent of Public Instruction from 1863 to 1867. He was a New 14 An Act to Provide For the Maintenance and Supervision of Common Schools (Sacramento, 1863), 19. 15 School Law (Sacramento, 1864), 22. 16 Revised School Law (Sacramento, 1866), 18. 17 California School Law (Sacramento, 1870), 18.

"Separate but Equal"

15

Englander by birth, a Republican and close associate of Thomas Starr King, the state's renowned Unionist orator. When Swett ran for the State Superintendency in 1862, his Democratic opponents circulated a handbill claiming that he was an abolitionist and that he had allowed Negroes and whites to be "taught and classed in terms of equality" while principal of San Francisco's Rincon School. Swett denied the charges, and during his term as superintendent, he never publicly advocated "mixed schools" nor questioned the practice of segregation. However, he did actively support and initiate legislation to assure blacks the right to public education, albeit in separate schools. 18 SEGREGATION UNDER ATTACK By the mid-1860s spokesmen for California's black population also were escalating their protests against restrictions on the right of their children to public education. In the 1850s other discriminatory practices, particularly limitations on judicial testimony, had been the major targets of black protests. Thus, while the Colored Citizens' Convention of 1856 appointed a committee to frame voluminous resolutions dealing with "laws which deprive children of color of equal school rights," the proposed resolutions were eventually tabled on grounds that they were "visionary and impracticable." 19 However, in the 1860s, victory in the long fight for judicial 18 John Swett, History of the Public School System of California (San Francisco, 1876), 49; and Public Education in California, its Origin and Development with Personal Reminiscences of Half a Century (New York, 1911), 143-145; Have Negroes Been Taught and Classed in Terms of Equality in a Public School Under the Charge of Mr. John Swett (San Francisco, 1862), 1. Also see Nicholas Polos, "A Yankee Patriot: John Swett, the Horace Mann of the Pacific," History of Education Quarterly (March, 1964), 17-32. 19 Proceedings of the Second Annual Convention of the Colored Citizens of the State of California (San Francisco, 1856), 6-7, 24-25.

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testimony allowed black leaders to focus their attention on other problems. The 1865 Colored Citizens' Convention made suffrage and equal education its chief goals. According to W. H. Hall, chairman of the convention's education committee, schooling demanded "our chiefest attention and labors;" it was "a paramount duty." 20 Hall was particularly concerned that the law still did not guarantee all black children the right to full public education. He pointed out that blacks were taxed to pay for schools, yet in districts in which there were less than ten black children, they still had no legal guarantee to primary schooling. Nowhere in California did qualified blacks have assurance of admittance to public secondary schools. Thus, the convention called on the legislature to amend the school law "so that colored children by its provisions shall receive the benefit of its advantages in common with others." The legislature also was asked to establish a state-supported high school for black adolescents. The convention did not specifically call for an end to separate schools, but Hall believed that if black children could not receive equal education in the few separate institutions then in existence, "let them be admitted to those [white] schools already established." 21 In 1867 black parents in San Francisco reacted angrily when the Board of Education moved the "colored school" from its convenient location on Broadway Street to a less accessible site near the corner of Vallejo and Taylor. The decision was made after a new white institution was built on Broadway near the "colored" schoolhouse. Apparently, white parents did not want their children attending classes on the same block as black children; as one Board of Education member put it, the "colored school" was moved because "it was too close to a white school on the 20 Proceedings of the California State Convention (San Francisco, 1865), 7. 21 Ibid., 6-8.

of Colored Citizens

"Separate but Equal"

17

same street." 22 Some black parents were so incensed by the move that they pulled their children out of school altogether. Others demanded that the board allow black children to attend the nearest school to their homes without regard to race. By 1870 San Francisco School Superintendent James Denman was sufficiently alarmed by the black protests to warn that demands for integrated schools were "unwise as long as the School Board is willing to provide equal education in separate facilities." 23 The concern of black parents was heightened when the Oakland School Board abruptly closed its "colored school" in 1871. The institution had been operating since 1866, but in 1871 less than ten children were enrolled. The board interpreted state law as no longer requiring maintenance of a "colored school," and when the remaining black parents requested that their children be allowed to attend the regular Oakland schools, the board refused, pointing out that state law did not require that this be done. The superintendent was instructed to "refuse admission to any colored children," and thus those children were deprived of any public education at all.24 According to the Pacific Appeal, a black-owned weekly newspaper published in San Francisco, the Oakland incident meant that blacks were having "their children driven from the free schools in each county for which they are taxed in common with other citizens . . . " The paper warned that "Colored citizens will be compelled ere long to take this whole question before a state or United States Court." 25 In November 1871 the Appeal invited "friends from San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento, Marysville and elsewhere" to attend a conference in Stockton "on the 22

Ferrier, Ninety Years, 100. " Ibid. 2 < Beasley, Trail Blazers, 178. 25 Pacific Appeal (San Francisco), Oct. 7, 1871.

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educational wants of our children." 26 The conference met in a Stockton church on November 20, and Peter Anderson, editor of the Appeal, was chosen president of the body. (Educator Jermiah Sanderson was elected one of the vice-presidents.) There was no doubt about the conference's position on current state law: a resolution demanded "the abrogation of the oppressive laws . . . which make no provision for the education of our children where there are less than t e n . . . " But the conference went beyond this position to oppose the very existence of separate schools for black children. Resolutions called for an end to "caste schools" and demanded that the legislature amend Article 56 of the school law to delete the phrase "children of African descent" from the requirement that "the education of children of African descent, and Indian children shall be provided in separate schools." Before adjourning, the conference appointed an on-going executive committee to follow up on the resolutions passed during the meeting. The committee was instructed to petition the legislature and, if that avenue failed, to bring a "test case of the School Law before the Courts." 27 LEGISLATIVE DEFEAT

Undoubtedly, the delegates to the Stockton Conference were aware of the fight against segregated schools that had been waged by black citizens of Boston fifteen years before. In 1850 the Massachusetts Supreme Court upheld "separate but equal" schools in the Roberts case, but in 1855 the Massachusetts legislature overturned the segregation statutes and decreed that blacks attend regular public schools.28 As in Massachusetts, California blacks 26

Ibid., Nov. 18, 1871. Ibid., Nov. 25, 1871; Beasley, Trail Blazers, 178. 28 Stanley K. Schultz, The Culture Factory: Boston Public Schools, 17891860 (New York, 1973), 196-198. 27

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decided to use both legislative and judicial channels in their fight against school segregation. They were encouraged about the legislative prospects after the inauguration of a new governor, Republican Newton Booth in 1871. In his inaugural address Booth lauded the recently ratified Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Federal Constitution and noted that these measures "make the rights of citizens independent of color . . . all badges of distinction that are relics of the slave holding era of our national history should pass away." Among such relics were "colored schools": "the doors of our schools should be open to all with no prejudice of caste." 29 The Appeal applauded Booth's speech, but was concerned that some of his fellow Republicans in the legislature might not be so firm. Even more questionable was the support of the Democrats who held a majority in the State Senate. Some of the Democratic senators identified themselves with the "New Departure" movement which disassociated itself from the Democratic Party's proConfederate past, but the Appeal had doubts about their sincerity. The newspaper pointed out that California black men finally had won the right to vote as a consequence of the Fifteenth Amendment, and politicians were warned that the school issue could weigh heavily with the new black voters. "We intend before the Presidential election [of 1872] to make each party, the New Departure Democrats and the Republican Party, show who they serve, God or Mammon." 3 0 The Appeal did not have to wait long to put the legislature to the test. In January 1872 State Senator Seldon V. Finney of San Mateo introduced a bill to remove all mention of race from the school law and require that "every public school shall be open to the admission of all children . . . " Finney called on California to "cast off its prejudices and rise to the level of justice, Pacific Appeal, Dec. 9, 1871. »o Ibid., Nov. 25, 1871. 25

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liberty and law." 51 His bill actually took the members of the black executive committee of the Stockton Conference by surprise, since they had been working on a similar measure to be introduced by Assemblyman Wheaton. But after some debate, the executive committee decided to support both the Finney and Wheaton bills. 32 As the Appeal had expected, both bills were emasculated in the Democratically controlled State Senate. One opponent claimed that "mixed schools" were opposed by "nine-tenths of the white people of this state—Democrats and Republicans, ultra-Secessionists and ultraRadicals." 33 The school law that eventually passed in 1872 repeated the requirement that "the education of children of African descent and Indian children must be provided for in separate schools." 34 The executive committee had more success dealing with the Oakland school board. At about the same time that Finney introduced his measure in the legislature, a member of the Oakland board called on his colleagues to reverse their 1871 policy statement and open the Oakland schools "for the admission of all c h i l d r e n . . . without reference to race, color or former condition." 35 In late January 1872 the board went on record as supporting legislative efforts to abolish separate schools, and on May 1 it resolved that "all children of African descent who may apply for admission to the Oakland public schools shall be received." Executive committee members had appeared before the board urging adoption of such a resolution, and now they offered thanks to Oakland school officials "for their independence in conceding us our rights." 36 »> Ibid., Feb. 3, 1872; Elevator, Apr. 27, 1872. « Pacific Appeal, Feb. 17, 1872; Feb. 24, 1872; Mar. 16, 1872. » Ibid., Mar. 30, Apr. 6, 1872. '4 School Law of California (Sacramento, 1872), 20-21. 55 Pacific Appeal, Jan. 6, 1872. 36 Beasley, Trail Blazers, 178-179; Elevator, May 4, 1872.

"Separate but Equal"

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WARD V. FLOOD But the Oakland victory paled before the legislative defeat in Sacramento. The Stockton Conference had decided that if legislative remedies could not succeed, a court test was in order, and in April 1872 the executive committee called a public meeting in San Francisco's Bethel Church "respecting the matter of testing the case in the Supreme Court of the State for equal school facilities and admission to all public schools." The meeting decided to proceed with legal action, and John W. Dwinelle, a prominent white San Francisco attorney, agreed to argue the case. 37 One thousand to 1,500 dollars were needed to finance the action, and during the spring and early summer of 1872, the Appeal and the Elevator, another black weekly newspaper published in San Francisco, printed requests for contributions. Peter Jackson of Butte county wrote the Elevator that he and his friends were willing to donate their share, but he wished to know if bonds were going to be issued. He had donated to similar causes before, and "never heard anything more of it." The Elevator assured Jackson that no bonds were necessary, since the treasurers "are gentlemen of means and responsibility." 38 Apparently, the Elevator's answer was convincing, for money came pouring in, not only from Butte County, but from Vallejo, Sonora, Sacramento, Shasta County and many other localities. Public meetings were held in San Francisco to raise funds; in May such a meeting netted $14.80 in cash and $15.50 in pledges. When Mrs. Jeremiah Johnson sent in Gilroy's contribution of $32.75, the Elevator exclaimed "Good for Gilroy." 39 By the third week of July, the committee announced it had enough funds to begin legal action. Several parents, » Elevator, Apr. 27, 1872. »« Ibid., May 4, 1872. Ibid., Aug. 3, May 18, 1872.

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including Mrs. Ward, apparently volunteered to try to register their children in various San Francisco schools to establish grounds for the judicial test. By the end of summer, Dwinelle had chosen the case of Mary Frances Ward as the basis for his legal action. On September 24, 1872, Dwinelle filed a complaint in the State Supreme Court against Noah Flood, alleging that Flood had violated Mary's rights under the Federal Constitution when he refused to admit her to Broadway School. 40 Dwinelle claimed that the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments had given black people the "political status of equality" which a state could not revoke. Laws prohibiting black children from attending certain schools simply because of their race constituted such a revocation of fundamental constitutional rights. Thus, Dwinelle asked the court to rule that "no child who is a citizen of California can be excluded by reason of color or race from any common or public school of the state." 41 Attorneys for the San Francisco Board of Education agreed that blacks could not be deprived of their basic rights of citizenship, but the board attorneys denied that attendance in school was one of those rights. Even if it was, they claimed that San Francisco's "colored children are not excluded from the public schools, for separate schools are provided for them, conducted under the same rules and regulations as those for the white, and in which they enjoy equal, and in some respects superior, educational advantages." In any event, the board attorneys argued that the issue was moot in Mary Ward's case, since she did not have the proper academic skills to qualify for admission to Broadway School. 42 "SEPARATE BUT EQUAL" Eighteen months later, on February 26, 1874, the State Supreme Court rendered its decision. Speaking for the 40 41 42

Ibid., July 20, July 27, 1872; Pacific Appeal, Ward v. Flood, 37-39. Ibid., 40-41.

Sept. 28, 1872.

"Separate but Equal"

23

court, Justice C.J. Wallace agreed that Mary did not have the proper scholastic qualifications for Broadway School. But rather than rule on this narrow ground, Wallace chose to deal with the central issue raised by the Ward case—whether school segregation by race was a violation of constitutional rights. The court agreed with Dwinelle that education is a right protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. "Ignorance, the lack of mental and moral culture in earlier life, is the recognized parent of vice and crime in the after years." According to Wallace, education "protects" youth from vice and crime, and a denial of access to education constitutes a violation of the "equal protection" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. "Authorities of the state," then, "cannot exclude the petitioner and those of her race . . . merely because of their African descent." 43 But Wallace ruled that, in fact, Noah Flood had not denied Mary the right to education when he prevented her from enrolling in Broadway School, only the right to go to school with whites. This, Wallace argued, is perfectly acceptable "where separate schools are actually maintained," as in San Francisco.44 California blacks could not be deprived of access to education, but they could be forced into separate schools. Wallace thus upheld Noah Flood's action, and established the principle of "separate but equal" in California law—twenty-two years before the United States Supreme Court adopted it in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. Black leaders obviously were disappointed with the decision. The court "did not give the remedy which should be equality before the law to all citizens," claimed the Appeal. "We regard it as a compromise decision to satiate the prejudice of color phobists on the one hand, and the growing sentiment even among liberal-minded Democrats on the other." 45 But the Appeal did recognize 4 Ibid., Dec. 5, 1906. » Call, Dec. 5, 1906; Examiner, Dec. 5, 1906. 56 Chronicle, Dec. 8, Dec. 11, 1906; Call, Dec. 7, 1906; Bailey, Theodore Roosevelt, 95.

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But the President won few friends among white Californians. Of the major California newspapers, only the Los Angeles Times had anything favorable to say about Roosevelt's remarks on the school issue. The Chronicle called it an "astonishing outburst" while the kindest thing the Call could say was that the speech was based on a "misapprehension." 57 For many Californians the issue was no longer segregation of the Japanese, but states' rights. The President was threatening to use federal power to interfere with state and local control of the schools. Governor George Pardee, like Roosevelt a Republican, made it clear that the operation of the schools was the "prerogative and privilege" of the state, and he also emphasized that he favored "separate schools for the Japanese as well as any other alien and unmixing people." 38 The California congressional delegation "deeply resented" the President's message, and one member claimed he had "begged" Roosevelt not to make the speech. Republican Congressman Joseph Knowland of Oakland commented that "it is a good thing that this message did not become public before the election, for if it had we [Republican] candidates might have suffered." 59 Two weeks later California received another blow from Washington when Roosevelt released Secretary Metcalf's report The Japanese in San Francisco. Metcalf pointed out that Japanese children were hardly overrunning San Francisco schools; out of a total of more than 28,000 students in the city, there were only ninety-three Japanese, attending twenty-three of the city's seventytwo schools. He claimed that all teachers he talked with believed that the Japanese were "among the very best of their pupils, clean in their persons, well behaved and remarkably bright." The Secretary agreed that "over" Chronicle, Dec. 5, 1906; Call, Dec. 5, 1906. Call, Dec. 6, 1906; Examiner, Dec. 6, 1906; Bailey, Theodore velt, 96-100. '» Chronicle, Dec. 5, 1906. 58

Roose-

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aged" students should be separated from younger children, but advised that this be done for all nationalities, not just Japanese. In sum, Metcalf could find no justification for the segregation of San Francisco's Japanese school children. 40 For his trouble, the California Federation of Labor branded Metcalf a "betrayer" and declared his report "unworthy of credence." 41 AOKI V. DEANE Meanwhile, U. S. Attorney Devlin was methodically preparing the government's test case against the San Francisco Board of Education. The earlier court action brought by the Japanese community was set aside so that a single, definitive decision would be achieved. On January 17, after the prearranged confrontation between Keikichi Aoki and Principal Deane at Redding School, Devlin filed his brief in both Federal District Court and the State Supreme Court. He did not attack "separate but equal" per se but pointed out that Section 1662 of the school law did not specifically mention Japanese, only "Chinese and Mongolians." Devlin asserted that Japanese were not "Mongolians" but a "separate race"; thus the law did not provide for the segregation of Japanese. He further argued that the Oriental School was located so far from many Japanese homes that requiring the children to attend the Clay Street facility was, in fact, depriving them of their right to education. Finally, Devlin made a creative attempt to justify federal intervention in local educational affairs. At the time of statehood, California's initial establishment of a public education system was financed by a fund created by the sale of federal lands granted to the state; thus, Devlin claimed that the federal 40

U. S. Senate, Japanese,

2-18.

Call, Dec. 24, 1906; Minutes of the Japanese and Korean League (San Francisco, Feb., 1907), 7-8. 41

Exclusion

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63

government had a legitimate interest in the operation of California's school system. 4 2 But Devlin's key argument rested on the treaty-making powers of the federal government. T h e Treaty of 1894 between Japan and the United States provided that "the citizens or subjects of each Contracting Party shall enjoy in the territories of the other the same privileges, liberties and rights, and shall be subject to no higher imposts or charges in those respects than native citizens or subjects of the most favored nation." San Francisco did not segregate children of European immigrants, and so Japanese were being treated in a discriminatory fashion in comparison with citizens of other "favored nations." Since the Constitution provides that treaties have the force of federal law, and since state and local governments cannot act in violation of federal law, Devlin argued that San Francisco could not segregate Japanese children and deprive them of their treaty rights as citizens of "the most favored nation." 4 3 Devlin's arguments were answered point by point by City Attorney William Burke. Burke was hardly a dispassionate advocate. He told the citizens of San Francisco that he was "inalterably opposed to ANY concession" and would work to keep the city's children "uncorrupted by contaminating influences that would be but the natural result of Oriental invasion." In court Burke argued that California law and popular usage clearly included Japanese in the broad term "Mongolian"; thus the segregation statute applied in this case. He denied that the fourteen blocks between the Aoki home and the Oriental School constituted a prohibitory distance for Keikichi to walk. While admitting that the state education system originally had benefited from federal land grants, Burke Keikichi Aoki v. M. A. Deane. Petition for Writ of Mandate (Supreme Court of the State of California, San Francisco, 1907), 1-13; Chronicle, Jan. 18, 1907. 45 Aoki v. Deane, 1-13. 42

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claimed that the total value of those grants was miniscule compared to the amount of state and local resources spent on the schools since the 1850's. 44 On the key issue of treaty rights, Burke pointed out that the Treaty of 1894 never specifically mentioned the right to education. But even if the treaty could be inferred to grant Japanese such a right, to say that this prohibited segregation would be "repugnant to the fundamental principles of government." The City Attorney cited a long list of cases, including Ward v. Flood and Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the courts had ruled that stateenforced segregation did not violate the Constitution, and he pointed out that the establishment and operation of public schools was clearly one of the powers reserved under the Constitution for the states. Thus, to say that the Treaty of 1894 prevented California from segregating Japanese was to claim that a treaty could override the constitutional powers of a state. Clearly, Burke argued, this was not true; the federal government cannot "cede away the constitutional right of a state by treaty." 45 The case attracted national attention and even became a bone of contention between rivals in the Ivy League. The Yale Law Journal claimed the "Japanese have a grievance" based on their status as a "most favored nation." 46 This position seemed in accord with Consul Uyeno's statement that if the Board of Education segregated "pupils of all foreign nationalities . . . there would be no objection." 47 On the other hand, the Harvard Law Review argued that since the courts had allowed states to segregate the school children of non-white American citizens, to deny California the right to segregate Japanese aliens would be granting Japanese "a greater right or William Burke, Japanese School Question (San Francisco, 1907), 1-14. Ibid. 46 Edwin Maxey, "Exclusion of Japanese Children From the Public Schools of San Francisco, Yale Law Journal (Dec., 1906), 90-93. 47 Chronicle, Dec. 20, 1906. 44

45

Yellow Peril" (II) privilege than citizens of this country possess." 48 This point was also recognized by California Congressman Everis A. Hayes. In a speech before the House, Hayes observed that if California could not segregate children of Japanese citizens, southern states could not segregate black Jamaicans who were British citizens. 49 The legal arguments were endlessly debated in the press and in Congress, but by January it was clear that Theodore Roosevelt hoped for a diplomatic rather than judicial solution to the San Francisco controversy. Apparently some members of his administration, including Secretary of State Root, had doubts about the strength of the government's legal case. Also the slow court proceedings would drag out a worrisome diplomatic crisis. What Roosevelt had in mind was winning Japanese acceptance to a treaty ending immigration of laborers to the United States in return for San Francisco rescinding its segregation order. 50 By February 1, even the Chronicle seemed willing to accept such a compromise. The real issue, the paper claimed, was immigration, and the "presence of ninety or one hundred small Japanese children scattered throughout the public schools does no harm to anyone." 51 However, the Japanese government refused to sign such a treaty unless the United States granted Japanese aliens the right to become naturalized citizens. Roosevelt knew this condition could never get through Congress: thus, he resorted to winning Japanese acceptance to executive orders and informal agreements limiting immigration, rather than a formal treaty.

