Latinos, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Making of Multiracial America After the 1960s

FAIN: FEL-267650-20

Lorrin Reed Thomas
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Camden (Camden, NJ 08102-1405)

Research and writing leading to a book on the Latino involvement in the Civil Rights Movement between 1968 and 1984.

Minority: Latinos and the Making of Multiracial America after the 1960s offers a full account of Latinos’ centrality to the struggles over law and policy that reconfigured American society after the 1960s. The book will argue that Latino activism and leadership contributed substantially to the outcome of major domestic conflicts and debates during the long decade of the 1970s: battles over school desegregation and busing, political redistricting, affirmative action in employment, and access to higher education, as well as ongoing protests against police brutality and disagreements over the causes of growing urban poverty. The real impact of the major changes that took shape in American society during the 1970s--the coda to the conventionally-defined civil rights movement--cannot be understood without expanding this national story to incorporate Latinos as central historical actors.

Associated Products

"Desegregation is Not a Black and White Issue": How Latinos Tried to Change the Debate Over Equity in U.S. Schools in the 1970s (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: "Desegregation is Not a Black and White Issue": How Latinos Tried to Change the Debate Over Equity in U.S. Schools in the 1970s
Author: Lorrin Thomas
Abstract: This chapter draft explores a long-running desegregation caes in Los Angeles, Crawford v. Los Angeles United School District, a class action suit filed in California Superior Court in 1963 and that was effectively ended by an anti-busing ballot measure that passed in California in 1979. The ideal of integration had seemed, to civil rights advocates, both a logical aspiration and a plausible outcome when the Crawford suit and hundreds of others like it were initiated across the North and West in the early 1960s. Over the course of the 1970s, however, that ideal gradually fell apart. The progressive political goals that inspired powerful elected officials, civil rights lawyers, judges, and others to work toward the creation and enforcement of desegregation laws in the 1950s and 1960s were outmatched in the 1970s by the conjunction of conservatism and racism, which emerged with new energy as part of a nationwide backlash against court-ordered desegregation as it spread beyond the South. The growing popular resistance to civil rights enforcement was bolstered in turn by political messaging from across the legislative and executive branches.
Date: 03/26/2021
Conference Name: Lees History Seminar

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