"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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