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1930 - Independent School District v. Salvatierra

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1930 - Independent School District v. Salvatierra

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The first Mexican American case, Salvatierra v. Independent School District, took place in Del Rio, Texas, in 1930. Jesus Salvatierra and other parents sued the town's school board on the grounds that Mexican American students were being deprived of the resources given white students.

This case ended with the ruling that it was legal to segregate the children of Mexican decent in schools through the third grade. Even though Salvatierra lost the case, it highlighted the need for regular communication.

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On March 30, 1931, the Superior Court of San Diego County ruled that the local school board's attempt to segregate 75 Mexican and Mexican American elementary school children was a violation of California state laws because ethnic Mexicans were considered White under the state's Education Code. The Mexican children legally were entitled to attend Lemon Grove Grammar School on the basis of being equal to the White children. This was the first successful school desegregation court decision in the history of the United States.

It is important in San Diego and U.S. history, not solely because it occurred but because the community took court action and won the case they established the rights of their children to equal education, despite local, regional and national sentiment that favored not only segregation, but the actual deportation of the Mexican population in the United States.

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1946 - Mendez vs Westminster and the California Board of Education

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1946 - Mendez vs Westminster and the California Board of Education

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On March 18, 1946, Judge Paul McCormick ruled in favor of the plaintiffs on the basis that the social, psychological, and pedagogical costs of segregated education were damaging to Mexican American students.
The case is important not only for the precedent it set for later court cases because it is a clear example of members of the Mexican American community taking the lead to fight for their rights — and winning.

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1954 - Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka

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1954 - Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka

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Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark 1954 Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. Brown v. Board of Education was one of the cornerstones of the civil rights movement, and helped establish the precedent that “separate-but-equal” education and other services were not, in fact, equal at all.

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Separate But Equal Doctrine

In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racially segregated public facilities were legal, so long as the facilities for Black people and whites were equal.

The ruling constitutionally sanctioned laws barring African Americans from sharing the same buses, schools and other public facilities as whites-known as "Jim Crow" laws -and established the "separate but equal" doctrine that would stand for the next six decades.

But by the early 1950s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP) was working hard to challenge segregation laws in public schools, and had filed lawsuits on behalf of plaintiffs in states such as South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware.

In the case that would become most famous, a plaintiff named Oliver Brown filed a class-action suit against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in 1951, after his daughter, Linda Brown, was denied entrance to Topeka's all-white elementary schools.

In his lawsuit, Brown claimed that schools for Black children were not equal to the white schools, and that segregation violated the so-called "equal protection clause" of the 14th Amendment, which holds that no state can "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The case went before the U.S. District Court in Kansas, which agreed that public school segregation had a "detrimental effect upon the colored children" and contributed to "a sense of inferiority," but still upheld the "separate but equal" doctrine.

Brown v. Board of Education Verdict

When Brown's case and four other cases related to school segregation first came before the Supreme Court in 1952, the Court combined them into a single case under the name Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, served as chief attorney for the plaintiffs. (Thirteen years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson would appoint Marshall as the first Black Supreme Court justice.)

At first, the justices were divided on how to rule on school segregation, with Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson holding the opinion that the Plessy verdict should stand. But in September 1953, before Brown v. Board of Education was to be heard, Vinson died, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower replaced him with Earl Warren, then governor of California.

Displaying considerable political skill and determination, the new chief justice succeeded in engineering a unanimous verdict against school segregation the following year.

In the decision, issued on May 17, 1954, Warren wrote that "in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place," as segregated schools are "inherently unequal." As a result, the Court ruled that the plaintiffs were being "deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment."

Little Rock Nine

In its verdict, the Supreme Court did not specify how exactly schools should be integrated, but asked for further arguments about it.

In May 1955, the Court issued a second opinion in the case (known as Brown v. Board of Education II), which remanded future desegregation cases to lower federal courts and directed district courts and school boards to proceed with desegregation "with all deliberate speed."

Though well intentioned, the Court's actions effectively opened the door to local judicial and political evasion of desegregation. While Kansas and some other states acted in accordance with the verdict, many school and local officials in the South defied it.