"Rights of the Japanese in California Schools," Harvard Law Review (Feb., 1907), 338-339. 49 Everis A. Hayes, The Treaty-Making Power of the Government and thi Japanese Question (Washington, 1907), 7-8. 10 Chronicle, Dec. 16, 1906; Call, Feb. 3, 1907; Bailey, Theodore Roosevelt, 139, 320. " Chronicle, Feb. 1, 1907. 18

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By the end of January the President apparently felt agreement with the Japanese government was possible, and he invited Superintendent Roncovieri and Board of Education President Lawrence Walsh to Washington for negotiations. Roncovieri and Walsh refused to go unless the President invited the entire board and Mayor Schmitz. Roosevelt reluctantly agreed, and on February 3 a large San Francisco delegation left for the nation's capital.52 Also on the train was Misuji Miyakawa, the lawyer who brought the original legal challenge against the board. He was going to Washington as a correspondent for a San Francisco Japanese newspaper, but the Call believed that the "shrewd, young attorney" would play an "active and important" role. Miyakawa had lobbied on behalf of Japanese immigrants with congressmen in the past, and he had important contacts in Japan. He was in a position to disrupt an agreement by reinstituting his original suit. He claimed San Francisco's Japanese "are not in favor of a compromise" on the segregation issue, and he did not quite dismiss the continuing rumors of war: "only the ignorant among our people regard it as a possibility—at this time." 53 Key man in the San Francisco delegation was Mayor Schmitz. Most of the other members of the group were his appointees and political associates. Schmitz already was under indictment for graft, and he may have hoped to recoup his political fortunes by resolving a diplomatic crisis. However, he found the political sledding precarious. His enemies were convinced he had gone to Washington purely as a political ploy, while his friends on the Anti-Japanese League were afraid he was selling them out. On February 10, Olaf Tveitmoe wired the mayor "Morning papers announce in big headline that » Ibid., Feb. 3, 1907; Call, Feb. 2, 1907; Examiner, Feb. 4, 1907. » Call, Feb. 3, Feb. 4, 1907.

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'Schmitz deserts labor for Japs . . . ' Sovereign rights must not be bartered away... California is whiteman's country, not a Caucasian graveyard."54 Nevertheless, on February 15 the San Francisco delegation agreed to rescind the segregation policy in return for Roosevelt's commitment to negotiate a "gentleman's agreement" with Japan ending immigration-of laborers to the United States mainland. In addition, Roosevelt promised to issue an executive order prohibiting Japanese laborers from entering the mainland from Hawaii, Mexico or Canada and agreed to dismissal of the Aoki v. Deane case.55 By March 13 both sides of the bargain had been kept, and Mayor Schmitz was celebrating what he called a "great victory." 56 But the San Francisco press was not so euphoric. The Call greeted news of the agreement with the headline " S C H M I T Z RAISES T H E F L A G O F S U R R E N D E R , " while the Examiner proclaimed " S C H M I T Z ADMITS S U R R E N D E R O N J A P A N E S E Q U E S T I O N . " The Chronicle said the Mayor had surrendered on the "great fundamental principle whose establishment is of far more consequence than the presence or absence of a few Japanese children in our schools . . . the right of the Federal Government to interfere in the management of our schools . . ." 57 To a limited degree, the Chronicle was correct. In 1907 and again in 1909 and 1911, Presidents Roosevelt and Taft "interfered" with political processes in California to prevent the legislature from passing anti-Japanese bills which would upset the diplomatic balance. Included was legislation amending Section 1662 to name specifically the Japanese as a group which could be subjected to school segregation, thus ending the argument about 54 Minutes of the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League (San Francisco, Mar., 1907), 4-5; Walton Bean, Boss Ruef's San Francisco (Berkeley, 1952), 182-183. 55 Bailey, Theodore Roosevelt, 139-149. Chronicle, Mar. 14, 1907. " Call, Feb. 16, 1907; Examiner, Feb. 16, 1907; Chronicle, Mar. 15, 1907.

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what, exactly, was a "Mongolian." In 1909 such a bill actually passed the Assembly, but Governor Gillett and Speaker Stanton used their influence to persuade the legislators to reconsider and eventually defeat the measure. 58 However, in 1913 Governor Hiram Johnson did nothing to stop passage of an Alien Land Law, a notably unsuccessful attempt to prevent Japanese from purchasing agricultural land in California. 59 AGAIN THE YELLOW PERIL By this time it was clear that the Gentleman's Agreement of 1907 had not "solved" the problem of Japanese immigration. While the flow of unskilled laborers was stopped, the agreement had not applied to wives and family members of Japanese already living in the United States. After 1907 an increasing number of Japanese women, many married by proxy to California Japanese, immigrated to the United States. This, through the natural course of events, created a boom in the population of second-generation Japanese Americans (Nisei), who by virtue of birth were American citizens. The total Issei (first generation) and Nisei population in California increased from 41,000 to over 71,000 between 1910 and 1920, and the number of Nisei alone grew from 4,500 to nearly 30,000. By 1930 half the people of Japanese ancestry in California were Nisei and nearly 40,000 of them were under 17 years of age. 60 These statistics, along with the diplomatic conflicts between the United States and Japan which followed World War I, had by 1919 created a new phase of the antiJapanese movement in California. A new Japanese Exclu58 Bailey, Theodore Roosevelt, 120, 308-310; Daniels, Politics, 47. " Daniels, 58-62. 60 Strong, Second Generation, 68; Ichihashi, Japanese, 97-100; Reginald Bell ¡Public School Education of Second Generation Japanese in California (Stanford, 1934), 7.

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sion League was formed, this time not only with organized labor backing, but also strongly supported by the American Legion and the Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West. Chief spokesman of the new crusade was Valentine S. McClatchy, member of the family which published the Sacramento and Fresno Bees, the most influential newspapers in the Central Valley. In 1920 California voters approved by a three-to-one margin an initiative measure which futilely tried to close the "loopholes" in the Alien Land Law, and in 1924 Congress banned all further immigration from Japan. 6 1 The leaders of the new campaign became increasingly concerned about the growing number of young Japanese Americans in California schools. In 1920 Governor William Stevens noted that "the fecundity of the Japanese race far exceeds that of any other people we have in our midst." As a result, "in many of the country schools... the spectacle is presented of having a few white children acquiring their education in classrooms crowded by Japanese. The deepseated and often outspoken resentment of white mothers to this situation can only be appreciated by those people who have struggled with similar problems." 6 2 JAPANESE LANGUAGE SCHOOLS V. S. McClatchy was particularly worried that the loyalty of the Nisei to the United States was being undermined by private Japanese-language schools. Such schools had been established during the first decade of the twentieth century, and by 1918 there were already 80 of them scattered around the state. Fifteen years later the total had grown to 220, and more than 65 percent of all Nisei 61 Daniels, Politics, 82-105; Raymond Leslie Buell, "Again the Yellow Peril," Foreign Affairs (Dec. 15, 1923), 295-309. 62 California State Board of Control, California and the Oriental (Sacramento, 1920), 9.

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youth were attending the schools for an average of about three years. Like the Chinese-language schools, classes were held in the late afternoons and on Saturdays, and tuitions were low. Policy usually was established by elected boards from the local Japanese community, and the schools often were informally linked with chapters of the Japanese Association. 63 But unlike the early Chinese schools, the Japanese institutions were not training children to return to Asia. As early as 1913, the Japanese Education Association, an organization of language-school teachers, emphasized that the role of the schools was to help the Nisei fit into the American way of life. It was necessary for the young Japanese-Americans to be able to communicate with their Issei parents so that family cohesiveness and discipline would not disappear. But the schools were "not intended to perpetuate the traditions and moral concepts of Japan." 6 4 Most also taught English to very small children in order to prepare them for public school, and some language schools purposely hired whites to teach these English classes. According to one Nisei educator, the "ultimate aim" of the schools was to make "good American citizens out of the children of Japanese parentage." Parents and teachers should "feel proud of educating and turning out good American citizens of their race." 65 There is much evidence that language schools in fact taught very few Nisei to speak acceptable Japanese, let alone to absorb Japanese culture or nationalism. Distin65 Bell, Public School, 17-26; Ichihashi, Japanese, 327-328; Marian Svensrud, "Attitudes of the Japanese Towards Their Language Schools," Sociology and Social Research (Jan.-Feb., 1933), 259-264. 64 Bell, Public School, 17-26; Kitano, Japanese Americans, 24-26; Gretchen Tuthill, "A Study of the Japanese in the City of Los Angeles" (M. A. Thesis, University of Southern California, 1924), 56-59. 65 Sakae Tsuboi, "The Japanese Language School Teacher," Journal of Applied Sociology (Nov.-Dec., 1926), 163-165.

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guished Japanese educator Yamato Ichihashi of Stanford believed the Nisei "idealize America." They preferred to speak and read English and found American schools more rewarding than the language school. The latter did serve a social function of bringing Nisei youth together, and to some degree, separating them socially from their white contemporaries. But even the social programs of the schools were often assimilationist in character, for example, athletic teams in various American sports. One former student claimed he went to the school not for the language classes, which he hated, but to play on the basketball team. 66 While a few Issei parents sent their children back to Japan for part of their education, most apparently were satisfied with the assimilationist philosophy of the language schools. In fact, Japanese adults themselves took great advantage of educational programs to aid their adjustment to California life. They attended Englishlanguage classes provided by public schools, Protestant missionary groups, the language schools or the Japanese Association.67 In Los Angeles, private sewing schools for Issei women became popular during the 1920s, and the Nanka Ladies Tailoring School, run by the wife of a Japanese Protestant clergyman, in 1923 had more than 70 students. According to U.S.C. graduate student Gretchen Tuthill, the women were "able to produce any dress they may see in a picture without using a commercial pattern." "The only drawback," Tuthill claimed, was "the attitude of the husbands . . . Apparently, the men are afraid the women will get too independent as a result of their additional knowledge." 68 But in spite of the predominantly assimilationist teachings of Japanese educational efforts in California, V. 66

Ichihashi, Japanese, 347-349; Kitano, Japanese Americans, 25; Dorothy Swaine Thomas, The Salvage (Berkeley, 1952), 212. 61 Tuthill, "Study," 40-43; Fujita, "Japanese Associations," 217-218. " Tuthill, "Study," 43-45.

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S. McClatchy still worried about the language schools. " T h e real purpose of the schools," he said, "is to teach Japanese ideals and loyalty and to make dependable Japanese citizens of the young Japanese children for whom are claimed, by birth, all rights of American citizenship." 6 9 T h e 1921 legislature established qualifications for language-school teachers and set standards to assure that textbooks did not reflect un-American values. In 1923 a bill abolishing the schools passed the legislature but was vetoed by Governor Richardson. Four years later, the United States Supreme Court ruled that a Hawaii statute controlling language schools was unconstitutional, and the ruling also had the effect of killing the 1921 California law. But since 1918, the Japanese Educational Association had been rewriting texts to "Americanize" them, and after 1927 many language schools continued to use the former state standards as criteria for teacher selection. 7 0 JAPANESE IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS T h e 1921 legislature also finally succeeded in amending Section 1662 specifically to name Japanese as a group eligible for segregation. However, only four small Sacramento County school districts—Courtland, Isleton, Walnut Grove and Florin—took advantage of the law to establish separate "oriental schools," (some of them for both Japanese and Chinese). In all four districts Japanese were a majority of the school population. 7 1 When asked why his town separated the schools, one Florin resident answered, "That's easy. Race prejudice. It got so my daughters went mostly with Japanese girls. The principal was letting Japs crowd our boys off the grammar school 69 Valentine S. McClatchy, California's Language Schools (Sacramento, 1922), 2. 70 Ibid., 4-5; Bell, "Public School," 23-24; Svensrud, "Attitudes," 261. 71 Bell, Public School, 65-67; Strong, Second-Generation, 199-201.

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team just because they could play better baseball. The town around us began to razz our kids because of t h a t . . . Well we couldn't stand for it any longer, so we separated our schools."72 But in 1929 there was a total of only 575 Japanese students in the segregated schools of Courtland, Isleton, Walnut Grove and Florin. Elsewhere throughout the state about 30,000 Nisei children attended integrated schools, and by 1930 they had achieved a remarkable scholastic record. The average California JapaneseAmerican over 20 had completed 12 years of schooling, a higher figure than that for the general population. 73 In some towns Nisei students received so many awards at graduation exercises that white parents objected. Reginald Bell of Stanford University concluded that Nisei secondary-school students received substantially more "As" and "Bs" and fewer "Cs" and "Ds" and "Fs" than other students. 74 Marvin Darsie, also of Stanford, found that 10-13 year old Nisei scored an average of 91 on the Stanford-Binet test as compared with 99 for white children. Darsie believed the eight-point differential was due entirely to the Nisei's difficulty with the English language. The test showed the Japanese-Americans inferior only in those mental processes "based on meanings or concepts represented by the verbal symbols of the English language." In other portions of the test, the Japanese-Americans were "at least equal and possibly superior." 75 The findings of the social scientists coincided with the impressions of California teachers. Harry Kitano has observed that by 1930 teachers had come to accept the " Ichihashi, Japanese, 351-352. " Strong, Second-Generation, 186. 74 Bell, Public School, 37-60. 75 Marvin Darsie, The Mental Capacity of American-Born Japanese in California (Comparative Psychology Monographs, No. 15, Baltimore, 1926), 84-85.

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Speed

stereotype of the "ideal Japanese child and his wonderful cooperative parents." 76 A Los Angeles teacher claimed "we always like to have one or two Japanese children in our classes as an example to the other children . . ." To reinforce the favorable picture, the Nisei juvenile delinquency rate in Los Angeles County was less than onethird that of white children. 77 By 1929 even V. S. McClatchy had to admit that the young Japanese-Americans were "fine specimens physically and mentally, a credit to their race and to this country." 78 But McClatchy also observed that the Nisei were subject to continuing discrimination. He believed this simply proved the wisdom of his earlier efforts to win Japanese exclusion, but his description of the Nisei as "American citizens in rights but a group set apart" was an accurate portrayal of the status of most Japanese-Americans in California public schools.79 One Nisei youth, educated before World War II, remembered that in his hometown school "we did not mix with the Caucasians very much. We did not speak to the Caucasian girls at all." Another young man recalled that at the small multi-racial elementary school he attended "there was no talk of race as everyone was the same." But as he went on to high school, the students separated themselves socially and the members of the Japanese Student Club "did everything by themselves." They organized a football and basketball team, the "Delta Lancers," and played in Nisei athletic leagues. In 1940 this particular youth was chosen "Typical Nisei Boy" at a statewide convention of Japanese students. Still another young man remembered that there was "little race consciousness" on the bus which took white and Nisei teenagers who had grown up 76

Ibid., 87; Kitano, Japanese American, 23-24. Tuthill, "Study," 52; Strong, Second-Generation, 179. 78 Valentine S. McClatchy, The Japanese Problem in California Francisco, 1929), 8-9. 79 Ibid., 9. 77

(San

"Yellow Peril" (II) together to the local high school, "but most of us went our own ways once we got on the school grounds." 80 There were, of course, exceptions to the rule of social separation. One Nisei youth became a star on the highschool basketball team and "expanded out of the Nisei group." 81 In Fresno the predominantly white soccer team unanimously elected a Japanese-American as team captain, and in Santa Monica in 1942, after Japanese were informed they would soon have to report to "relocation centers," white high-school student body officers resigned en masse and turned their offices over to a slate of Nisei students. 82 CLASSROOMS BEHIND BARBED WIRE The relocation centers were, of course, the results of President Roosevelt's executive order of February 1942 requiring all people of Japanese ancestry who lived on the Pacific Coast of the United States to move to camps established in the interior of the country. Over 70,000 of the more than 100,000 evacuees were California residents, and the majority were American-born Nisei. Thus, the War Relocation Agency ( W R A ) bureaucracy that operated the camps found itself responsible for the education of more than 25,000 American school children. Almost overnight the W R A had to create a school system equivalent to that of a small city, and by the very nature of relocation, it was a racially segregated system. It was in the camps that the great mass of Nisei children experienced school segregation for the first time. By September 1942 schools were operating in eight of the ten original camps, but the operations were hardly without problems. In Manzanar, a camp located in Cali80 81 82

Thomas, Salvage, 159-160, 185, 213. ¡bid., 159. Elliot G. Mears, Resident Orientals on the Pacific Coast (New York,

1927), 366.

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fornia's Owens Valley, east of the Sierra Nevada, a WRA report described classes held in "unpartitioned recreational barracks without any lining on the walls or heat of any kind. Within two days a cold wave combined with dust storms at the center had forced the schools out of operation until the barracks could be lined and stoves could be installed." Initially, there were severe shortages of textbooks, instructional equipment and even furniture. "In the first weeks many of the children had no desks or chairs and for the most part were obliged to sit on the floor . . ,"83 The WRA hoped that schools in the two California camps, Manzanar and Tule Lake in Modoc County in the northeastern part of the state, would be integrated into the normal California school system and thus be eligible for state textbooks and financial aid. But this arrangement was ruled illegal by State Attorney General Earl Warren, and the Manzanar and Tule Lake schools, like those in other states, remained under federal control. Fortunately, the Los Angeles Board of Education donated thousands of used books which helped to relieve shortages of texts. Even so, the schools never had sufficient instuctional materials and equipment, particularly for shop and laboratory classes.84 Another item in short supply was qualified teachers. The WRA was determined to hire only people who were eligible to obtain credentials in states in which the camps were located. By 1943 the agency had managed to hire 557 white teachers and about 25 evacuees. But the WRA was never able to find enough qualified faculty, and hundreds of evacuee "teaching assistants" were hired to help in the classrooms. 85 Despite all the problems, 85 United States War Relocation Authority (WRA), Second Quarterly Report (Washington, 1942), 17-18; Quarterly Report: October 1 to December 31, 1942 (Washington, 1943), 14. 84 WRA, First Quarterly Report (Washington, 1942), 27; Second Quarterly Report, 30. 85 WRA, Semi-Annual Report: January 1 to June 30, 1943 (Washington, 1943), 30.

