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In September 1943, Sylvia Mendez, then 9 years old, and her two brothers went with their aunt and three cousins to enroll at the 17th Street School in Westminster. School officials, however, told her aunt that her children, who were half-Mexican but had light skin and a French surname, could register at the white elementary school.
But the Mendez kids, who were dark skinned and had a Mexican last name, were not allowed. They had to enroll at the "Mexican" school 10 blocks away. Mendez's parents were appalled, and sued the school district in what turned out to be a ground-breaking civil rights case that helped outlaw almost 100 years of segregation in California and was a precedent seven years later for Brown v. Board of Education. On March 18, 1946, Judge Paul J. McCormick ruled that the "segregation prevalent in the defendant school districts foster antagonisms in the children and suggest inferiority among them where none exists" and that the equal protection clause had been violated. on April 14, 1947, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court's ruling but not on equal protection grounds. It did not challenge the "separate but equal" interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that had been announced by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Instead, the Ninth Circuit held that the segregation was not racially based, but it had been implemented by the school districts without being specifically authorized by state law, and it was thus impermissible irrespective of Plessy.

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1948- Presidential Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Forces

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1948- Presidential Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Forces

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President Truman had been examining the issue of segregation in the armed forces since at least 1947, when he appointed the President's Committee on Civil Rights. By January 1948, internal White House memos indicated that the President was determined to end military segregation by executive order. "It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin." Naturally, there was resistance to this order within the military. Staff officers from all branches protested anonymously and sometimes even openly to integration. The Fahy Committee worked with the different branches of the military to ensure that the armed forces instituted integration in their recruitment and unit composition practices. Full integration did not come until the Korean War however, when heavy casualties forced segregated units to merge for survival.

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1951- Spanish is Restored as the Language of Instruction in Puerto Rico 

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1951- Spanish is Restored as the Language of Instruction in Puerto Rico 

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After the Spanish-American War, English was the sole language used by the military government of Puerto Rico, which consisted of officials appointed by the US Government. On 21 February 1902 a law was passed to use both English and Spanish as co-official languages in the government. When the new political status, the Commonwealth, came into effect in 1952, the Constitution stated nothing about the official language that would be used by the new government. Public school instruction in Puerto Rico is conducted entirely in Spanish. In 2012, however, there were pilot programs in about a dozen of over 1,400 public schools aimed at conducting instruction in English only. English is taught as a second language and is a mandatory subject from elementary levels to high school.

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The act, named after Senator Pat McCarran and Representative Francis Walter, did relatively little to alter the quota system for immigration into the United States that had been established in the Immigration Act of 1924. The skewed nature of the quotas was readily apparent. In defending the act, Senator McCarran declared, “If this oasis of the world should be overrun, perverted, contaminated, or destroyed, then the last flickering light of humanity will be extinguished.” President Harry S. Truman took a very different view, calling the legislation “un-American” and inhumane. When the bill was passed in June 1952, Truman vetoed the bill. Congress overrode his veto, and the act took effect in December. The McCarran-Walter Act set America’s immigration standards until new legislation was passed in 1965.

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The Refugee Relief Act of 1953 provided an additional 205,000 immigration visas for specific categories of aliens, their spouses, and their dependent children. An additional 4,000 visas were made available for orphans under the age of ten whom U. S. citizens had agreed to adopt. The law made these visas available until the end of 1956 in order to allow U. S. immigration officials time to investigate individual immigrants’ applications. The lengthy application and investigation process also allowed immigrant assistance groups in the United States time to raise sufficient funds to cover the transportation and resettlement of refugees in the United States.Unlike the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, which directly addressed the problems of persons displaced by World War II, the Refugee relief Act of 1953 addressed cases of persons whose military service or political activities in the war were still causing them problems, as they ended up in Soviet-controlled territories as Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were rising. Another 5,000 visas were reserved for Chinese anticommunists. Jewish refugees still resident anywhere in Europe were granted a special allotment of 2,000 non-quota visas to immigrate to the United States instead of Israel.

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Rosa Parks, The first lady of civil rights, the mother of the freedom movement. Civil Rights Activist Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a segregated Montgomery, Alabama bus. Which spurred on the 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott that helped launch nationwide efforts to end segregation on public facilities. The city of Montgomery had no choice but to lift the law requiring segregation on the public  buses. Rosa Parks received many awards during her lifetime, including the NAACP's highest award. She was 92 when she passed away in 2005. "I have learned over the years that when ones mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear." - Rosa Parks

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1957- What Happened At Central High School?

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1957- What Happened At Central High School?

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The Little Rock Nine were a group of nine black students who enrolled at formerly all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in September 1957. Their attendance at the school was a test of Brown v. Board of Education, a landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling that declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional. On September 4, 1957, the first day of classes at Central High, Governor Orval Faubus called in the Arkansas National Guard to block the black students’ entry into the high school. Later that month, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in federal troops to escort the Little Rock Nine into the school.

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Emmett Luis Till was a 14 year old African American kid from Chicago. Who got brutally murdered by Carolyn Bryant's husband and her brother while visiting family in Mississippi. Emmett and his cousins and some friends were standing outside of a country mart, Emmett was bragging to them that back home he had a white girlfriend, not believing him, they dared him to ask the white woman behind the counter for a date. Well of course, being a kid, he couldn't turn down a dare. So he went in and bought a piece of candy, and as he left, he said to her "Bye baby". There were no witnesses, but Carolyn later claimed that he grabbed her, made lewd advances, and whistled at her. Well she told her husband how he had spoken to her. So Roy Bryant and his wife's brother got Emmett and took him to a tool house and beat him nearly to death, gouging out his eye, and shooting him in the head, then dumping his body into the Tallahatchie river. His body later found, so disfigured that they could only identify him by his initial ring. Last year, in Tim Tyson's book "The Blood of Emmett Till" it was revealed that Carolyn recanted her testimony admitting that Till did nothing to her, and said "Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him."