School Segregation

School Segregation

In 1951, high school student Barbara Johns led more than four hundred of her classmates in a protest against the conditions of the black high school in Farmville, Virginia. Johns lured administrators and teachers from the building and announced an assembly where she explained to her fellow students the separate and unequal conditions they faced. The white high school was a modern and spacious facility with an auditorium, gymnasium, and up-to-date classrooms. Their school was an aging facility surrounded by tar paper shacks that passed as classrooms. Johns led her classmates on a walk-out and protest march with signs demanding a new school. The students refused to return to school for two weeks and convinced NAACP attorneys to file a lawsuit that demanded an end to racial segregation in public education.

After three years of proceedings, the US Supreme Court agreed to hear the students’ case, along with four similar lawsuits from Washington, DC, Delaware, New Jersey, and Kansas. Because the last name of the lead plaintiff in the Kansas case preceded the others alphabetically, the case is known as Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, KansasThe landmark US Supreme Court case of 1954 declaring that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment, regardless of whether those schools were equal in every other aspect. The case was created by consolidating five separate lawsuits that were each sponsored by the NAACP.. In this landmark case, the Supreme Court agreed that separate schools, even if they received equal funding, were inherently unequal and therefore were a violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Unfortunately for Barbara Johns, she was not able to participate in any of the proceedings. Due to threats on her life, her family sent her to live with family members outside of the state.

In areas with large Mexican American communities, such as California and Texas, separate public schools were also maintained for Hispanic children. School officials often utilized “language deficiency” regardless of a child’s ability to speak English as a method to perpetuate separate schools for Mexican American children irrespective of law. While non-English speaking “white” immigrant children were permitted to attend schools of their choice, children of Mexican origin were often assigned to separate schools.

In communities where there were only “white” and “black” schools, the complexion of a Hispanic child might be heavily scrutinized and used to assigning children on an individual basis. In many communities, Mexican American children were informally expected to attend separate “Mexican” schools that were financed and operated by Catholic Mexican American parishioners. For example, the school leaders in Emporia, Kansas, refused to create a separate school for black children (despite the demands of some white parents) but expected the growing Hispanic population to attend a “Mexican School” which was operated by the Sacred Heart church. As was the case in most communities, school records provide no evidence that Mexican American children were formally banned from the public schools of Emporia.

Figure 9.17

Mendez v. Westminster was a landmark case overturning California’s segregation of Hispanic children in its public schools.

This kind of informal segregation was difficult for parents to fight and remains challenging for historians to document. However, it is clear that Mexican American communities challenged and defeated more obvious forms of discrimination. During World War II, Gonzalo Mendez leased a farm belonging to an interned Japanese American family in a primarily white area of Orange County. When his children were denied enrollment in the neighborhood school, Mendez and other Mexican American residents of Orange County sued the school board of Westminster in 1946. The board’s defense argued that separation was not based on ethnicity or national origins, categories that would indicate discrimination as Mendez claimed, but instead on their inability to speak English. In Mendez v. WestminsterA 1946 federal court case that reversed the practice of segregating Mexican American students in absence of a state law permitting the practice., the board argued that its practice of providing separate schools for Spanish-speaking children until they were able to speak and read English was based on the best interests of the children. However, neither the federal district nor the circuit court of appeals agreed that language was the basis of board policy. Many of the children spoke English, and the court ruled that the board’s practice of assigning children to separate schools based on their national origins could not continue.

While the district court believed that separation of children based on national origins was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment—the same logic that led to Brown v. Board of Education—the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided the case on more narrow grounds. While the case is still significant in striking down segregation for Mexican American children, the court avoided any ruling on the Fourteenth Amendment. Instead, it focused on whether California could legally exclude Mexican American children when the educational laws of the state made no such provision.

The laws of California did allow for separate schools for Native American children, as well as those of “Chinese, Japanese, or Mongolian” heritage. The laws made no provision for or against the separation of other minorities. Shortly after this case, however, California governor Earl Warren supported the repeal of the laws permitting segregation for Native American and Asian children. In 1948 in Texas and 1950 in Arizona, Mexican American plaintiffs secured federal court decisions declaring that separate schools for Mexican American children violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Warren would later serve as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court and secure a unanimous decision against school segregation in the landmark 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education.