Yellow Peril" (II)

17

schools were in full operation at all camps by the spring of 1943. By this time the agency also was operating a successful program allowing Nisei formerly enrolled at west coast colleges to finish their education at institutions in other parts of the country. The schools were planned according to the best precepts of "progressive education" as understood by WRA bureaucrats. 86 Lester Ade, agency director of education, defined the main purpose of the schools as preparing students "for reabsorption into normal community life and for return to outside schools." Thus the WRA took pains to assure that all schools were accredited by the states in which the centers were located and that full college prep curricula were established at all camp high schools. Ade also claimed the schools were to become community centers, a "background for community participation of various types . . . an institution with which people were familiar, and which served as a connecting link with the cherished past . . ." In conformance with these ideals, the WRA encouraged formation of local PTA chapters and established parental advisory boards. But actual control of the schools remained in the hands of camp authorities. 87 The WRA educational program was supposed to promote "an understanding of American ideals, institutions and practices;" thus, the schools had a full range of student activities. Student government ("to permit participation in the democratic process"), athletic teams, drama, art and music program's, debating teams all existed as they might in any large American school system. 88 Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston describes Our World, the 1943-44 Manzanar High Yearbook: "In its pages you 86

Dorothy Swaine Thomas, The Spoilage (Berkeley, 1946), 37. WRA, Education Program in War Relocation Centers (Washington, 1945), 1-2. 88 Ibid., 1, 12; WRA, Semi-Annual Report January 1—June 30, 1944 (Washington, 1944), 39-40. 87

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can see school kids with armloads of books, wearing cardigan sweaters and walking past rows of tar paper shacks. You see chubby girl yell-leaders, pom-poms flying as they leap with glee. You read about the school play called Growing Pains . . . the story of a typical American home . . . with Soji Katamayer as George Mclntyre, Takuda Ando as Terry Mclntyre and Mrs. Mclntyre played by Kigako Nagai . . ," 89 The inconsistency between these "typical" American schools with their "progressive" ideals and the reality of camp life surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards was not lost on Nisei students. When school opened at the camp in Rohner, Arkansas, in September 1942, a student chalked the words "Jap Prison" on the tar paper wall.90 Young people, particularly Kibei, American-born children who had been educated in Japan, were active in protest the movement against the WRA administration and Japanese-American Citizens League leaders who cooperated with WRA authorities. The protests became intense in 1943 after the government distributed questionnaires to evacuees which, in effect, asked them to declare allegiance to the United States. Most camp residents were willing to make such a declaration, but several thousand who refused to do so were transferred with their families to Tule Lake, which became a "segregation center" for "renunciants" and other "trouble-makers." 91 The new status of Tule Lake had a profound effect on its school system. The educational program was disrupted by massive movements of people in and out of the camp. Some of the most militant "renunciants" pulled their children out of WRA institutions and began independent Japanese-language schools. A board was elected to run the language schools, and a major campaign was 89 Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, Farewell Manzanar (Boston, 1973), 87. 9 0 Edward Spicer et al., Impounded People (Tucson, 1959), 123. 91 Ibid., 180.

to

Yellow Peril" (II)

79

instituted to persuade Tule Lake parents to send their children to the new institutions. Unlike earlier language schools in California, the Tule Lake schools were training children to return to Japan after the war, and one was even called "The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity School." By the beginning of 1945 language school enrollment at Tule Lake was about 4,300 as opposed to 2,300 children in the WRA schools (obviously, there were many dual enrollments). However, by the summer of 1945 a reaction against the hardline leaders apparently set in among Tule Lake parents, and language-school enrollment began to drop. The Japanese school board became more cooperative with camp authorities, and the Greater East Asia school was renamed the Tule Lake Language School. Nevertheless, after the war, more than 2,000 Tule Lake residents chose to be repatriated to Japan. 92 CUTTING THE BARBED WIRE

In 1944 the WRA began encouraging evacuees to leave the camps and resettle in areas outside of the West Coast zone. WRA schools provided students with information on the resettlement program to take home to their parents and adult and vocational courses were started to prepare people for an end to camp life. By early 1945, about 3,000 children of resettled parents had left camp schools, and the total WRA school enrollment by the end of the spring semester of 1945 was about 5,000 less than it had been in the fall of 1944.93 The success of the resettlement program and the impending end of the war convinced WRA officials not to plan to reopen the schools in September 1945 (except at Tule Lake). Some 92

Ibid., 180, 275; WRA, Semi-Annual Reports July 1-December 31, 1945, 74; January 1—June 30, 1945, 37, 52-53. 95 WRA, Semi-Annual Reports, January 1-June 30, 1944, 40; January 1June 30, 1945, 37-38.

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parents protested, claiming that it would take them many months to resettle or return home and that their children would be deprived of an education in the meantime. 94 But student opinion may have been better expressed by a photograph in Valedictorian 1945, Manzanar High's last yearbook. It showed a forearm and hand, squeezing a pair of pliers whose cutting edges were wrapped around a piece of barbed wire.95 The camp schools, with their rhetoric about community participation and democratic ideals, can be viewed as flagrant examples of institutional hypocrisy. The facilities, equipment, materials and probably a good portion of faculties were second-rate at best. But one alumnus, Dr. Harry Kitano of UCLA, believes that in some respects this first experience with segregated schooling was stimulating for Nisei students. Young Japanese-Americans for the first time had a chance to be the "big man" or "most popular girl" on campus, and this allowed them to develop a new sense of self-confidence and assertiveness.96 Also, at least some learning went on at the camp schools. Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston remembers a Manzanar teacher "who was probably the best teacher I've ever had—strict, fair-minded, dedicated to her job. Because of her, I was, academically at least, more than prepared to keep up with my peers."97 The return of the Nisei to California public schools after World War II was often a difficult social, if not educational, process. But throughout the state, it was a process that occurred in an integrated setting. By 1962 Dr. Kitano found that the assimilation of JapaneseAmerican students was proceeding rapidly, with the ironic effect that academic achievement and grade-point average were declining somewhat. According to Kitano, 94 95 96 97

Spicer, Impounded, 256. Houston, Farewell, 115. Kitano, Japanese Americans, 38. Houston, Farewell, 90.

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81

"With the breakdown of the ethnic community and increasing opportunities to participate in the broader one, the behaviors of the group are changing from typically Japanese to American. The current Sansei [third] generation offers an example where behaviors are now approaching the American middle class in terms of achievement and social participation."98 In the 1970s some Sansei youth turned away from assimilation and tried to find an identity in an Asian American or "Third World" context. But it is still true that no immigrant group has used the public schools more effectively than the Japanese. Excellence in educational achievement was often gained at great psychological and cultural cost, but it allowed the Nisei partially to offset the crippling blows American society dealt them. In this, the WRA schools played a role. Relocation shattered home life and even much of family life, but public school life, even with its contradictions and hypocrisy, continued in the camps. It provided a link and an avenue of return to life outside the barbed wire. Back in 1906, during the San Francisco controversy, Goroku Ikeda of the Japanese Association claimed that Japanese children were "endeavoring to assimilate themselves" and "obtain an education so that they might be good citizens." 99 Forty years later, as they emerged from the camps, most Nisei still were committed to those goals. 98 Kitano, "Changing Achievement Patterns or the Japanese in the United States" Journal of Social Psychology (Dec., 1962), 263-264. " Chronicle, Oct. 19, 1906.

4 The Tragedy of Indian Education

T H E A U G U S T 30, 1924, edition of the Big Pine Citizen contained a routine announcement of the reopening of the local public school after summer vacation. Students were to report to the schoolhouse at 10 a.m. on September 1, but "Indian children who were not in the public schools last year" were asked to arrive a half-hour earlier. 1 In this somewhat indirect and undramatic fashion, the Citizen indicated that Alice Piper, a fifteen year old Indian girl, had won her court battle for admittance into Big Pine School. In the process, the court not only opened the classrooms of the small Owens Valley town of Big Pine to Indian children, but also applied "separate but equal" to Indian education and established the right of Indians to be admitted to state-supported rather than federal schools. Piper v. Big Pine is thus an obvious point of departure for a discussion of the history of Indians in California public education. "THE ONLY GOOD INDIAN . . . " The Piper case is also part of the long and tragic story of cultural misunderstanding and conflict between whites 1

Big Pine Citizen, Aug. 30, 1924.

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83

and Indians in California. Centuries before the arrival of Spanish settlers in 1769, the scores of separate California Indian cultures had developed generally stable ways of life, based on simple technologies and hunting, fishing and gathering economies. Most of the Indian groups honored tradition and had no expectation of rapid social and material change. But Spanish settlement began a radical process of transforming and destroying Indian cultures. The Spanish missions and Mexican ranchos were, in part, educational institutions whose purpose was to remake the Indians into a colonial work force. The stone-aged hunters and gatherers were Christianized, forcibly settled in villages, and taught agriculture, herding, and western crafts. Indian traditions and modes of life were wiped out, and a massive decline in Indian population was inadvertently caused by exposure to European diseases.2 Spanish-Mexican rule left large areas of the future state free from white man's control, but after 1848, the Gold Rush attracted thousands of new settlers into these previously untouched regions. Unlike California's former Spanish-speaking rulers, the Anglo-Americans did not need the Indian as a labor force, and Indian cultures were displaced and Indian peoples destroyed with even greater efficiency than before. In 1769 the Indian population of California was between 200,000 and 300,000; by 1880, not more than 20,000 Indians were left. It had been, according to Hubert Howe Bancroft, "one of the last human hunts in history, and the basest and most brutal of them all."3 The United States Congress attempted to regulate California Indian affairs in the early 1850s by appointing 2 For a good account of white-Indian relations in California, see Sherburne Cook, The Conflict Between the California Indian and White Civilization (Berkeley, 1943). 3 Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of California (San Francisco, 18841890), VII, 474-475.

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special federal agents to negotiate treaties to remove Indians from direct contact with white settlers. By the end of 1852, eighteen such treaties had been signed affecting 139 separate Indian communities with a combined population of about 25,000 located primarily in the Mother Lode region. The Indians agreed to move from the mining area of the Sierra foothills to 7.5 million acres of Central Valley land granted them by the government. The treaties obligated Washington to provide economic aid, social services, and most important for our purposes, education. For example, a treaty made on the Kings River between agent George Barbour and the "chiefs, captains and headmen of the Taches, Cah-Wai, etc." promised the Indians "one superior and such assistant school teachers as may be necessary." 4 All told, the eighteen treaties provided for twenty-two principal teachers, forty-five assistants, and fifty-four schoolhouses. 5 The first Federal Superintendent of Indian Affairs for California, Edward F. Beale, hoped the treaties would be ratified by the United States Senate. But he had some doubts about the educational provisions and warned that "the establishment of schools among them [the Indians] at the present time would not subserve their interests; their present state of civilization and advancement being such as to preclude the possibility of their appreciating the benefits . . ," 6 Beale did not have to worry; the treaties were vehemently opposed by whites who were shocked at the idea of granting valuable land to "savages." The Senate refused ratification in 1853, and Beale was allowed 4

Message

Eighteen

From

Treaties

the President

of the

United

States

Made with Indians in California

Communicating

(Washington, 1905),

11; United States, Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Indians of California (Washington, 1966), 8; William Ellison, " T h e Federal Indian Policy in California 1 8 4 6 - 1 8 6 0 ) , " Mississippi Review 5

Robert Kenny, History and Proposed

Indians 6

Valley

Historical

Claims of

California

(June, 1922), 4 7 - 5 7 . (Sacramento, 1944), 82.

Message

From

the President,

9.

Settlement,

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83

to establish only five small reservations. By the mid18605, only two of the reservations still remained in operation: Hoopa Valley in Humboldt County and Tule River in the San Joaquin Valley.7 Meanwhile the state legislature was depriving Indians of most civil rights. Laws were passed allowing Indian vagrants to be hired out as unpaid laborers to private employers and, under certain conditions, permitting Indian children to be indentured to white families. Like Blacks and Asians, Indians could not vote, hold political office, or testify in court against whites. And like other non-whites, the segregation legislation of the 1860s banned Indians from "white" public schools, although Indian children living with white families were exempted from the ban in 1862. In 1866 school districts were allowed, but not required, to admit "half-breed" children with white guardians into the regular schools, and as a result of Ward v. Flood in 1874, Indian children theoretically could attend "white" schools if no "colored" school was located in the district. 8 In fact, however, few Indians were willing or able to take advantage of California's school system; during the 1865-66 year, only sixty-three Indians were enrolled in the State's public schools.9. RESERVATION SCHOOLS

The major burden of Indian education in California thus fell to the Federal government. By the 1860s the Indian 7

Ellison, "Federal Indian Policy," 58-67. ' Ferdinand Fernandez, "Except A California Indian: A Study in Discrimination," Southern California Quarterly (June, 1968), 167-168; Robert Heizer and Alan Almquist, The Other Californians: Prejudice and Discrimination Under Spain, Mexico and the United States to 1920 (Berkeley, 1971), 61-64. 9 Irving G. Hendrick, "Federal and State Roles in the Education of Indians: The California Experience, 1850-1934" (unpublished research paper, Riverside, 1974), 4.

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Bureau was planning schools at Hoopa Valley and Tule River, but in 1866 George Hoffman, Indian agent at Tule River, refused to recommend "the expenditure of any money on such hopeless subjects." He believed that the "California Digger" was a "cruel, cowardly vagabond, given to thieving, gambling, drunkeness and all that is vicious without one redeeming trait." Hoffman added that the issue was moot, since the Indians "must soon be extinct." 10 But the Indians did not become extinct, and by 1872 the government was operating schools at both Hoopa Valley and Tule River with a total enrollment of 127 students. 11 In the late 1880s Congress appropriated money to establish additional reservations and rancherias for southern California's "Mission Indians," and in the early twentieth century similar action was taken on behalf of some northern California groups. With the expansion of the reservation system, there was a steady increase in the number of Indian schools. In 1891 the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) operated two boarding schools and twelve reservation day schools in California; by 1900 there were more than 900 students enrolled in six boarding schools and twenty day schools. 12 Nevertheless, the schools had problems attracting students. In 1885, C. A. Belknap, agent at Tule River, claimed "no part of the service in connection with this agency has been so difficult as the educational." He described parents as "indifferent if not adverse" to education, and believed that "so many of the children are diseased and the number of pupils so small, that enough healthy ones cannot be selected and placed in a boarding school to warrant the expense." 13 In 10 United States Office of Indian Affairs, Reports on Indian Affairs, California Superintendence 1861-1871 (Washington, 1861-1871) n. 19,98. 11 Hendrick, "Federal and State," 5. 12 United States Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior (Washington, 1891), 56-58; ibid. (1902), 16-21. " Ibid. (1885), 13.

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87

1891, the agent at Hoopa Valley, Isaac A. Beers, observed that the parents "wish their children to grow up as Indians and they say, 'school is no good to Indians.' " 1 4 In truth, Indians found little that was familiar and less that was consistent with Indian cultural values in the reservation schools. The curriculum and structure were established in Washington and aimed at assimilation into the white man's way of life. As Evelyn Adams has said, the schools attempted "to destroy the tribal ways and train the individual Indian to earn his living like a white man." 1 5 Boarding schools were thought to be most effective, for they separated the child from his family and native culture. In 1885 the agent at Hoopa Valley counseled that students "be kept strictly removed from all tribal or family associations, for without enforcement of such removal but little permanent mental or moral improvement need be anticipated." 16 PUBLIC SCHOOLS Another effective way to achieve assimilation was to encourage enrollment of Indian children in the regular public schools. Here the students would receive a totally non-Indian education and have close contact with white children. Moreover, public schooling would relieve the federal government of some of the financial burden of Indian education. Thus, as early as 1892, the Bureau of Indian Affairs was contracting with California school districts for the education of reservation children. The Bureau agreed to pay tuition expenses for fifty-one students in three school districts in Shasta, San Diego and Inyo counties. 17 The students attended integrated K Ibid. (1891), 220. " Evelyn C. Adams, American Indian Education (Morningside Heights, N. Y., 1946), 56. 16 Annual Report of the Commissioner " Ibid. (1892), 55.

of Indian Affairs (1885), 5-6.

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Speed

schools, for, as we have seen, California law had not specifically provided for the segregation of Indians since 1880. But apparently the BIA program awakened old fears, and in 1893 the legislature amended the school law to allow districts again to require Indians to go to separate schools. 18 In 1898 only twenty-one students still were covered by BIA contracts; by 1902 all contracts had been cancelled.19 However, the concept of integrating Indian children into the public schools did not die. After the turn of the century, voluntary organizations of white citizens dedicated to helping Indians became prominent in California life. In 1907 one such group, the Northern California Indian Association, declared that "the schools of the State from common school to university should be and must be given to the Indian as fully as to the white American." 20 In the same year, a group of Indians meeting at Mount Herman in Santa Cruz County with a number of "white friends and field workers," demanded "common school education for our children." The Indian spokesmen claimed that the government schools "reach but a few, and most of the public schools of the State do not admit our children." 21 Two years later, the Secretary of the Northern California Indian Association, C. E. Kelsey, spoke about Indian education before San Francisco's prestigious Commonwealth Club. He noted that in the past "no Indian children were tolerated in the public schools," but "now about 500 attend schools throughout the state." Still, Kelsey claimed, Indians were banned in a "majority of the districts containing Indian children," 18

Fernandez, "Except A California Indian," 167-168; School Law of California (Sacramento, 1893), 24. 19 Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (1898), 15; ibid. (1903), 38. 20 Northern California Indian Association, Zayante Indians Conference (Mt. Herman, 1907), 6-7. 21 Ibid., 2-3.

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and since the capacity of the government schools was limited, the result was that 1,800 children, about half the school-aged Indians in the state, had no chance for education at all. 22 Kelsey was also a government Indian agent in California, and his remarks were consistent with Indian Bureau policy. In 1910 the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Robert Valentine, asserted that the "association of Indian children with white children in the public schools, where practicable, will be a definite means of assimilation of the Indian into American life." 2 3 Thus he announced that the government again was willing to make tuition payments for reservation children in public schools. School districts would receive an amount equal to the cost per pupil apportioned by the state for each Indian student whose parents lived on non-taxable reservation land. During the next decade, BIA officials in California vigorously pushed the program. In 1917 progress temporarily was halted when the Comptroller of the United States Treasury ruled that many California Indians were ineligible for coverage, but by 1918 the matter was resolved. In that year, the Bureau claimed that for the first time more California Indian children were in public schools than in government institutions (1,820 and 1,745 respectively). 2 4 T h e task of persuading school districts to accept Indian children was seldom easy. Agent Kelsey claimed that many districts cooperated only because they were so small that they "would lapse without the Indians." Kelsey said he had little difficulty dealing with state or county education officials but was often stymied by "the Plain People," who when "full of prejudice against I n d i a n s , . . . 22 Kelsey, C. E., "The Rights and Wrongs of the California Indians." Transactions of the Commonwealth Club of California (Dec. 1909), 422423. 25 Annual Report of the Comissioner of Indian Affairs (1910), 15. 24 Ibid. (1918), 165.