In one major example, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas called out the state National Guard to prevent Black students from attending high school in Little Rock in 1957. After a tense standoff, President Eisenhower deployed federal troops, and nine students-known as the " Little Rock Nine"- were able to enter Central High School under armed guard.

Impact of Brown v. Board of Education

Though the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board didn't achieve school desegregation on its own, the ruling (and the steadfast resistance to it across the South) fueled the nascent civil rights movement in the United States.

In 1955, a year after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. Her arrest sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and would lead to other boycotts, sit-ins and demonstrations (many of them led by Martin Luther King Jr.), in a movement that would eventually lead to the toppling of Jim Crow laws across the South.

Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, backed by enforcement by the Justice Department, began the process of desegregation in earnest. This landmark piece of civil rights legislation was followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

In 1976, the Supreme Court issued another landmark decision in Runyon v. McCrary, ruling that even private, nonsectarian schools that denied admission to students on the basis of race violated federal civil rights laws.

By overturning the "separate but equal" doctrine, the Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education had set the legal precedent that would be used to overturn laws enforcing segregation in other public facilities. But despite its undoubted impact, the historic verdict fell short of achieving its primary mission of integrating the nation's public schools.

Today, more than 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, the debate continues over how to combat racial inequalities in the nation's school system, largely based on residential patterns and differences in resources between schools in wealthier and economically disadvantaged districts across the country.

HISTORY Vault: Black History

Sources

History - Brown v. Board of Education Re-enactment, United States Courts.
Brown v. Board of Education, The Civil Rights Movement: Volume I (Salem Press).
Cass Sunstein, "Did Brown Matter?" The New Yorker, May 3, 2004.
Brown v. Board of Education, PBS.org.
Richard Rothstein, Brown v. Board at 60, Economic Policy Institute, April 17, 2014.

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Brown v. Board of Education: Summary, Ruling & Impact | HISTORY

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Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark 1954 Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional.

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The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Provisions of this civil rights act forbade discrimination on the basis of sex, as well as, race in hiring, promoting, and firing.

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Legal Highlight: The Civil Rights Act of 1964

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In the 1960s, Americans who knew only the potential of “equal protection of the laws” expected the president, the Congress, and the courts to fulfill the promise of the 14th Amendment. In response, all three branches of the federal government--as well as the public at large--debated a fundamental co…

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1965 -Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)

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1965 -Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)

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The federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), enacted in 1965, is the nation's national education law and shows a longstanding commitment to equal opportunity for all students.

ESEA authorizes state-run programs for eligible schools and districts eager to raise the academic achievement of struggling learners and address the complex challenges that arise for students who live with disability, mobility problems, learning difficulties, poverty, or transience, or who need to learn English.

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On January 2, 1968, the U.S. legislation that provided federal grants to school districts for the purpose of establishing educational programs for children with limited English-speaking ability. It was the first time that the U.S. government officially acknowledged that these students need specialized instruction.
The Bilingual Education Act (BEA) was an amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965.

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1970 - Diana vs. California State Board of Education

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1970 - Diana vs. California State Board of Education

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Here was a case in which the use of tests to place students was again challenged. Diana, a Spanish-speaking student in Monterey County, California, had been placed in a class for mildly mentally retarded students because she had scored low on an IQ test given to her in English.

This case resulted in laws requiring that children who are referred for possible placement in a special education setting be tested in their primary language.

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On January 21, 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a California school district receiving federal funds must provide non-English-speaking students with instruction in the English language to ensure that they receive an equal education. In this specific case, the San Francisco School District was failing to provide English Language instruction to Chinese-American students who have limited English proficiency. The ruling required school districts to provide equal opportunities for all students, this includes students who do not speak English.

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1977 - The National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE)

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1977 - The National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE)

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The National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) created and issued standards for the accreditation of teacher education. These standards required all of the NCATE member institutions to implement components, courses, and programs in multicultural education. These institutions made up about the 80% of the teacher edcuation programs in the United States.

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No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was the main law for K–12 general education in the United States from 2002–2015. The law held schools accountable for how kids learned and achieved. This improving public primary and secondary schools, and thus student performance. The law was controversial in part because it penalized schools that didn't show improvement.

This federal legislation by requiring that states introduce school accountability systems that applied to all public schools and their students in the state.