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refuse to reason." 25 He recalled that when the School Superintendent of Colusa County in the Sacramento Valley allowed an Indian child to enroll in elementary classes with whites, "The next morning there was not a white child in the school." The white parents continued the boycott until the Indian was withdrawn from the school and the superintendent was defeated for reelection. Since then, Kelsey explained, "we haven't been able to get a single Indian into public school with white children," and the Bureau was forced to settle for a separate Indian public school in Colusa County, supported in large part by federal tuition payments. 26 Kelsey's solution to the Colusa County problem was reluctantly accepted by his superiors in Washington. While the BIA preferred integrated facilities, it believed segregated public schools were better than no public schools at all. In 1915, Agent L. A. Dorrington identified two California communities in which he recommended that the Bureau pay for the construction of public Indian schoolhouses if the county would agree to establish separate, county-operated school districts for the Indians. According to Dorrington, it was "not practicable at the present time to have these children enrolled in other districts maintained for white children." 27 But in most cases, the Bureau was able to persuade districts to accept Indians in regular, integrated schools. By 1920 the subsidy program was going so well that Dorrington was sending out form letters reminding local superintendents that "the present school year is drawing rapidly to a close and if the school desires assistance from the Government, it will be necessary to present an Letter from C. E. Kelsey, Special Agent at San Jose, to C. E. Asbury, Special Agent at Reno, October 14, 1912, National Archives, San Francisco Branch, Record Group 75, Files of L. A. Dorrington, Box 12. 26 Ibid. 27 Letter from Special Agent L. A. Dorrington to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, October 19, 1915, Dorrington File, Box 12. 25

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application therefore without delay." To facilitate matters, the letters contained an application blank which the respondents were asked to "return at the earliest possible date." 28 Cooperation was also enlisted from state educational officials. In January 1923, Bureau representatives met with a number of California school adminstrators, including Superintendent of Public Instruction Will C. Wood and Supervisor of Attendance Georgiana Carden. The BIA informed the state officials that it sought to "enroll Indian children in the public schools as rapidly as possible," and urged vigorous enforcement of the state school attendance laws. Wood and Carden agreed to pressure districts to accept Indian children in return for a federal promise to provide about two hundred more boarding school places for children whose "home conditions" made them "unacceptable" for public schools.29 However, the state legislature was not nearly as cooperative as professional educators committed to the ideal of universal school attendance. In 1921 Section 1662 of the School Law was amended so that "in school districts in California where the United States government has established an Indian school, or in an area not to exceed three miles from the said Indian school, the Indian children of the district or districts, eligible for attendance upon such Indian school, may not be admitted to the district school." 30 This was the specific provision of the law successfully challenged by Alice Piper in the Big Pine case.

28

Letter from Dorrington to William Goyette, Clerk, Millerton School District, Friant, California, March 26, 1920, Dorrington File, Box 12. 29 Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (1923), 3; William J. Drew, "Educational Provisions for California Indians," Commonwealth (June 8, 1926), 114. 50 School Law of California (Sacramento, 1921), 160.

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All Deliberate Speed THE COLLETTS

Voluntary organizations also continued to push for Indians in the public schools. Perhaps the most active was the San Francisco-based Indian Board of Cooperation, a group of "leading representative citizens," including Stanford University President David Starr Jordan. The board's executive secretary, and most influential force was Reverend Frederick G. Collett, a Congregationalistturned-Methodist minister who had long been involved in causes on behalf of the California Indian. Before becoming active in the Board of Cooperation, Collett and his wife taught in a Colusa County Indian school and encouraged Indian communities to take advantage of the BIA public school subsidy program. 31 The Colletts were far from universally admired, even among other friends and advocates of the Indians. In 1913, for example, C. E. Kelsey had criticized Reverend and Mrs. Collett for encouraging subsidy contracts for Indians who did not qualify under BIA criteria for publicschool tuition payments. Kelsey charged that much of the Colletts' activity was an "excuse and means of raising their salary." The problem, he claimed, was "less with Collett than with Mrs. Collett who is the stronger of the two." 32 However, a BIA investigation eventually cleared the Colletts of the 1913 charges, and, under their leadership, the Board of Cooperation had some solid achievements to its credit. For example, in 1917 the organization had successfully represented Ethen Anderson, a Lake County Indian, in his fight to become a registered voter. Federal law prohibited Indians living in recognized tribes from obtaining citizenship, but the California Supreme Court ruled that Anderson had never "lived in a tribal 31

Frances Fischer (unpublished research paper, delivered orally, Berkeley, 1975); California Indian Herald, Dec., 1923, 11. 32 Letter from Kelsey to Asbury, August 13, 1913, Dorrington File, Box 12.

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relationship nor ever owed allegiance to any tribe," and thus was a California citizen. Since most of the state's Indians had a tribal status similar to Anderson's, the decision effectively established suffrage for the bulk of California Indians. 33 One of the Board of Cooperation's major aims was "to promote the general welfare with regard to public school privileges," and in 1923, school matters were the organization's prime concern. It represented Virginia Knight, a Mendocino County Indian girl, in a legal challenge that resulted in her being allowed to enroll in the Carroll District public school.34 It also cooperated with Lake County Women's Clubs in obtaining a segregated public school for Indians on the Big Valley reservation. According to the California Indian Herald, the Board's newsletter, "No Parent-Teacher Association meeting, no gathering of the Chamber of Commerce, no club meeting or group of trustees escaped without hearing from some of the women as to the need for schooling of the [Big Valley] Indians." After the Lake County battle was won, Collett addressed "a tense, interested group" of nearly three hundred local "club women and men," and assured them that "it is only a matter of equal advantage that will enable the Indian to parallel the mental capacity of the white . . ."35 CONFLICT AT BIG PINE

But the Big Valley campaign was an isolated victory and the decision in the Knight case was decided by a local court and thus did not have statewide precedent. In Big " Chauncey Shafter Goodrich, "The Legal Status of the California Indian." California Law Review (Mar., 1926), 164-166; Anderson v. Matthews, California Reports, 537-547 (1918). 54 California Indian Herald, Dec., 1923; Jan., 1924; Santa Rosa Republican, Dec. 27, 1923; Ukiah Republican Press, Dec. 26, 1923. 35 California Indian Herald, Dec. 1923; Lake County Bee, Dec. 27, 1923.

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Pine and in other rural communities throughout California, Indians continued to be barred from public schools. Big Pine had a Board of Cooperation "Indian auxiliary," an organization which allowed Indians limited participation but not membership in the board. John Sommerville, the Big Pine auxiliary leader, claimed that in 1921 local school trustees had urged Indians to vote for a measure that would finance construction of new educational facilities, with the understanding that if the election was successful, the Indians would be admitted to the school.36 However, in 1923 the trustees refused to honor whatever pledge they had made on grounds that they were prohibited from doing so by Section 1662 of the School Law. There was, in fact, a government school located less than three miles from the Indian homes, and thus California law did prohibit Indian attendance in the public school. John Sommerville later said that his people had no objection to the government teacher, who was "a good friend to the Indians." But they did object to the rules and procedures of the government-school system, which required students to do manual labor on the school grounds for part of the day and which effectively limited the educational program to the equivalent of no more than five grades of the public school. Although the Indians wished admittance into regular integrated classes, they were willing to settle for a publicly supported segregated program given in their own community hall.37 During the summer of 1923, Reverend Collett and local Indian leaders made a series of presentations before the Big Pine School Board, one of which featured seventeen-year-old Eunice Hill. The Indian Herald described her speech as "a stirring defense of children of her people whom the whites pretended to consider of an inferior mentality." 56 57

Big Pine Citizen, Aug. 23, 1924. Ibid.; California Indian Herald, Jan., 1924.

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But the trustees were not moved and refused to change the policy of "no Indians allowed."58 The decision was applauded by the local press. The Inyo Independent believed that the board met "with nearly unanimous approval throughout the Owens Valley." The paper warned that if the Indians "persist in such actions as characterized them at Big Pine they will lose their standing." Prime villain, according to the Independent, was Frederick Collett who "misled" the Indians. The Board of Cooperation was advised that if it really wanted "to help the Indians [it] can do no greater service to them to get rid of Mr. Collett." 59 The Big Pine Citizen also criticized Collett, and on September 22 he responded in kind, with a long letter to the editor. The Citizens publisher claimed that he was glad to present the other side of the issue, but commented that "next week we will probably be in a position to take up this question with him [Collett] again." 40 What the Citizen did take up on September 29 were charges against Collett made in 1922 by a former Board of Cooperation staff member, Helen Dare. She had claimed that Collett had misused organizational funds while in Washington ostensibly lobbying on behalf of a bill to provide for monetary settlement of Indian land claims against the government. The board's executive committee cleared Collett of the charges, but the Citizen still printed a long article by Dare that originally had appeared in the San Francisco Bulletin. Inevitably, this resulted in Collett responding with an equally long 1922 piece, also originally published in the Bulletin, and John Sommerville issued a statement defending the reverend as a "friend of the Indian from the bottom of his heart." Sommerville claimed that the Indians only wanted "what is fair as citizens and we do not want to be used by the 58 59

California Indian Herald, Jan., 1924. Inyo Independent, Sept. 15, 1923.

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white people . . ." 4 1 This did not convince the Owens Valley press, and in December, the Inyo Register seemed delighted to announce that Collett was being sued for divorce, partially on the grounds that he was "seeing other women." The Register reminded its readers that when last in the Valley, Collett was accompanied by a young female stenographer. 42 PIPER V. BIG PINE All the verbal cannonades back and forth across the Sierra had little effect on the eventual outcome of the Big Pine school controversy. After the trustees refused the Indian appeals, the Board of Cooperation took the matter before the California Supreme Court. Representing Alice Piper was J. W. Henderson, President of the Board of Cooperation, and victorious attorney in both the Ethen Anderson and Virginia Knight cases. Henderson must have been particularly pleased with the decision written by Justice Seawell and issued on June 1,1924. Not only did the court unanimously uphold Alice Piper's right to attend Big Pine School, but it used the Board of Cooperation's earlier victory in the 1917 Anderson case as a prime precedent. 43 Seawell ruled that Alice, like Ethen Anderson, was a citizen of California because she did not belong to an organized Indian tribe that had a treaty relationship with the United States. Moreover, the judge believed that Alice qualified for citizenship under terms of the Dawes Act of 1887, for in that legislation Congress provided that an Indian who voluntarily resides "separate from any Big Pine Citizen, Sept. 22, 1923. Ibid., Sept. 29, 1923; Oct. 6, 1923. 42 Inyo Register, Dec. 6, 1923. However, the courts eventually found insufficient evidence to sustain the adultery charge against Collett. 43 Goodrich, "Legal Status," 169-170; San Francisco Chronicle, June 3, June 4, 1924. 40 41

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tribe of Indians therein, and has adopted the habits of civilized life, is hereby declared a citizen of the United States . . . " Citizenship, then, was defined by the degree of assimilation into the white way of life or at least the degree of separation from tribal society, and by this test, Alice Piper was a citizen of both California and the United States. Justice Seawell found ample precedent for the principle that such a citizen could not be denied the right to public education on the "basis of race or color difference." 4 4 Seawell's decision also recognized that by the 1920s public education played a major role in determining a person's economic and social standing: " T h e common schools are doorways opening into the chambers of science, art and the learned professions, as well as in fields of industrial and commercial activities. Opportunities for securing employment are often more or less dependent upon the rating which a youth, as a pupil of our public institutions, has received in his school work." Education, then, not only involved abstract rights to knowledge and enlightenment, but also tangible oportunities for wealth and privilege. "These are rights and privileges that cannot be denied." 45 Such rights and privileges also could not be delegated. T o argue that Alice Piper was eligible to attend a government school less than three miles from her house, was to "beg the question." Seawell ruled that under the Constitution, public education is "exclusively the function of the state," and it "cannot be delegated to any other agency," even the federal government. The State of California could not, therefore, avoid its obligation to allow Alice Piper to attend a state-supported school. 4 6 Seawell had negated the 1921 amendment to Section 1662, and since Piper v. Big Pine School District, 193 California Reports, 670-672 (1925); Anderson v. Matthews, 543-544. 45 Piper v. Big Pine, 673. 44

46

Ibid., 669.

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Congress in 1924 granted citizenship to all Indians b o r n in the United States, no m a t t e r what their tribal status, the Piper decision effectively guaranteed public schooling for all California Indians. In May of 1928 a state appellate court allowed Wesley Peters to attend public school in the P a r m a District of San Diego County. Unlike Alice Piper, nine-year-old Wesley lived on federal Indian land and was identified as a "Mission Indian." 4 7 But the decision in the Piper case did not challenge the doctrine of "separate but equal." Justice Seawell concluded that the establishment of "separate schools for Indians as provided by the statute, does not offend either the federal or state constitutions." Indeed, Seawell seemed to expect that many districts would establish such schools and sympathized with boards of education which would have to raise additional money to build separate facilities. 48 In fact, however, the Piper decision did not result in large n u m b e r s of segregated Indian schools. By 1931, w h e n m o r e t h a n 2,800 Indian children were enrolled in California public schools, there were only seven segregated Indian schools with ninety-two students in the state. 49 In 1935 the legislature amended the school law so that there was no longer legal authority to segregate Indians born in the United States. 50 Officially, at least, de jure segregation of Indian children was at an end. INDIANS IN THE SCHOOLS But the problems faced by Indians in the schools were hardly ended. A 1926 report of the C o m m o n w e a l t h Club commented that Indian "enrollment and attendance are 47

Los Angeles Times, May 18, 1928. Piper v. Big Pine, 671, 674. 49 California State Department of Education, Biennial Report (Sacramento, 1932), 32. 50 Fernandez, "Except a California Indian," 167-168; School Code of the State of California (Sacramento, 1935), 140. 48

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two different matters." 51 The report was the work of the club's section on Indian Affairs, and contained a depressing account of Indian education in California. The investigators found that Indian children from prosperous, assimilated families generally did well scholastically, but the bulk of the "less fortunate" majority performed poorly, dropped out early and often became truants. The report claimed that the reception of Indian children by public schools ranged from "cruel exploitation" to "friendliness and honesty." Greenville, in the extreme north of the state, "fought bitterly" against accepting Indian students, while Susanville, about 100 miles away, "welcomes the Indian children." When Middle Creek in Lake County was forced to accept fourteen Indian students, a special room was partitioned off, a section of the playground fenced in, and a separate teacher hired for them. 52 A few years later, whites in Alturas in Modoc County tried to prevent Indians from entering the public school on grounds that they were in a "diseased condition." When Indian parents produced doctors' certificates assuring that the children were in "perfect health," the school reluctantly admitted the students. 53 The Commonwealth Club report also found little that was positive to say about the remaining government schools, which still enrolled about one-third of California's Indian children in 1926. The boarding school at the Fort Bidwell reservation was termed "a disgrace," and conditions at Hoopa Valley and Fort Yuma were not much better. Sherman Institute in Riverside was judged to be "by far the best" of the boarding schools "in equipment and grade of teacher," but even it was described as based on "the conception that the Indian is inferior to the whiteman... Every Indian girl is viewed as 51

Drew, "Educational Provisions," 115.

" Ibid., 113, 115. » Mary Coxhead, "Modoc County Indians Need a Change" (unpublished manuscript in Bancroft Library, Berkeley, 1932), 3.

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a potential house servant and every boy as a farm hand." The report also looked at the various reservation day schools and found them "ideal in plan" but "pitiful makeshifts" in reality. The sole exception was the school at Tule River, where Indians were fairly prosperous and the teacher a well-educated, popular young man. The class was "happy and vigourous" and the pupils "not only will answer the questions, but will ask them." 54 Many of the Commonwealth Club's conclusions were confirmed by a massive nationwide report on The Problem of Indian Administration, published by the Institute of Government Research in Washington in 1928.55 This document was prepared by a team of experts under the direction of Lewis Merriam, and the education chapter was written by prominent "progressive" educator, William Carson Ryan. Ryan criticized the assimilationist theory of the government schools and called for a new educational program that would teach Indians to prosper in the modern world without shattering the traditional Indian culture. But in spite of its anti-assimilationist tone, Ryan's chapter applauded the effort to enroll Indian children in public schools, although he recommended increased federal control to assure that subsidy funds actually would be used to benefit the Indian students.56 RISE AND FALL OF "jOM"

Unlike many documents of its kind, the "Merriam Report" had great influence on official policy. In 1930 William Carson Ryan was named BIA director of education and cautiously began initiating reforms. Two years later, the veteran advocate of Indian causes, John Collier, 54

Drew, "Educational Provisions," 110-111, 115. Lewis Merriam, The Problem of Indian Administration (Baltimore, 1928). 56 Ibid.; Margaret Szasz, Education and the American Indian (Albuquerque, 1974), 17-24; Adams, American Indian Education, 68-69. 55

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became Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and in 1936 another prominent progressive educator, Willard Walcott Beatty, replaced Ryan as education director. Educational policy was transformed by two laws passed in 1934: the Indian Reorganization Act, which reversed many of the old assimilationist programs, and the Johnson O'Mally Act, which allowed the BIA to contract directly with states for the education of Indian children. Under the " J O M " programs, not only were the old tuition subsidies increased, but for the first time, the Bureau could deal directly with state educational authorities rather than negotiate agreements on a district-by-district basis. T h e new system lessened the effect of local opposition to Indian public-school enrollment. 5 7 In 1935 California became the first state to sign a J O M contract, and thus began the final phase-out of the state's federal Indian schools. By the 1950s only the Sherman Institute remained, and it served only non-California Indians. 58 But the J O M program did not always operate smoothly in California. As part of the initial contract, Mary Steward, a BIA employee, was installed in the State Education Department to assure that federal funds were used to benefit Indian children. She was frustrated in her attempts to influence policy and claimed state officials made her "feel like a clerk." W h e n she resigned in 1941, she was not replaced. Bureau officials also found that some Indian parents protested the closing of government schools. At Fort Bidwell, for example, parents claimed "we would rather our children be in school by themselves." Another challenge to the program came in the early 1940s when Purl Willis, a self-appointed spokesman who claimed to be of California Indian descent, warned that the federal government would deduct J O M 57 Szasz, Education and the American Indian, 17-24; Adams, American Indian Education, 75-78; Bureau of Indian Affairs, Indians of California, 16. 58 Szasz, Education and the American Indian, 95; Adams, American Indian Education, 78.

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payments from eventual cash settlements in the Indian land cases. 59 (In 1964 California Indians finally were awarded $29 million as a result of the cases, and JOM funds were not deducted from the total.) In 1953 federal authorities began reducing JOM funds, arguing that states should not receive special financial assistance to educate children just because they happened to be Indians, and five years later all California JOM payments ceased. 60 However, many of the funds were replaced by new federal money authorized under "impacted area" legislation, which granted financial assistance to school districts with heavy concentrations of federal property (including Indian reservations). By the mid-sixties, about 60 percent of California school districts formerly participating in JOM programs were receiving "impacted area" funds, and federal poverty money also was beginning to find its way into districts with heavy Indian enrollments. 61 THE TRAGEDY OF INDIAN EDUCATION Certainly most districts needed all the help they could get, for by I960 the educational profile of the California Indians was not encouraging. Of those fourteen years or older, 43-3 percent had not gotten beyond the eighth grade, compared with a 25 percent figure for whites. Less than 2 percent of California Indians had four or more years of college, compared with 11 percent of whites. Since levels of schooling, employment, and income are closely related, it is not surprising that Indians had both the highest unemployment rate and lowest per capita 59

Szasz, Education and the American Indian, 62, 95-97. Ibid., 95. 61 Ibid., 182-183; California State Advisory Commission on Indian Affairs, Progress Report to the Governor and the Legislature on Indians in Rural and Reservation Areas (Sacramento, 1966), 11, 36. 60

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income of any California ethnic group in I960. 6 2 One of the most serious problems was the high Indian drop-out rate. In 1965 a state survey of eighteen school districts with heavy Indian enrollments found that only in five were drop-out rates the same for Indians and whites; in the other districts, the Indian rates were considerably higher. A study of Indian students in the Auburn schools in Placer County over a ten-year period found a drop-out rate of 50 percent above the ninth grade. Seventy-five percent of the drops occurred in the tenth grade when most Indian youths turned sixteen, the age at which fulltime schooling is no longer mandatory in California. 63 Educators interviewed as part of the state survey often blamed the Indians themselves for the high drop-out rate. T h e principal of Surprise Valley High School in Cedarville mentioned the "complacent attitude of the Indian toward school and life in general," while an administrator at Hoopa Valley believed that "so long as an Indian youth may receive 'Indian money' to buy a car, live on tax-free land, hunt and fish without restriction or limits or regard to seasons, it is difficult to convince him that education is the key to the good life." But the School Superintendent of Modoc County was willing to place some of the responsibility on the schools themselves. He suspected that Indian parents regarded the schools as "something belonging to the white man . . . Since there are no teachers of Indian extraction in the schools, these people conclude (and possibly they are correct) that the white man intends to turn their children into white men. This is not a desired end as far as the Indians are concerned." 6 4 A Mendocino County Indian leader took California Department of Industrial Relations, Fair Employment Practices Commission, American Indians in California (San Francisco, 1965), 10-13; Jack Forbes, A Model for the Improvement of Indian Education: the California Indian Education Association (n.p., 1969), 11-12. 65 State Advisory Commission, Progress Report, 11, 34-36. 64 Ibid., 37-39. 62

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a more extreme position, claiming the problem was not so much one of "school drop-outs" as "school pushouts." 6 5 In the middle 1960s it was assumed that conditions were better for Indians in California's urban areas, but there were few data on which to base that assumption. Most urban school districts did not keep separate records for Indian students and little research on urban Indian problems had been done. In 1928 investigators for the Merriam Report found the situation of Los Angeles's small Indian population generally good. T h e report concluded that, there was "no public school discrimination whatsoever," but did quote a school principal who claimed "This school does not fit Indians at a l l . . . some of their sullenness may be stolidity or timidity." 6 6 Whatever the situation in 1928, it probably had little resemblance to conditions of the mid-1960s when the Los Angeles area had become one of the largest centers of urban Indian population in the United States. T h e growing urban Indian population was in part due to employment opportunities created by the new defense industries, but it also reflected the fact that the pendulum of federal Indian policy swung back in the direction of assimilation after World War II. A reservation "termination" system was instituted, and Indians were encouraged to resettle in urban areas. T h e BIA chose the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay regions as relocation points for Indians from all over western America, with Los Angeles receiving more former reservation residents than any other city. 67 Between 1950 and I 9 6 0 , California's Indian population, including people born in 65 Hearings of the United States Senate Subcommittee on Indian Education. Text of the Testimony Given by Indian Witnesses at the San Francisco Hearing, January 4, 1968 (Published by American Indian Historical Society, San Francisco, 1968), 11. 66 Merriam, Problems of Indian Administration, 723-724. 67 Estelle Fuchs and Robert J. Havighurst, To Live on This Earth:

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other states, more than doubled. By the end of the decade less than one-fourth of the states' 40,000 Indians still lived on or near reservations, and over half resided in urban areas. 68 In the cities the inadequacies of reservation education quickly became apparent. Relocated young Indians found they had not received adequate vocational training to qualify for well-paying jobs nor sufficient academic background to succeed in college. BIA counseling, employment, and educational services offered in the cities were inadequate, and Indian-run "friendship houses" were under-staffed and under-financed. 69 Although relocation primarily affected young adults above high school age, Indian enrollments in California urban schools steadily rose during the 1950s and 1960s. In the Los Angeles area, teachers and principals in schools with high Indian enrollments reported that Indian children were "quite obedient and well-behaved" but "possibly too passive in the classroom." 70 FORTY YEARS AFTER

Forty years after Piper v. Big Pine School District, Indians had become an accepted part of California's public education system. The American Friends Service Committee found that in one community where militant white opposition to Indian children in the public schools had existed in the 1930s, in the fifties Indian students encountered "practically no prejudice," and Indian parAmerican Indian Education (Garden City, N. Y., 1973), 276-277; Forbes, Model for the Improvement of Indian Education, 8-9. 68 Fair Employment Practices Commission, American Indians in California, 10-13; Fuchs and Havighurst, To Live on This Earth, 26-28. 69 American Friends Service Committee, Indians of California: Past and Present (San Francisco, 1956), 20; Hearings of United States Senate Subcommittee on Indian Education, 17-18. 70 Fuchs and Havighurst, To Live on this Earth, 280-283.

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ents were actively participating in the local PTA. 7 1 But too often school remained an alienating and frustrating experience for Indian children. One young woman educated in the Bay Area remembers her teacher telling the class, " 'This is our little Indian girl and she's going to live with us and tell us about things.' You know I was quite upset. I went running home and I said, 'Mommy, I'm an Indian. Isn't that terrible!' She said, 'Well, what do you mean?' I said, 'Well, I don't want to get shot down like we do on T.V.' " 7 2 By the late 1960s some California Indian leaders believed that "Indian-controlled schools" were the answer to their people's educational problems. In 1967 Indian educators organized the California Indian Education Association which successfully lobbied for restoration of J O M funds in California, but on the condition that the money be spent on projects at least partially controlled by Indians. T h e association also held a series of conferences throughout the state and encouraged local groups to apply for federally-financed poverty programs to aid Indian school children. Meanwhile the San Francisco-based American Indian Historical Society was campaigning against the unfavorable image of Indians contained in public school texts and lesson plans. By 1972 at least some changes were noticeable. An Indian informent pointed out that in the Hoopa Valley School District, "They have Indian teachers walking around. You know, usually, you could just see Indian janitors with a broom. Now we have three trustees who are Indians, we have a policy advisory board and we have Indian consultants." 7 3 American Friends, Indians of California, 28-29. California Indian Education Association, Report on the Fifth Annual State Conference and Workshops (San Diego, 1973), 86-87. 75 Indian Education Association, Report, 37; Forbes, Model, 13-28; American Indian Historical Society, The American Indian Review v. I-VI (San Francisco, 1966). 71 72

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Perhaps Frederick Collet* correctly foresaw the most significant effects of Alice Piper's victory a half century earlier when he observed that public schooling would allow Indian children to cope better with "the devious ways and mass of inconsistencies" of white society's attitude towards Indians. The children would get "early experience in the environment in which they must later make their living. In other words, they would at least get a glimpse at the rules before they were forced to play the game." 7 4 74

California Indian Herald, June, 1924.

5 The Decline and Vail of "Separate but Equal"

O n MARCH 2, 1945, five Mexican-American fathers, Gonzalo Mendez, Thomas Estrada, William Guzman, Frank Palomino, and Lorenzo Ramirez, challenged the practice of school segregation in the Ninth Federal District Court in Los Angeles. They claimed that their children and 5,000 other children of "Mexican and Latin descent" were victims of unconstitutional discrimination by being forced to attend separate "Mexican" schools in the Westminster, Garden Grove, Santa Ana, and El Modeno school districts of Orange County. Judge Paul J. McCormick ruled in favor of Mendez and his coplaintiffs on February 18, 1946, and more than a year later, on April 14, 1947, McCormick's ruling was upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal in San Francisco. On June 14 of the same year, Governor Earl Warren signed into law a repeal of the last remaining school segregation statutes in the California Education Code. Thus did "separate but equal" end in California schools and with it ended de jure school segregation, legally and administratively enforced separation of racial and national groups in the public education system. Judge McCormick's decision reflects significant social and intellectual movements which produced a remarkable 108

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change in educational and judicial attitudes on matters of segregation and race during the 1930s and 1940s. T h e Mendez case is equally important as a part of the history of Mexican and Mexican-American people in the United States and their experience in Anglo-American schools. GREAT MIGRATIONS Although California once had been ruled by Mexico, the major migration of Mexicans to the state began at the end of the nineteenth century, as southwestern railroads recruited Mexican labor for unskilled track work. T h e Mexican Revolution of 1910 created a large refugee population and increased the social mobility of Mexican peasants. In the United States, World War I created labor shortages and restrictive legislation in the early 1920s reduced European immigration and banned further immigration from China and Japan. But the border with Mexico was left relatively open, and hundreds of thousands of Mexicans took advantage of that fact. Mexicans not only continued their domination of track work on California railroads but by the middle twenties, comprised the bulk of the farm labor force in the Imperial and San Joaquin valleys and the "citrus belt" surrounding Los Angeles. By the end of that decade, they also were a significant part of Los Angeles's urban labor force. T h e United States Census recorded a tripling of California's Mexican and Mexican-American population during the twenties, from 121,000 to 368,000, but these figures probably understate the actual growth. By 1930, people of Mexican descent were California's largest "minority group"'a status they have maintained to the preset day.1 Mexicans were not the only group immigrating to California during the twenties. T h e 1924 ban on Asian Governor C. C. Young's Mexican Fact Finding Committee, Mexicans in California (San Francisco, 1930), 47; Carey McWilliams, Southern California Country (New York, 1946), 316. 1

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immigration did not apply to the Philippines, which was an American territory; thus California employers began recruiting labor in the islands. But unlike the Mexican migration, the arrival of Filipinos did not have a major effect on California schools. Most of the new arrivals were single young men who planned to return to the Philippines, though some of them attempted to continue their education in California. They entered high schools and colleges but often dropped out because of poor scholastic preparation, financial difficulties, prejudice and social ostracism. Although Filipinos never were subjected to formal school segregation, some high-school principals encouraged them to attend schools with large Asian enrollments. 2 In 1935 as a consequence of legislation granting the Philippines eventual independence, the islands were given an immigration quota of only fifty people per year. T h e quota was raised after World War II, but not until the immigration reforms of the 1960s did substantial numbers of young Filipino children appear in California schools. By 1971 about 4 percent of San Francisco's public school population was of Filipino origin. 3 Like the pre-war Filipino immigrants, the first Mexicans to cross the border at the turn of the century were largely single young men who returned home after a few months' work. But even before World War I, a growing percentage of the immigrants were coming to stay, bringing wives and children with them or raising families once they arrived. By the 1920s, a new population of Mexican and Mexican-American children was having a profound effect on California school enrollments; 65,527 pupils, nearly 10 percent of the state's total public-school 2 California Department of Industrial Relations, Facts about Filipino Immigration into California (San Francisco, 1930), 11-12; Bruno Lasker, Filipino Immigration to Continental United States and Hawaii (Chicago, 1931), 142-149; John Burma, Spanish Speaking Groups in the United States (Durham, 1954), 139-146. 5 Integrated Education (May-June, 1971), 47.

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population, were of Mexican descent in 1927. More than 8 8 percent of these Mexican and Mexican-American students lived in counties south of the Tehachapis, over 50 percent in Los Angeles County alone. In Orange County, 2,869 public-school children, about 17 percent of total county-school enrollment, were of Mexican descent in 1927. Most dramatically affected was Imperial County; more than 36 percent of the school children were Mexicans or Mexican-Americans by 1927. 4 SEGREGATED SCHOOLS These increasing enrollments of Mexican children rapidly led to segregated schools. According to Grace Stanley, a California educator writing in 1920, "One of the first demands made from a community in which there is a large Mexican population is for a separate school. T h e reasons advanced for this demand are generally from a selfish viewpoint of the English-speaking public and are based largely on the theory that the Mexican is a menace to the health and morals of the rest of the community." 5 In the Imperial Valley, University of California economist Dr. Paul S. Taylor found some employers of Mexican labor opposed any education at all for their workers' children: " T h e schools teach Mexicans to look upon farm labor as menial," one grower claimed. "It [education] only makes them dissatisfied and teaches them to read the wrong kind of literature." However, Dr. Taylor found most Imperial Valley residents willing to support education for Mexican children, though in schools "segregated by a consciousness of racial difference." 6 4 C. C. Young's Committee, Mexicans, 53; Paul S. Taylor, Mexican Labor in the United States, I (Berkeley, 1930), 265-284, 18. 5 Grace Stanley, "Special School for Mexicans," the Survey (Sept. 15, 1920), 714. 6 Taylor, Mexican Labor, 78-79, 83-84.

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And so it went in town after Southern California town. Pasadena established a "Mexican school" in 1913. The Ontario school superintendent recommended construction of such a school in 1921; by 1928 enrollment in this school was so great that another "Mexican" facility had to be built.7 One elementary school in Riverside had become predominantly Mexican as early as 1910, and in 1924 another "Mexican school" was built when Anglo parents "wished there might be segregation of the Mexican element now attending Liberty [School]." 8 The San Joaquin Valley town of Mendota built a new school in 1920, but Mexicans were prohibited from attending. They either went to the old facility or were bused to a "Mexican school" in another town. 9 The city of Santa Ana was divided into fourteen elementary school zones in 1920, and population patterns along with strategically placed boundary lines resulted in three of the zones becoming predominantly Mexican. In response to parental protests, the school board allowed non-Mexican children living in the three zones to transfer to other, "white" schools.10 The Los Angeles School Board also manipulated attendance zones to produce segregation. In 1933 a city school official admitted that "our educational theory does not make any racial distinction between Mexican and native white population. However, pressure from white residents of certain sections forced a modification of this principle to the extent that certain neighborhood schools have been placed to absorb the majority of Mexican pupils of the district." 11 7

Mary Peters, "The Segregation of Mexican American Children in the Elementary Schools of California: Its Legal and Administrative Aspects" (M.A. Thesis, UCLA, 1948), 37-39. 8 Irving G. Hendrick, The Development of a School Integration Plan in Riverside California: a History and Perspective (Riverside, 1968), 41-42. 9 Dallas Johnson, "They Fenced Intolerance In," Survey Graphic (July, 1947), 398-399. 10 Peters, "Segregation," 74-75; Mendez et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County et al., 64 Federal Supplement 551 (1946). 11 Annie Reynolds, The Education of Spanish Speaking Children in Five

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The increasing segregation of Mexican school children was part of a more general pattern of social separation between Mexicans and Anglos in Southern California. 12 Segregation, sometimes de jure, sometimes de facto, of most public facilities including swimming pools, theaters and restaurants became common during the 1920s. As late as 1947, Carey McWilliams claimed that "segregation is the rule wherever Mexicans reside in sizable colonies." It lasted "from cradle to grave." 13 SEGREGATION AS EDUCATIONAL THEORY But professional educators were not always responding to popular pressure when they established "Mexican" schools. The bulk of professional opinion during the 1920s was on the side of segregation for educational reasons. Grace Stanley believed that Mexican children were happier in segregated schools. She described a "mixed" facility in San Bernardino where the Mexican and Mexican-American children appeared to be "dull, stupid and phlegmatic"; however, in the all-Mexican school, the children's faces "radiated joy, they had thrown off the repression that held them down when they were in school with the other chldren." Stanley believed that Mexican children needed a special curriculum to suit their special abilities. "They are primarily interested in action and emotion but grow listless under purely mental effort." In particular, they were not suited for courses emphasizing "book study and seat work." 14 Many California educators of the 1920s were deSouthwestern States, United States Department of the Interior, Office of Education Bulletin 1933:11 (Washington, 1933), 10. '2 Taylor, Mexican Labor, 38, 55-58, 76-77, 83-84. 15 Carey McWilliams, "Spectrum of Segregation," Survey Graphic (Jan., 1947), 24; Southern California Country, 219; W. Henry Cooke, "The Segregation of Mexican American School Children in Southern California," School and Society (June 5, 1948), 417-421. 14 Stanley, "Special School," 715.

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signing "Americanization" programs for Mexican students. These curricula aimed at achieving the assimilation of young Mexicans and Mexican-Americans into "the American way of life." The students were taught English and forbidden the use of Spanish on school grounds. American values, sanitation practices, and work habits were stressed. 15 And educators argued that the process could best be accomplished in separate schools and classrooms. Such separation would allow for special training of Mexican students without hindering the educational progress of Anglo children. Ontario Superintendent Merton E. Hill, writing of his "Americanization" program in 1928, claimed that "there should be developed wherever numbers shall warrant a segregation of pupils . . . Pupils should not be put into Mexican classes because they are Mexican, they should be put there because they can profit most by instruction offered in such classes." 1 6 T h e fact that many Mexican students were members of migrant families also persuaded educators that Mexicans needed separate classes and facilities. Since the families continually moved, children either constantly changed schools or attended no school at all. Cesar Chavez was a member of a migrant family during the 1930s, and he claimed to have attended at least thirty-one different schools while never getting beyond the sixth grade. 17 In 1921 the legislature passed a tough law requiring migrant parents to keep their children in school and authorized the California Department of Education to establish special programs for migrant pupils. School attendance supervisor Georgiana Carden began a small stategenerated pilot project in Ventura County, but eventually she concluded that local districts should be required to accept migrants rather than have them placed in separate 15 Roy E. Dickerson, "Some Suggestive Problems in the Americanization of Mexicans," Pedagogical Seminary (Sept., 1919) 288-296. 16 Peters, "Segregation," 40. 17 John Gregory Dunne, Delano (New York, 1967), 64.

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state programs. Since districts earned more state financial aid if enrollments increased, migrants began attending schools in growing numbers, but there was little else done for the children. Irving Hendrick has observed that attendance "was but a first step in meeting the needs of migratory children. Regrettably, it was the only successful step." 1 8 And in many communities even this step was taken in separate classrooms or separate schools. T h e segregation arguments were further strengthened, at least implicitly, by findings of educational psychologists. During the 1920s, social scientists put great faith in I.Q. tests. According to William Sheldon of the University of Texas, the tests "enable us to compare accurately the ability of one child with another." Sheldon applied the Cole-Vincent and Stanford-Binet tests to groups of "Mexican" and "American" students in Texas. H e found that on the average the former had only 85 percent of the I.Q. of the latter. Mexicans scored lower than "Americans," "English," "Hebrews," and "Chinese," but higher than "Indians," "Slavish," "Italians" and "Negroes." 1 9 Thomas Garth of the University of Denver gave the National Intelligence Test to over 1,000 Mexican and Mexican-American students in Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. Garth discovered that the median I.Q. of those tested was 78.1. T h e Mexican child with the highests score (142), however, claimed to be a "Spanish American"; thus, Garth theorized, the child probably had more "white" blood than the others. 2 0 18 Irving G. Hendrick, "Public Policy Toward the Education of NonWhite Minority Group Children in California," National Institute of Education Project HE-G-00-3-0082 (Riverside, 1975), 144, 124-146. For contemporary problems of migrant children see Ronald Taylor, Sweatshops in the Sun: Child Labor on the Farm (Boston, 1973), 121-149. " William H. Sheldon, "The Intelligence of Mexican Children," School and Society (Feb. 2, 1924), 139-141. 20 Thomas Garth, "The Intelligence of Mexican School Children," School and Society (June 28, 1928), 792-793.

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Segregation of Mexican and Mexican-American students, then, was a product of community pressure, sanctioned by professional educators and supported by the studies of educational psychologists. By the mid-twenties the practice was well entrenched in California. In 1928 sixty-four schools in eight southern California counties had from 90 to 100 percent Mexican and Mexican-American enrollment. 21 Three years later a survey of school districts with substantial enrollments of students of Mexican descent found that more than 80 percent practiced segregation, and where separate schools did not exist, separate "Americanization" classrooms often were maintained. 22 In Orange County, for example, over 4,000 students, a quarter of total school enrollment, were Mexicans or Mexican-Americans in 1934. About 70 percent of the Spanish-surnamed total attended the fifteen Orange County elementary schools which had 100 percent Mexican enrollment. Forty percent of all Mexican and Mexican-American students in the county lived in the four districts eventually affected by the Mendez case, and six of the fifteen all-Mexican schools were located in these districts (three in Santa Ana; one each in Westminster, El Modeno and Garden Grove). 23 However segregation of Mexican and MexicanAmerican school children in California was never monolithic. Some districts chose not to separate children of Mexican descent, perhaps because few such children were in the schools, or the methods of separation were too expensive and cumbersome. Even in segregated districts, it was common to allow a few Mexican children to attend 21

Peters, "Segregation," 35. William A. Farmer, "The Influence of Segregation of Mexican and American School Children Upon the Development of Social Attitudes" (M.A. Thesis, USC, 1937), 7. 23 Simon Ludwig Treff, "The Education of Mexican Children in Orange County" (M.A. Thesis, USC, 1934), 22-24. 22

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"white" schools. Usually they were children of middleclass Mexican-American parents or descendants of old "Californio" families. In San Bernardino the criteria for choosing exceptions to the rule of segregation were "apparent prosperity, cleanliness, the aggressiveness of parents and the quota of Mexicans already in the mixed school." 24 Similar criteria existed in many communities including the Orange County districts affected by the Mendez case.25 Moreover, segregation was never rigidly applied at the secondary level. According to accepted theory, once a Mexican child learned English and became "Americanized" in the elementary school, he could be integrated into a mixed high school.26 Equally important was the fact that most rural California districts could afford only one secondary school. In fact, however Mexican and Mexican-American students rarely stayed in the elementary grades long enough to reach high school. In 1926 more than 3,000 children of Mexican descent were enrolled in Imperial County elementary schools, over one-third of the total enrollment, but only fifty-one such children, 4 percent of total enrollment, were in the high schools.27 In 1930 nearly 10 percent of Ontario elementary school children were Mexicans or Mexican-Americans, but two years later, the Chaffey High School District (including Ontario) graduated two students of Mexican descent out of a total graduating class of 293. Some of this disparity might be explained by the relative youth of the Mexican population, but nine years later, Chaffey managed to produce only six Mexican and Mexican24

Ruth Tuck, Not with the Fist: Mexican-Americans in a Southwest City (New York, 1948), 186. 25 Taylor, Mexican Labor, 84-86; Mendez v. Westminster, 549. 26 State of California, Department of Education, A Guide for Teachers of Beginning Non-English Speaking Children, Bulletin no. 8 (San Francisco, 1932), vi. 27 Taylor, Mexican Labor, 76-77.

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American graduates out of a total of 370. 2 8 In Orange County only 165 of the county's 4,000 "Mexican" students were enrolled in high school in 1934. Seventy percent of the county's students of Mexican descent in 1934 were classified as "retarded" in the sense that they were older than the normal student at their grade level. This rate of "retardation" increased with the number of years in school, so that by the time Mexicans and MexicanAmericans reached the eighth grade, many already were sixteen years old, the age at which compulsory full-time schooling ended in California. 29 Ironically, although Mexicans were by far the most segregated group in California public education by the end of the 1920s they were never specifically mentioned in the Education Code. Until 1935 the law allowed for segregation of Chinese, Japanese, "Mongolians" and Indians, but in that year Indians born in the United States were exempted from the provision. However, the legislature did permit separate schools for Indians who were not "wards of the United States Government" or "descendants of the original American Indians of the United States." 3 0 In this tortuous and indirect fashion, the 1935 law seemed to allow for segregation of Mexican "Indians," but not of Mexican "whites." INTEGRATION AS EDUCATIONAL THEORY By this time, the concept of school segregation was coming under increasing attack. T h e Depression spawned attempts at social and economic reform, and these in turn created a belief that poverty and social disadvantage were caused by environmental factors subject to human remedy. In such an intellectual climate, George I. Sanchez, the director of information and statistics for the New 28 Peters, "Segregation," 45. » Treff, "Education," 44-45. 50 State of California, Education Code (Sacramento, 1945), 194.

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Mexico Department of Education, asserted that low I.Q. scores of Mexican-American students had to be understood in the context of the children's environment. 51 1.Q. scores have meaning, Sanchez claimed, "only to the extent that the past history of the child has been assayed by the test in equal manner, with equal justice, and in equal terms with the past histories of the children used as the criteria of the test." Otherwise, the results were absurd. Thomas Garth, for example, found that nearly half his Mexican sample had scored so low that they were not capable of performing the simplest tasks, yet hundreds of thousands of Mexican laborers were being recruited to work in the fields, railroads, and mines of the southwest. Sanchez argued that Garth's results were explained not by the inherent intellectual inferiority of Mexicans, but by the "dual system of education presented in 'Mexican' and 'white' schools, the family system of contract labor, social and economic discrimination, educational negligence on the part of local and state authorities, [and] 'homogenous grouping' to mask professional inefficiency . . ." 32 Few educators in the 1930s were willing to go as far as Sanchez, but at least some began to have doubts about segregation of Spanish-speaking students. Annie Reynolds, a researcher for the United States Office of Education, believed that "formerly persons writing on the subject showed considerable agreement in assigning a relatively low place to Spanish-speaking pupils along intelligence, achievement and school progress lines. This is not true at present [1933]." Reynolds claimed that scholars were suspending judgment "until much more information is available based on a far greater equaliza51 George I. Sanchez, "Group Differences and Spanish-Speaking Children: a Critical Review," Journal of Applied Psychology (Oct., 1932), 556. 52 Sanchez, "Bilingualism and Mental Measures, a Word of Caution," Journal of Applied Psychology (Dec., 1934), 767-769.

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tion of economic, social and educational opportunity than at present obtains." 33 California educator Simon Treff asserted that Mexican students in mixed schools seemed to be less "retarded" than those in segregated facilities, while Herschel T. Manuel of the University of Texas claimed that reading and arithmetic problems of Mexican-American children were caused primarily by poverty and bi-lingualism. By 1937, still another researcher, William A. Farmer of California, was calling for an end to "emotionalism" on the question of segregation; what was needed was more research. 34 The doubts expressed about segregation in the thirties were transformed into new convictions during the forties. In the process, a virtual revolution in educational thought occurred during those decades. By the end of World War II, spokesmen for California's educational establishment were vigorously condemning school segregation. The war had identified racism with Hitler and the Axis powers, while equality and justice were said to be the principles of the Allied cause. The first United Nations Conference in San Francisco in 1945 focused attention on idealistic hopes for peace between nations and peoples. Along with these hopes, however, came fears of new ethnic conflict in California. Wartime labor shortages produced large increases in black and Mexican-American populations, and these increases were accompanied by new social tensions. In 1943 white servicemen rioted against young Mexican-American pachucos in Los Angeles, and violence broke out between black and white shipyard workers in Richmond. Further violence was predicted when "re-located" Japanese-Americans returned to the state after the war. Thus, public officials and 35

Reynolds, Education, 46-47. Treff, "Education," 55; Hershel T. Manuel, "A Comparison of Spanish-Speaking and English-Speaking Children in Reading and Arithmetic," Journal of Applied Psychology (April, 1935), 201-202; Farmer, "Influence," 104! 54

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public agencies called for inter-ethnic cooperation and understanding to prevent further conflict. 35 As if to illustrate both the hopes and fears of the postwar era, the California Elementary Schools' Principals Association entitled their 1945 yearbook Education for Cultural Unity. Helen Heffernan, chief of elementary education in the State Department of Education, and Coreen Seeds, principal of the University Elementary School at UCLA, in their contribution to the yearbook, claimed that segregation had "almost completely misfired." It represents a practice which schools must eliminate." 36 Dr. Martha Seeling, Butte county coordinator of curriculum called on educators to do "the spadework toward lessening the hatred and prejudice in America by ceasing to segregate normal children in our schools." Hawaii and Russia already had eliminated racial prejudice, Seeling claimed; California could do no less. "The United Nations insist that they will bring liberation and equality to the beaten and downtrodden. What will happen to America?" 37 Non-educators also attacked school segregation. During the twenties and thirties, leading books on MexicanAmericans accepted or defended school segregation. But the writers of the post-war period severely condemned the practice. Ruth Tuck claimed that school segregation "untrains little citizens for democratic living," while Beatrice Griffith believed it intensified the "insecurity and sense of inferiority that comes in early childhood." According to John Burma, Spanish-speaking children in 55

Monroe E. Deutsch, "California's Part in Racial Relations," Education for Cultural Unity; Seventeenth Yearbook, California Elementary Schools Principal's Association (Los Angeles, 1945), 11. 56 Helen Heffernan and Coreen A. Seeds, "Inter-cultural Education in the Elementary School," Education for Cultural Unity, 84. 57 Martha Seeling, "Segregation in the Public Schools," Education for Cultural Unity, 69, 71.

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mixed classrooms "progress in the [English] language much faster" than those in segregated classes. 38 But the integrationist educators and writers of the forties still shared a common goal with their segregationist predecessors of the twenties and thirties; both groups looked upon assimilation of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans into the "American way of life" as the ultimate goal. UCLA historian Flaud C. Wooton condemned segregation, but also criticized the "cultural pluralism" of the East Los Angeles barrio or San Francisco's Chinatown, as "a source of competition, prejudice and even conflict." 3 9 While "Americanization" programs of the 1920s assumed that assimilation could best be achieved through separate classes in English, hygiene, and other fields, "inter-cultural" programs of the 1940s assumed the same ends could be better accomplished through integration. In 1946 the First Regional Conference for Education of Spanish-Speaking People in the Southwest proclaimed that Mexican children learn English best when in constant contact with English-speaking peers. 4 0 What better way to assimilate the American language and culture than to play and study with American children? Reporting on the "successful" integration effort in Mendota in 1947, Dallas Johnson noted, "English was the rule of the day; the new athletic director enforced the rule on the playground." As Helen Heffernan and Coreen Seeds put it, "Assimilation is a long-term process, but it will be even slower if hindrances such as segregation of educational purposes persist." 4 1 58 Tuck, Not With the Fist, 184; Beatrice Griffith, American Me (Boston, 1948), 153; John Burma, Spanish-Speaking Groups in the United States (Durham, 1954), 76. " Flaud C. Wooton, "Cultural Pluralism, a Challenge to Permanent Peace," Education for Cultural Unity, 18. 40 Thomas P. Carter, Mexican Americans in School, a History of Educational Neglect (New York, 1970), 12. 41 Johnson, "Fenced Intolerance," 399; Heffernan and Seeds, "InterCultural Education," 84.

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The new message sometimes had difficulty filtering down through the educational ranks. Ruth Tuck quoted one teacher as saying "I'd hate to count the number of master's theses that have been written in its [segregation's] defense, but behind all the qualifications and footnotes, you could be sure of one thing. T h e teachers who felt that way were concerned with their own status. They wanted to teach in the silkstocking districts themselves, not in Spanish t o w n . . ." 42 Beatrice Griffith told of a graduate student in education who sat through a seminar on the problems of Mexican-Americans. "I've had a very entertaining experience," the prospective teacher said, "but as far as I am concerned they are still dirty, stupid and dumb." 43 But in spite of such discouraging tales, both Tuck and Griffith believed that educator's attitudes were changing for the better. MEXICAN-AMERICAN PROTESTS World War II also created new opposition to school segregation among Mexican and Mexican-American parents. As early as 1927, Paul S. Taylor noted such opposition in the Imperial Valley, but claimed it came solely from assimilated, middle-class parents. 4 4 University of Southern California psychologist Emory Bogardus reported the same phenomenon but believed that most Mexican-Americans realized the "advantages" of separate schools. Nevertheless, parental action did lead State Attorney General U. S. Webb to rule in 1929 that segregation of Mexican children was not supported by California law. In 1931 a local court allowed seventy-five Mexican children in Lemon Grove to attend a "white" school. However Webb's opinion was only advisory, and 42 43 44

Tuck, Not with the Fist, 189. Griffith, American Me, 156. Taylor, Mexican Labor, 86.

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the Lemon Grove case had little statewide impact. 45 Middle-class Mexican-American resentment probably was quieted by the practice of allowing a few assimilated children to attend "white" schools, while lower-class Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were diverted by more serious problems. The Depression caused severe economic hardships, particularly when the farm-labor market was flooded with "Okies" and "Arkies." Thousands of Mexicans returned to their native land, some of them the victims of forced "repatriations" managed by county relief agencies. Workers of Mexican descent carried out scores of major agricultural strikes during the thirties, including a particularly bitter conflict at Garden Grove in 1936. But there were few short-term victories and no long-term successes. 46 Not until the war years did Mexican and MexicanAmerican parents begin to enjoy relative prosperity and a degree of economic security. The distinguished war record of Mexican-Americans created both a feeling of ethnic pride and a consciousness of inequitable treatment at home. A new generation of Mexican-American young people was coming of age and demanding equal rights and economic opportunities. New post-war MexicanAmerican organizations such as the G.I. Forum and the Community Service Organization and older groups such as the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) engaged in political activity and fought discrimination in the barrios,47 In such an atmosphere, segregation of Mexican and Mexican-American school 45 Emory S. Bogardus, The Mexican in the United States (Los Angeles, 1934), 70-71; Reynolds, Education, 13. 46 McWilliams, Southern California Country, 220-221; Charles Wollenberg, "Race and Class in Rural California: The El Monte Berry Strike of 1933," California Historical Quarterly (Summer, 1972), 155-164. 47 McWilliams, North from Mexico: the Spanish-Speaking People of the United States (New York, 1948), 272-280; Matt S. Meier and Feliciano Rivera, The Chicanos: a History of Mexican Americans (New York, 1972), 236-247.

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children came under increasing parental attack. "World War II stimulated Mexican-Americans to demand change," California educator Thomas Carter has observed. They became "more aware of their rights and duties as American citizens [and] they demanded an end to separate schools . . ." 4 8 By 1945 protests against school segregation by Mexican-American parents had forced the Ontario School Board to consider integrating the previously allMexican Grove School. Boards in Mendota, Riverside and San Bernardino faced similar protests. 4 9 In Westminster, Gonzalo Mendez and several other Mexican-American parents persuaded the board to propose a bond issue for the construction of a new integrated school. But when voters turned down the bond, the board refused to take further action. William Guzman was one of several parents protesting segregation practices in Santa Ana. T h e parents asked that all children of Mexican descent who wished to transfer out of the "Mexican" schools be allowed to do so. T h e board not only refused this request, but it also cut back the small number of token transfers that it previously had granted. 5 0 MENDEZ V. WESTMINSTER Mendez and Guzman were among the five plaintiffs in the Mendez v. Westminster case. They and their coplaintiffs decided to take legal action only after receiving no remedy from their respective school boards. Although they brought the case as individuals with no organizational identification, apparently LULAC activists assisted in obtaining the service of David Marcus, a Los Angeles Carter, Mexican Americans, 69. Peters, "Segregation," 90; Robert Weaver, "Northern Ways," Survey Graphic (Jan., 1947), 46-47. 50 Mendez v. Westminster, 550-551; Santa Ana Register, Mar. 3, 1945. 48

49

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attorney who often had represented the Mexican consulates in Los Angeles and San Diego. 5 1 T h e defendant districts were represented by Orange County counsel, Joel Ogle. Both attorneys agreed that all four districts in question maintained elementary schools with 100 percent Mexican and Mexican-American enrollment. Garden Grove had one "Mexican" school and two "white" schools, and Westminster and El Modeno had one of each (in El Modeno the two schools were located only 120 yards apart). Santa Ana, by far the largest district affected by the case, assigned elementary-school children by neighborhood, but Anglo children living in Mexican attendance areas were allowed to transfer to "white" schools. Thus, three of Santa Ana's fourteen elementary schools were 100 percent Mexican. All four districts allowed token transfers of a few Mexicans and Mexican-Americans to "white" schools. 52 Marcus claimed that this situation constituted a violation of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment rights of his clients' children and of five thousand other children of "Mexican and Latin descent." H e called on the court to declare segregation of school children of Mexican descent in California a violation of the United States Constitution and asked that the districts in question be enjoined from further segregation practices and be required to pay the plaintiffs' court costs. Joel Ogle replied that federal courts had no jurisdiction in the case, since education was a matter governed by state law. Moreover Ogle claimed that the districts were not segregating children on the arbitrary basis of race or nationality, but for the reasonable purpose of providing special instruction to students not fluent in English and not familiar with American values and customs. Finally, he pointed out that in Plessy 51

from 52

Cooke, "Segregation of Mexican Children," 419; McWilliams, North Mexico, 283. Mendez v. Westminster, 546, 550-551.

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v. Ferguson the Supreme Court had endorsed the principle of "separate but equal." 53 Judge McCormick delivered his decision on February 18, 1946, nearly a year after arguments originally had been presented. He first dealt with the constitutional issues of jurisdiction and precedent. The key fact in both instances was the California's Education Code did not specifically provide for the segregation of children of Mexican origin. McCormick ruled that "Mexicans" were not "Indians, thus the tortuous wording of the 1935 law did not apply. Since California law did not allow for separate "Mexican" schools, the requirement that children attend such schools could be considered arbitrary action taken without' 'due process of law." This, McCormick said, raised a Fourteenth Amendment issue and clearly established federal jurisdiction. Also, the Plessy v. Ferguson precedent with its "separate but equal" doctrine did not apply because California laws did not provide for the establishment of "Mexican" schools. McCormick ruled that Plessy had dealt only with segregation imposed by state law, and such was not the case in the Orange County dispute. 54 The central question, then, was whether the children were being forced to go to schools for the arbitrary reason of race or nationality, or for valid educational purposes. Here the judge entered the realm of educational and social theory, and, as might be expected, he adopted the integrationist ideas of the educators of the 1940s. McCormick admitted that "the only tenable ground upon which segregation practices in the defendant districts can be defended lies in the English-language difficulties of the children . . ,"55 But he doubted that such difficulties warranted separation until as late as the eighth grade; 53

Santa Ana Register, Mar. 3, 1945; La Opinion (Los Angeles), Mar. 3, 1945; Fullerton Daily News Tribune, Mar. 3, 1945. 54 Mendez v. Westminster, 546-549. » ¡bid., 549.

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surely, children could become proficient in English before this. The judge also claimed that "evidence clearly shows that Spanish-speaking children are retarded in learning English by lack of exposure to its use by segregation . . ." As to allegations that Mexican children were intellectually inferior to other children, McCormick pointed out that in El Modeno, seventh graders in the "Mexican" school out-scored their contemporaries in the "white" school in standardized achievement tests. The judge thus concluded that the children were not being separated on valid educational grounds, but because of "the Latinized or Mexican name of the child." 56 McCormick also sided with the post-war theorists who advocated assimilation through integration. "Comingling of the entire student body instills and develops a common cultural attitude among the school children which is imperative for the perpetuation of American institutions and ideals." Segregation, according to the judge, "fosters antagonisms in the children and suggests inferiority among them where none exists." 57 Not only on legal and constitutional grounds, then, but also on the grounds of educational and social theory, McCormick ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and ordered the end of school segregation in the defendant districts. La Opinion, a large Spanish-language daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, hailed McCormick's brief as a "brilliant judicial exposition." David Marcus called it "one of the greatest judicial decisions in favor of democratic practices granted since the emancipation of the slaves . . ."58 However, such exuberance was premature. The Orange Daily News reported that Joel Ogle was planning an appeal. After meeting with representatives of the four school boards, Ogle was ready to carry the case to the Supreme Court if necessary.59 Ibid. " Ibid. La Opinion, Mar. 22, 1946, Feb. 21, 1946. " Orange Daily News, Feb. 21, 1946. 58

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MENDEZ APPEALED On December 10, 1946, Ogle brought his appeal before the, Ninth Federal District Court of Appeals in San Francisco. By now, the Mendez case was attracting nationwide attention. The American Civil Liberties Union and National Lawyers Guild had filed amicus curiae briefs on the side of the plaintiffs during the original court proceedings. Now these organizations were joined by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the American Jewish Congress, and the Japanese American Citizens League, all filing briefs in support of McCormick's ruling. Even Robert Kenny, Attorney General of the State of California, intervened on behalf of Mendez and his companions. 60 New York Times correspondent Lawrence Davies reported that the proceedings were being "closely watched as a guinea pig case," for the ACLU and NAACP briefs asked the court to strike down the "separate but equal" doctrine itself. 61 If reporters were looking for dramatic pronouncements, they were not disappointed by the arguments presented to the Court of Appeals. Ogle again denied that federal courts had jurisdiction in the case. And even if they did, he claimed, "segregation by itself is not a denial of equal protection of the laws." Marcus replied that "if we accept the premise laid down by the other side that a school board can do anything it desires and not be in violation of the Federal Constitution, a board can start segregation with children of Mexican descent, go on with Germans and other national origins and end by dividing with respect to religion, and we'll have the same situation we had in Germany." When Marcus explained that the Orange County districts segregated almost all children with Spanish surnames, Judge William Denham asked 60 Westminster School District of Orange County et al. v. Mendez et al., 161 Federal Reporter 774 (1947). 61 New York Times, Dec. 22, 1946.

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what would h a p p e n to a person named O'Shaughnessy w h o was "five-sixths Spanish." Marcus assured that young Mr. O'Shaughnessy would be segregated too, for the districts separated on the basis of appearance as well as family name. 6 2 On April 14, 1947, the seven justices of the Court of Appeals unanimously upheld McCormick's decision. Judge Albert Lee Stevens' opinion stuck to narrow constitutional and legal issues. Again, the key fact was that California law did not specifically provide for segregation of Mexican school children; thus McCormick was correct in the matter of jurisdiction and in finding that the segregation practices violated the Fourteenth Amendment. But Stevens adamantly refused to rule on the broader issues of "separate but equal": "We are not tempted by the siren w h o calls to us that the sometimes slow and tedious ways of democratic legislation is no longer respected in a progressive society." 63 Stevens also chose not to venture very far into the realm of educational and social theory. But this caution was more than offset by the vigorous language of Judge D e n h a m ' s concurring opinion. D e n h a m believed that segregation in the Orange County districts created "inequality on its face." If the Orange County precedent had been allowed, "Hitler's anti-semitism . . . would have a long start in the country which gave its youth to aid in its destruction." Orange County educational officials should be liable for criminal indictment, D e n h a m claimed, for they had "brazenly proclaimed their discriminatory violation of the state educational laws." 64 La Opinion believed that the appellate decision was a blow to "those w h o believe in the anti-semitic theories of Adolph Hitler." T h e newspaper reported that the case had established that people of Latin descent "must be 62 65

64

Ibid., Dec. 10, 1946. Westminster v. Mendez, 779-781.

Ibid., 783-784.

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treated as the same race [as norteamericanos -Y6"* The Santa Ana Register, probably the most conservative newspaper in California, also approved of the appellate decision. The Register had long campaigned against compulsory public education and saw the Mendez v. Westminster case as one more piece of ammunition. According to the Register, Santa Ana school board members "disobey the moral laws they profess to teach and have to be stopped by policemen of the state." This was the result of the nature of the people who serve on school boards: "Self-seekers who want power; who want to appear to be leaders; who are willing to violate their own oaths of office in order to let their will prevail." The Register believed that school segregation was "the natural result of compulsory education" and just one more reason why that latter practice should be abolished.66 There is no evidence of unfavorable California press reaction to the Mendez decision on grounds that segregation should be continued. However, representatives of the ACLU and NAACP criticized the fact that the Court of Appeals did not strike down the "separate but equal" doctrine.67 Open Forum, published by the Southern California branch of the ACLU, attacked Judge Stevens' opinion as "devoid of social imagination." 68 But, in fact, the Mendez decision did establish precedent for important cases in other states. In 1948 and 1950, federal district courts ruled that de jure segregation of MexicanAmerican school children was unconstitutional in Texas and Arizona respectively.69 If Mendez v. Westminster could not be cited as direct precedent for the Brown v. La Opinión, Apr. 16, 1947. Santa Ana Register, Apr. 16, 1947. 67 Lester H. Phillips, "Segregation in Education: A California Case Study," Phylon (4th Quarter, 1949), 412. 68 Open Forum (Los Angeles), May 3, 1947. 69 George I. Sanchez, Concerning Segregation of Spanish-Speaking Children in the Public Schools (Inter-American Education Occasional Paper, IX, Austin, 1951), 13-15; 67. 65

66

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Board of Education decision of 1954, in which the Supreme Court did finally reverse the "separate but equal" doctrine, much of the social and educational theory expressed by Judge McCormick anticipated Earl Warren's historic opinion in the Brown case. FALL OF "SEPARATE BUT EQUAL" The Mendez case also had repercussions in Sacramento. It focused attention on the issue of school segregation and on the California statutes still allowing such practices. In January 1947, Assemblymen Anderson, Hawkins, Rosenthal and Bennet introduced legislation to repeal sections 8003 and 8004 of the Education Code, the remaining school segregation laws on the books. Opponents of the measure claimed that California had "a racial situation different from that of any other state," because of its large Asian population. However the Anderson bill passed both the assembly and senate by large margins, and on June 14, 1947, Governor Earl Warren signed the repeal into law. 70 About one year later, Mary Peters surveyed 100 southern and central California non-urban school districts to determine the effects of the Mendez decision. Seventyeight percent of the responding districts claimed that they formerly had maintained separate "Mexican" schools; however, only 18 percent admitted still having such schools. 71 In Orange County, officials had decided further appeal of the Mendez case was pointless. Orange County's education commissioner ordered that there be "some Anglo and Mexican children in every class." In September 1947, integrated schools opened in Westminster, Garden Grove, El Modeno and Santa Ana, apparently with little trouble. 72 70 Sacramento Bee, Apr. 11, 1947; June 4, 1947; Peters, "Segregation," 78-79; Cooke, "Segregation of Mexican Children," 421. " Peters, "Segregation," 117-119. 72 Ibid., 116; Phillips, "Segregation in Education," 410.

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School board members in Riverside were sufficiently impressed by McCormick's original 1946 decision to accede to demands of Mexican-American parents and integrate schools in the "Bell Town" section of the city. In 1948 Riverside closed an "all-white" school near another Mexican neighborhood, thus producing integration of another previously "Mexican" school. 73 The Ontario school board decided to integrate Grove School in 1946. During the summer of that year, Anglo parents obtained 1,400 signatures on a petition asking the board to "rescind its action in rearranging school district boundaries." But the board held firm, and in September, Grove opened with 177 Mexican and 155 non-Mexican students. According to the new principal, once the Anglo parents realized the board's decision was final "they made up their minds to help in every way." 74 In Mendota, Superintendent Virgil Howard made a virtue of necessity. Vandalism required that a fence be built around Mendota's schools, and Howard pointed out that the district could save $5,000, if only one, integrated school were fenced instead of two segregated facilities. The board agreed. As one board member put it, "democracy turns out to be cheaper... The Mexican boys who've been breaking school windows on Saturday night were just getting even . . . If the schools hadn't been separated in the first place, we probably wouldn't have needed a fence." 75 DE FACTO, DE JURE It was in small communities such as Mendota that the Mendez decision had its most dramatic effect. The case applied only to de jure segregation, not to the "de facto New York Times, Dec. 22, 1946; McWilliams, North from 283; Hendrick, Development of a School Integration Plan, 42. 74 Peters, "Segregation," 90-93. 75 Johnson, "Fenced Intolerance In," 398-399. 73

Mexico,

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segregation" that created separate schools in large urban districts such as Los Angeles. After 1947 California's Mexican and Mexican-American population grew rapidly and became increasingly urbanized. By I 9 6 0 more than 80 percent of the state's 1.4 million "Spanish-surnamed" people lived in urban areas. Thus the number of "Spanish-surnamed" children attending de facto segregated schools steadily increased. A California State Department of Education survey in 1966 found that 57 percent of such children attended "minority schools" (schools with a minority group enrollment percentage 15 points above the community average). 76 In 1973 UCLA historian and civil liberties activist John Caughey estimated that two-thirds of the students of Mexican descent in Los Angeles attended substantially segregated schools. 77 Statewide, more Mexican and MexicanAmerican children probably attended segregated schools in 1973 than did in 1947, Mendez v. Westminster notwithstanding. By 1963 some prominent Mexican-Americans were supporting black spokesmen in their call for the integration of the Los Angeles schools. 78 But by the end of the sixties, many new Chicano leaders were in favor of ethnically separate institutions. When Chicano students staged mass boycotts of four East Los Angeles high schools in March of 1968, integration was not among the demands they presented to the city school board. Instead, they asked for more bilingual programs, new courses on Chicano history and culture, Mexican food in the cafeterias, more Spanish-speaking faculty and the firing of 76 California State Department of Education, Racial and Ethnic Survey of California Public Schools, Part One: Distribution of Pupils, Fall 1966 (Sacramento, 1967), 11. 77 John Caughey, To Kill a Child's Spirit: the Tragedy of School Segregation in Los Angeles (Itasca, 111., 1973), 11. Caughey denies the distinction between de jure and de facto segregation, saying that both are sanctioned by the state. 78 Integrated Education, (Aug., 1963), 53, (Oct.-Nov., 1963), 43-44.

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"anti-Mexican" teachers (as well as increased student rights, liberalized dress codes and up-grading of facilities). 79 In 1969 and 1970 some Chicano spokesmen supported the unsuccessful attempts at establishing "community control" of neighborhood schools in Los Angeles. 80 But this is not to say that the Mendez decision was an insignificant event. It ended nearly a century of de jure school segregation in California and incorporated into law the integrationist and egalitarian morality that had developed during the 1930s and 1940s. However, neither Mendez v. Westminster nor the idealistic educators of the 1940s had determined whether de facto segregation was, like de jure segregation, a violation of human and legal rights. And neither the courts nor the schools of the immediate post-war period had considered the possibility that some members of ethnic minorities might not accept the assimilationist assumptions on which the Mendez decision was made: that some victims of prejudice might call for separatism in education and society. Gonzalo Mendez and his companions had raised legal and moral questions that the judges and educators of the 1940s were prepared to answer. Today's more difficult questions of de facto segregation and separatism have largely stumped the courts and schools, let alone the general public. But without Mendez v. Westminster, the agonizing questions of the 1960s and 1970s could not even have been asked. Mendez was part of a process which stripped away the formal structure of legalized segregation and exposed the underlying conditions of racism and reaction that divide the American people and plague their consciences. T> Los Angeles Times, Mar. 7, 8, 9, 12,13,1968; La Opinión, Mar. 6,7,8, 12, 1968. 80 Caughey, To Kill A Child's Spirit, 132, 187-188; Integrated Education (Sept.-Oct., 1964), 48-51.

6 "All Deliberate Speed" in California

W E CONCLUDE that in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate education facilities are inherently unequal." Thus on May 17,1954, in the case of Brown v. the Topeka Board of Education, the United States Supreme Court ruled that school segregation violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the American Constitution. One year later, Chief Justice Earl Warren ordered federal district courts to begin implementation of the Brown decision and "to take such proceedings and enter such orders and decrees consistent with this opinion as are necessary and proper to admit to public schools on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed the parties to these cases.1 But what, precisely, did Warren and his colleagues on the Court mean when they said that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal?" Did this apply only to de jure segregation enforced by law, or also to de facto segregation produced by neighborhood patterns? And what, precisely, was Warren trying to say when he instructed the lower courts to act "with all deliberate 1

Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka et al., 347 United States

Reports 495 (1954) and 349 United States Reports 301 (1955).

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speed"? Was this an order for immediate school integration, integration as soon as was practical, or gradual, evolutionary integration? During the past two decades, these questions have been raised in many California communities. Los Angeles, San Francisco and Richmond have been among the districts facing court desegregation orders, while Berkeley and Riverside voluntarily initiated extensive busing programs. But nowhere have the questions been raised more often or debated more fully than in Pasadena. In the case of Jackson v. the Pasadena City School District the State Supreme Court first attempted to apply the Brown precedent to California, and in the case of Spangler v. the Pasadena City Board of Education, a federal judge imposed California's first comprehensive, court-ordered integration plan. 2 Yet today, more than twenty years after the Brown decision, Pasadena remains deeply divided over the issue of "busing," and the future of the city's integration plan is very much in doubt. This chapter will briefly cover the experiences of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Richmond, Berkeley and Riverside. But Pasadena will serve as our major case-study for a discussion of the conflicts and contradictions produced by the issue of school segregation during the past twenty years. "CITY BUILT BY ROSES" Pasadena is an "old suburb" in California terms. Its school district, which encompasses some outlying communities such as Altadena and Sierra Madre as well as Pasadena itself, is over 100 years old. The area is just east of Los Angeles and was linked to the downtown metropolitan center by Pacific Electric trains at the turn of the century and by California's first freeway in the 1940s. For 2

Jay R. Jackson Jr. v. Pasadena City School District et al., 59 California Reports 876-882 (1963); Nancy Anne Spangler et al., v. Pasadena City Board of Education et al., 311 Federal Supplement 501-524 (1970).

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over sixty years, Pasadena has had national prominence as the site of the Tournament of Roses and the RoseBowl game. Although most of the district's residents always have been affluent, middle- or upper-class whites, as early as 1920, about 1,100 Pasadenans, 2 percent of the city's total population, were black. They worked in Pasadena's resort hotels or as domestics in the homes of the wealthy. Pasadena whites were proud of their city's record in race relations, believing that all ethnic groups lived "in dignity, privacy and peace." 5 But before World War II the local real estate board encouraged the use of "restrictive covenants," conditions placed in deeds, prohibiting sale or lease of property to non-whites in many neighborhoods. When the Supreme Court ruled the covenants illegal in 1948, many real estate agents continued to refuse to sell or rent homes in many areas of the city to minorities. 4 Baseball star Jackie Robinson grew up in Pasadena in the 1920s and 1930s and recalled that the town regarded blacks "as intruders." "We saw movies from segregated balconies, swam in the municipal pool only on Tuesdays, and were permitted in the YMCA only one night a week. Restaurant doors were slammed in our faces." When the Robinsons moved to a new home on Pepper Street, some of their white neighbors circulated a petition protesting the presence of a "colored family." But Robinson did remember a white school teacher "who judged me as an individual and not by the color of my skin." He acknowledged that he did not work hard in the classroom because his older brothers and their friends "had studied hard and wound up as porters, elevator operators, taxi drivers, bellhops. I came to the conclusion that long hours over the books were a waste of time." 5 » David Holburd, This Happened in Pasadena (New York, 1951), 12. Ibid., 13; Spangler v. Pasadena, 512. 5 Jackie Robinson, Baseball Has Done It (New York, 1964), 29-32; Carl Rowan and Jackie Robinson, Wait Till Next Year (New York, I960), 23-24. 4

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But the Pasadena schools did provide Jackie Robinson with one opportunity to excel—in school athletics. H e regarded sports as "the big break in the wall of segregation about me. In primary and high school white boys treated me as an equal. I was their s t a r . . . They made me a professional at eight by bringing me lunches as a bribe to play on their teams." Robinson earned varsity letters in football, baseball, basketball and track at both J o h n Muir Technical High School and Pasadena Junior College. When some whites from Oklahoma on the junior college football team treated black players badly, Robinson, the team's star quarterback, and another black athlete who was a first-string end, threatened to transfer to arch-rival Compton. The coach quickly taught the Oklahomans the value of racial harmony, and Robinson led the team to a national championship. He continued his spectacular athletic career at UCLA, but left school without graduating after his athletic eligibility ended: "I was convinced that no amount of education would help a black man get a job. I felt I was living in an academic and athletic dream world." 6 SCHOOL SEGREGATION, PASADENA STYLE During World War II, labor demands of a new defenseoriented economy drew thousands of black residents into the state, many of them poor people from the rural South and Midwest. Pasadena, like many California "central cities" and "old suburbs", experienced a sharp rise in minority population. By 1946 the city's black residents numbered more than 6,300, over 6 percent of total population. In a few neighborhood schools white children found themselves "very much in the minority—the ratio running from six to ten colored children for every 6 Robinson, Baseball, 31-32; Jackie Robinson and Alfred Duckett, I Never Had It Made (New York, 1972), 23.

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white child." 7 The school board established "neutral attendance zones" in such neighborhoods and allowed white children to transfer to predominantly white school in other parts of the city. Thus a school district "Human Relations Workshop" caused considerable controversy in 1950 when it recommended the abolition of one of the neutral zones in an area east of Arroyo Seco. 8 The workshop recommendation was supported by School Superintendent Dr. Willard E. Goslin who had come to Pasadena from Minneapolis in 1948. He soon was under fire for his "progressive" ideas about education, and one of his critics, Mary Allen, believed that "the planners of the new or modern education, alias progressive, launched a full-scale invasion of the schools in Pasadena under the leadership of Willard E. Goslin." According to this line of thinking abolition of neutral zones was another example of "utopian" or "socialistic" theories in the schools, and the Human Relations Workshop was an effort at "racial agitation." Allen charged that, "Minority groups, racial and otherwise, were propagandized with the idea that the majority discriminated against them, exploited them, held them in subjugation . . . Intercultural dances were held, and children of different backgrounds were made to feel uncomfortably unless they danced together." 9 In spite of these charges, the school board agreed to abolish the neutral zone in question, but after a school tax increase vocally opposed by Goslin's critics failed by a two-to-one election margin, the board accepted the superintendent's resignation. 10 During the 1950s the black population of Pasadena district steadily grew. School enrollments in the 7 Hulburd, Happened, 12; Mary L. Allen, Education or (Caldwell, Ida., 1955), 147. 8 Hulburd, Happened, 12; Allen, Education, 151-153.

Indoctrination

9 Allen, Education, 54, 149. The dismissal of Goslin is the primary subject of both Allen, Education and Hulburd, Happened. 10

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western portion of the city and in Altadena reflected the changing racial composition of the neighborhoods. In 1946 10 percent of Washington Elementary School's student body was black; in 1958 the figure was 52 percent; in 1964 it was 84 percent. A Citizens School Survey Committee recommended "that the so-called neutral zones or neutral territory be eliminated" in 1952, and the local N A A C P chapter began a vocal campaign against district attendance policies. But white parents continued to be able to transfer their children out of predominantly black schools. 11 In 1961 La Cañada, a community located outside of the city limits, left the school district, allegedly to avoid having its children attend J o h n Muir High, whose student population was becoming increasingly black. As a result of La Canada's action, the district lost one junior high school and white parents in the Loma Vista area faced the prospect of their children attending largely black Washington Junior High. Instead, the children were allowed to transfer to a predominantly white school in another part of the district. 12 JACKSON V.PASADENA This was too much for the parents of 13-year-old Jay Jackson, a black student at Washington. They requested that Jay also be allowed to transfer to predominantly white Eliot Junior High on grounds that Washington was a segregated and "therefore inferior" school. W h e n the school board refused, the Jacksons took the matter to >' United States Commission on Civil Rights, Racial Isolation in the Public Schools (Washington, 1967), 10; Pasadena Citizens School Survey Committee, Pasadena Faces the Future, Abridged Report of the Cooperative Study of the Pasadena City Schools (Pasadena, 1952), 156; Ernest M. Posey, "Segregation in the Pasadena Schools: A Community Effort" (Senior thesis, Harvard, 1972). 12 Spangler v. Pasadena, 507, 511; Jackson v. Pasadena, 878; John Caughey, To Kill A Child's Spirit (Itasca, 111., 1973), 133; Posey, "Segregation," 41-43.

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court, with NAACP assistance. On June 27, 1963, the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of Jay Jackson and in the process applied Brown v. Board of Education to California for the first time. The Supreme Court ruled that Pasadena had gerrymandered junior high school boundaries and allowed white transfers specifically "for the purpose of instituting, maintaining, and intensifying racial segregation at Washington." Under the Brown doctrine, the court found Washington Junior High to be a "racially segregated school which is inherently inferior to the other junior high schools in the district." Thus, Jay Jackson had the right to transfer to another institution. 13 In effect, Pasadena had been found guilty of purposeful, de jure segregation. But in the Jackson case the court chose to go beyond the specific facts presented to it and also deal with the issue of "unintentional," de facto segregation. It claimed that a student in a racially imbalanced school might be entitled to judicial relief, "even in the absence of gerrymandering or other affirmative discrimination." The court held that "residential segregation is itself an evil," and when such an evil exists a school board must do more than simply "refrain from affirmative discriminatory conduct . . . The right to equal opportunity for education and the harmful consequences of segregation require that school boards take steps, insofar as reasonably feasible, to alleviate racial imbalance in schools regardless of its cause."14 Here, then, was a doctrine which interpreted Brown v. the Board of Education to mean that schools have a legal obligation to reduce the scope of de facto as well as dejure segregation. DE FACTO UNDER ATTACK Even before the decision in the Jackson case was announced, the California State Board of Education was "Jackson v. Pasadena, 879-880. 14 Ibid., 881-882.

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moving toward adoption of a similar doctrine. In June 1962, it asked local districts to give "serious and thoughtful consideration" to the problem of racial imbalances in the schools, and in October of the same year, it required districts to "exert all effort to avoid and eliminate segregation . . ," 1 5 After the Jackson decision, the board asked State Attorney General Stanley Mosk if it was proper to identify students by race in formulating plans to relieve racial imbalances. Previously, it was thought that the schools should be "officially colorblind," but Mosk claimed that to hold to that assumption, one would have to "not merely conclude the Constitution is colorblind, but that it is totally blind." 1 6 Race and ethnicity could indeed be identified and considered in formulating policies to deal with school segregation. That ruling opened the way for a statewide racial school census which was taken in the fall of 1966. It determined the number of minority students in the schools and revealed a greater instance of segregation than most educators had expected. Thirteen percent of California's school children were "Spanish surname," 8 percent were black, over 2 percent were Asian, and nearly 1 percent were Indians and other non-whites. T h e survey defined "racially balanced" schools as those whose ethnic mix was within a range of plus or minus 15 percent of the ethnic composition of the school district as a whole. By this definition, only 12 percent of black, 28 percent of Spanish-surname and 39 percent of white students attended racially balanced schools. On the other hand, 85 percent of black, 57 percent of Spanish-surname and 6 percent of white students attended predominantly mi15 Ibid., 881; Irving G. Hendrick, The Development of a School Integration Plan in Riverside, California: A History and Perspective (Riverside, 1968), 15-16; Neil Sullivan, Integration: A Plan for Berkeley (Berkeley, 1967), 4; Integrated Education (Chicago) (Oct.-Nov., 1963), 40-43. 16 Integrated Education, (Oct.-Nov., 1963), 43; Hendrick, Development, 17.

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nority institutions. 17 In 1969 the state board adopted a set of integration guidelines which included the plus/minus 15 percent definition of racial balance^ Districts with schools which did not meet this definition were required to take corrective action. 18 By this time several California communities had adopted plans to reduce racial imbalance in the schools. By far the most dramatic program was instituted in Berkeley. JLike Pasadena, Berkeley is an "old suburb" which long had a small black population. Also, as in Pasadena, that population grew rapidly after the outbreak of World War II. In 1939 4 percent oif Berkeley's school children were black; in 1963 the figure was 37 percent, and most black children were concentrated in largely segregated "flatland" schools in the western section of the city.19 In 1962 the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality demanded school desegregation, and two years later the school board responded with a scheme to integrate the junior highs. An organization called Parents Association for Neighborhood Schools opposed the board actions and mounted a campaign to recall board members who had voted for the junior-high integration. In October 1964 Berkeley voters turned down the recall by a three-to-two margin. Meanwhile the junior-high integration plan had gone into effect in the previous September. 20 Berkeley School Superintendent Neil Sullivan interpreted the defeat of the recall as a popular mandate for further integration. During the middle sixties, he carefully led the community in the direction of total desegre17 California State Department of Education, Racial and Ethnic Survey of California Public Schools: Part One Distribution of Pupils (Sacramento, 1967), 5-8; Frederick R. Gunsky, "Racial and Ethnic Survey of California Public Schools," Integrated Education (June-July, 1967), 44-47. 18 "California State Board of Education Policy on Ethnic Imbalance" Integrated Education, (May-June, 1969), 36-37. 19 Neil Sullivan, Now is the Time: Integration in the Berkeley Schools (BlooArlington, 111., 1969), 33. 20 Ibid., 42-52; Integrated Education, (Dec., 1964-Jan., 1965), 4.

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gation of Berkeley public schools. A proposal to build a second high school was turned down so that the city would continue to have one integrated institution. In 1968 the Berkeley School Board adopted Sullivan's recommendation for elementary desegregation which involved substantial "two-way busing" of white children to western flatland schools and black children to "hill" schools in the eastern part of the city. In September 1968, the full Berkeley integration program was peacefully instituted. About 3,500 of the city's 9,000 elementary school students were bused in what was not only the largest non-court-ordered school integration plan in the nation, but probably the only one which involved busing more white than black students. 21 Yet the Berkeley experiment was not without problems. Even before elementary desegregation began, there were reports of inter-racial violence at newly integrated Garfield Junior High. White parents claimed their children were victims of beatings and extortion. A Berkeley Teachers Association poll revealed great increases in disciplinary problems and substantial teacher doubts about the integration program. 22 Sullivan promised to crack down on disorder, but he reminded Berkeley parents that "the Negro ghetto has no monopoly on violence." Whites who had grown up in poor immigrant neighborhoods also had often made their way with "fists, feet and elbows." Sullivan remembered his own childhood when his mother transferred him from a poor Irish neighborhood school in Manchester, New Hampshire, to a different school in a "better" part of town: "Violence was a part of my everyday life. I fought and argued and 21

Sullivan, Now is the Time, 188-192; Integrated Education, (Nov.Dec., 1968), 5; Helen Nestor, Virginia Hadsell, Grethel C. Newcom, Equal Start: A New School, A New Chance (San Francisco, 1968) is an excellent photographic study of integration in Berkeley. 22 Sullivan, Now is the Time, 180; Berkeley Daily Gazette, Apr. 16, 17, 18, 1968.

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cussed. In the new school I spent most of my time seeking recognition, and I used time-worn tactics—many young Negroes today entering a Caucasian school for the first time resort to them . . ," 23 Even before Berkeley had completed its desegregation program, Riverside, a southern California city located about 60 miles east of Los Angeles, had embarked on a similar effort. Like Berkeley, Riverside was the location of a University of California campus, and the liberal university community gave substantial support to the integration program. Unlike Berkeley, the local newspaper also provided editorial backing. By 1965 about 7 percent of the city's school population was black and 11 percent was of Mexican descent. Three of twenty-eight elementary schools had at least 95 percent minority enrollments. The school board had made a modest effort at compensatory education in the minority schools, but by the fall of 1965 it produced little improvement in academic achievement. The local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People demanded complete desegregation and after fire destroyed a portion of one of the ghetto schools, the board agreed. In September 1966 fully integrated schools opened in the Riverside district. Integration had been accomplished by changing attendance boundaries, closing ghetto schools and busing some minority children to predominantly white institutions. 24 SUPPORT FROM WASHINGTON The successful school integrationists in Riverside and Berkeley had reason to feel that history was on their side. Sullivan, Now is the Time, 122-132, xiii-xiv. Best coverage of the Riverside integration plan is Hendrick, Development. Also see Nathaniel Hickerson, "Integrated vs. Compensatory Education in the Riverside-San Bernardino Schools," in T. Bentley Edwards and Frederick M. Wirt, School Desegregation in the North: the Challenge and the Experience (San Francisco, 1967), 116-128. 25 24

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The nation seemed to be involved in a great crusade against segregation and discrimination. Lyndon Johnson had persuaded Congress to pass the comprehensive Civil Rights Act of 1964, and federal funds were forthcoming to aid desegregation programs in local school districts. In 1966 the Department of Health, Education and Welfare issued the "Coleman Report," actually entitled Equality of Educational Opportunity and prepared by a group of scholars led by Dr. James Coleman. The report was the most comprehensive study of school segregation yet published in the United States. Coleman and his colleagues discovered that America's public education system was already highly segregated and becoming more so. They also found that differences in schools were not nearly as important in predicting student achievement as family and socio-economic class background, but they still concluded that "a pupil's achievement is strongly related to the educational background and aspirations of the other students in the school." Since a greater percentage of white students was likely to come from well-educated families than was the case for minorities, it followed that integration would improve minority student achievement. But even here Coleman was cautious: "Analysis of the test performance of Negro children in integrated schools indicated positive results of integration, though small ones." 25 Much less cautious were the authors of a 1967 study published by the United States Commission on Civil Rights, entitled Racial Isolation in the Public Schools. Many of the findings in this document paralleled those of the Coleman Report, but the commission's conclusions were stated without reservation: "Negro children who attend predominantly Negro schools do not achieve as well as other children, Negro or white." Black children were judged to suffer serious harm "when their education James Coleman et al., Equality of Educational Opportunity (Washington, 1966), 21-23; 29. 25

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takes place in public schools which are racially segregated, whatever the source of that segregation might be." While the commission admitted that class differences might have more effect on school achievement than racial discrimination, it pointed out that racial integration normally meant class integration, since most blacks were of lower social status than most whites. 26 BACKLASH

But if the weight of the federal government and its scholarly allies was clearly on the side of racial integration during the middle sixties, public opinion in California was far less convinced. In November 1964, the state's voters overwhelmingly supported Proposition 14, an initiative on the state ballot which overturned California's "fair housing" laws. In August 1965 the Watts district of Los Angeles erupted with fire and fury, and in the following year, the Black Panther Party began to receive substantial publicity for its militant activity in the San Francisco Bay Area. Protests against the Vietnam War divided Californians along lines of age and "life style." As social tensions increased, many white parents' fear and resentment of school integration also seemed to increase. Perhaps the most spectacular school integration failure occurred in Richmond. The Richmond Unified School District includes a large area of industrial and suburban development on the east shore of San Francisco Bay. By 1968, 38 percent of the district's students were black, and in that year, a Superior Court judge ordered Richmond to prepare a desegregation plan. The school board, dominated by upper-middle class whites from the "hill" areas of the district, adopted a policy of substantial "two-way" busing of both black and white students. The 26

Civil Rights Commission, Racial Isolation,

193-195.

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result was a political uprising of working class, conservative whites against busing. It was, according to Lillian Rubin, a "failure of liberal politics—a case history of its inability to cope with an issue that arouses strong feelings, that divides the society deeply, and that brings large numbers of formerly inactive men and women into the political areas." 27 Conservative anti-busing candidates swept the incumbent school board from office in August 1969. The new board discarded the busing plan and received court permission to attempt a voluntary "open enrollment" integration program. By 1972 some Richmond schools were still racially imbalanced, and the board was resisting new court orders for more comprehensive integration. 28 Similar controversies also were about to erupt in Pasadena in 1969. The percentage of blacks in the schools steadily rose during the sixties, while that of whites just as steadily dropped. Between 1963 and 1970 the Pasadena district lost 4,600 white students and gained 3,900 blacks. In the two and a half decades following the end of World War II, the black proportion of the school population had grown from less than 5 percent to more than 30 percent, while that of whites had declined from over 90 percent to under 60 percent. 29 The rising minority enrollments were accompanied by increased school segregation, the 1963 Jackson decision notwithstanding. In 1964 the school board refused to take action that might have reduced elementary school segregation. Two neighboring schools, predominantly black Washington and largely white Longfellow, were suffering 27

Lillian B. Rubin, Busing and Backlash: White Against White in an Urban School District (Berkeley, 1972), 196. 28 Best source on Richmond situation is Rubin, Busing and Backlash. Also see Louis Heath, "De Facto Segregation in a California City," Integrated Education (Jan.-Feb., 1970), 3-10 and Integrated Education (Sept.-Oct., 1972), 14. 29 New York Times, Oct. 11, 1970.

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from overcrowding. The board decided to bus Longfellow students to other white schools but installed portable facilities at Washington, thus keeping a black student body intact. 30 Also in 1964 the racial composition of the district's high schools became a point of controversy. The withdrawal of La Canada and the building of a new Pasadena High School campus in the eastern part of the city threatened to turn John Muir High into a predominantly minority institution. Parents in the Muir attendance zone and the NAACP demanded that the school board transfer some white students from Pasadena to Muir, but the board refused. Instead, black neighborhoods in the Muir area were declared "open enrollment zones" and students were encouraged to apply for a limited number of openings at Pasadena and the newly constructed Blair High School. By 1967 open enrollment clearly was not working and the California Department of Education warned the district that it was in violation of state racial balance guidelines. The board finally adopted "Plan A" which reassigned a portion of the white Pasadena High students to Muir, but Pasadena parents bitterly criticized the action. In the spring of 1967 two candidates opposed to "Plan A" were elected to the board, the decision on "Plan A" was reversed and the ineffective open enrollment scheme was reinstated. 31 SPANGLER V. PASADENA Parents of three John Muir High School pupils, two of them white and one black, now decided to take their case to court. They asked a Superior Court in Los Angeles to Spangler v. Pasadena, 508-510. Donald McAIpin, "Analysis of the Efforts to Promote Racial Desegregation within the Pasadena Unified School District As Directed by the Court Order of Judge Manuel L. Real in January of 1970" (Ph.D. Thesis, Walden University, 1972) 80-89; Coleman, Equality, 482-484. 30 51

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order "Plan A" into effect, but the judge refused to take immediate action. In October 1968 the case was refiled in Federal District Court in Los Angeles and the plaintiffs, supported by the NAACP and the Southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, claimed that the Pasadena school board was violating the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by maintaining a segregated school system. In November 1968 the United States Department of Justice entered the case and in 1969 the department successfully moved to have the issue broadened to include all the schools in the district rather than just the high schools.32 The federal intervention focused national attention on Pasadena, for it was the first federal action against school segregation in the western United States, and the first such action to come to trial outside of the South or border regions. The New York Times speculated that the Justice Department chose Pasadena as a test case for "northern-style" segregation because of the national prominence of the Rose Bowl game. A local school official believed "there may be an attempt here to develop a landmark case by using Pasadena's reputation." 33 If that was so, Pasadena's reputation certainly was not improved by the evidence presented at the trial. The plaintiffs submitted records documenting school-board decisions on boundaries, transfers, construction plans and transportation programs that created or reinforced segregated school patterns. One black teaching applicant testified that when she arrived at the Pasadena district office, the receptionist told her "they're taking maids' applications downstairs." Another black job seeker claimed that a principal told her that she was not hired because of the "effect on the community, the other » New York Times, Apr. 7, 1968. » Ibid.; Integrated Education (Jan.-Feb., 1969), 57-58.

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teachers and the parents." A former school superintendent testified that a school board president, "gave me specific instructions to keep my mouth shut [about desegregation], He said it was a political issue. I said I thought it was a crucial education issue . . . He told me I had made a vast mistake." 34 Attorneys for the school board denied that the evidence amounted to proof of purposeful de jure segregation. But they tacitly admitted that their clients had not done enough to reduce racial imbalances in the past and pointed out that the present board majority had formulated a comprehensive integration plan in 1969. The plan was not to take full effect until 1973 and the attorneys asked the judge to realize that implementation of integration takes time, that the logistics are difficult and the teachers, students and community must be properly prepared for the change in traditional attendance patterns: "This court should recognize that moving too abruptly is likely to cause deprivation of education." 35 The board, then, claimed it was willing to desegregate, but it was asking to be allowed to do so "with all deliberate speed." Judge Manuel Real was not impressed with such logic. On January 20, 1970, he delivered an extraordinary oral opinion that swept away most of the board's arguments. He denied that there was a distinction between de jure and de facto segregation. It was "the opponents to the concept of integration that gave the adjectives of de facto, dejure, partial or entire," he claimed. The judge believed that the Supreme Court in the Brown decision simply held "where Negro students had to attend majority 54 New York Times, Jan. 21, 1970; Integrated Education, (Mar.-Apr., 1970), 58-59. 15 Los Angeles Times, Jan. 21, 1970; New York Times, Jan. 21, 1970. The Board also had proposed a bond issue to build an integrated high school "cluster" for the entire city, but in April, 1969 the voters rejected the bonds. New York Times, Apr. 7, 1969; McAlpin, "Analysis," 100-101.

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Negro schools or all Negro schools they were being deprived of an educational opportunity to fulfill all of their dreams . . ." As for the concept of "all deliberate speed," Real was of the opinion that "the country has recognized the mistake of that small phrase." 3 6 In his written decision, submitted on March 12, the judge repeated the arguments of his earlier oral statement and went on to deal with the issues of neighborhood schools and cross-town busing. H e admitted that these were subjects worthy of "educational consideration," but unlike segregation, they did not have "constitutional proportions . . . It can be recognized that the use of the neighborhood school policy results in racial imbalance and increasing racial imbalance. T h e same is true with the policy against cross-town busing." Real granted that the current school board had been willing to begin desegregation, but prophetically, he pointed out that board majorities can change. Thus, the judge found for the plaintiffs and ordered the Pasadena school board to submit to the court an acceptable "plan of correction of the racial imbalance . . . to be implemented on or before the beginning of the school year of September, 1970." T h e plan had to guarantee that no Pasadena school would have "a majority of minority students." It also had to adjust district construction programs and school boundaries to facilitate integration, provide fair treatment of minorities in recruitment, hiring, evaluation and promotion of district personnel. 3 7 A DIVIDED COMMUNITY T h e immediate question for the Pasadena board was whether to obey Judge Real's order or appeal the decision to a high court. Two board members were in favor of appeal. J o h n Welsh said he was "shocked, disappointed 56 57

Pasadena Star News, Jan. 21, 1970. Spangler v. Pasadena, 504-505; Los Angeles Times, Jan. 21, 1970.

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and angry" about the decision, while Brad Houser felt it was unconstitutional and established "an unreasonable, ridiculous time-table which is certainly not in the best interest of education." But another board member, Albert Lowe, said he had expected the decision and "only wished we had more time to do the staff training, community participation and communication." Board President Luverne La Motte and member Joseph Engholm were concerned about the cost of a full integration program, but like Lowe they believed that such a program was necessary and inevitable. On the evening of January 27, the board voted 3-2 to obey Judge Real's order and not appeal the decision. 38 During the spring and summer of 1970, the district staff, under the direction of School Superintendent Ralph Hornbeck, prepared for fullscale integration. T h e court had approved a plan in which schools were grouped together in east-west corridors which had a racially mixed population. Considerable busing within the corridors was necessary to achieve Judge Real's criterion that no school have a majority of minority students. However, all students would attend a school within walking distance of their homes for half of the elementary grades, and Hornbeck was able to get state and federal funds to finance most of the transportation costs. On September 14, 1970, busing began almost without incident. Over 14,000 children were transported back and forth across the corridors, and only a handful of demonstrators appeared at school district headquarters with signs reading STOP CROSS-TOWN BUSING. A t t e n d a n c e was about 6 p e r -

cent below estimates, but Hornbeck and new board President A1 Lowe were delighted at how well the integration program was going. T h e superintendent believed that Pasadena had proved "that a major desegregation plan can be implemented smoothly in an urban area," while Lowe claimed that Pasadenans had shown them58

Pasadena Star News, Jan. 21, 1970; Los Angeles Times, Jan. 21, 1970.

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selves to be "bigger in their hearts and spirits than the challenges we face."39 But the challenges had just begun. The calm surface of integration's first day belied a deep community division over the issue of "busing." In fact there had been a certain amount of busing in the Pasadena district for many years, some of it to allow white children to escape from predominantly black neighborhood schools. But now busing was being used to achieve racial balance, and many parents expressed deep reservations. "I don't mind integration," one white father claimed, "I just don't want my children bused." Another father said that busing was "silly ... You lose all contact with the community. Besides that, its costly."40 Appealing to such sentiments, a group calling itself the Pasadena Recall Committee circulated petitions to obtain a recall election of the three board members who had refused to appeal Judge Real's decision. The petitioners easily got the required number of signatures, and the recall vote was scheduled for October 13, 1970, just a month after the busing plan went into effect. All but one of the fourteen candidates filing against the three incumbents opposed the integration plan, but the beleaguered board majority held its ground. Board President Lowe asked Pasadena voters to consider "How do we build friendships among people in this community if we keep an invisible Mason-Dixon line?" 41 The election results confirmed rather than resolved the community division over integration. The incumbents survived by the narrowest of margins. Out of over 45,000 votes cast, Luverne La Motte won by less than 600 and Joseph Engholm and A1 Lowe by less than 2,000. The » Los Angeles Times, Sept. 15, 1970; Pasadena Star News, Sept. 15, 1970. For a full description of the "Pasadena Plan" see McAlpin, "Analysis,"123-173. 40 Los Angeles Times, Sept. 15, 1970; New York Times, Oct. 11, 1970.