“Fragmented Diversity: School Segregation, Student Activism, and Busing in Los Angeles, 1963-1989”

• In Event: Excellence in Education Research: Early-Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

From 1963 when the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed it to 1982 when the United States Supreme Court ruled on it, the important but understudied, civil rights and equal educational opportunity case of Mary Crawford v. Los Angeles City Board of Education encapsulated and propelled the legal and political framework of an era. I show that what began as a school desegregation lawsuit under the framework of a straightforward black-white binary transformed dramatically over nearly two decades due to demographic and economic shifts in the city. Decision-making processes within two powerful institutional contexts at the Los Angeles City Board of Education (LACBE) and the courts generated new political identities, ideologies, and actors during the struggle over school desegregation. In my book manuscript, I argue that these legal and political settings developed policies that undermined cross-racial cooperation and coalition-building efforts in support of school desegregation. In spite of colorblind rhetoric from the board of education and the courts, school board policies and court decisions reinforced racial and ethnic cohesion and school segregation.

Los Angeles’ racial politics changed markedly by 1982 because racial and ethnic minority groups managed to carve out political spaces and concessions from these two institutional contexts, but political coalitions in the city were characterized by a condition of fragmented diversity, marked by alliances that emanated out of political fissures among and within various racial and ethnic communities. However, the influential political and legal institutions created the context and the parameters under which these new actors could operate, delineating who would participate in the political and legal arenas of education policy generally, and Crawford specifically. For example, as the case progressed through the courts, these institutions would legitimize the participation of individuals and groups – as members of official committees or intervenors – over others. On the ideological front, these institutions shaped the debate over the meaning of equal educational opportunity, compensatory education, bilingual and bicultural education, and de jure/de facto segregation. These institutions also dictated and in some cases co-opted many transformative events and circumstances, including the student demonstrations of 1968 in East LA and South Central LA that called for “community control” in educational affairs and the rise of an anti-busing coalition.

In addition to documenting decisions that resulted in unequal treatment of its students by race and reinforced school segregation on the part of the school board, I also show that California, in spite of popular perceptions of the state as a politically progressive paragon, has served as a laboratory for innovative, conservative, sometimes race-neutral, anti-minority legislation and policies that, even if remotely successful, proliferate throughout the rest of the country. In 1979, California voters added an anti-busing amendment, Proposition 1, which was in accordance with federal standards, to the California constitution by a 2-1 vote. This proposition replaced a California statute that required the state “to alleviate racial imbalance [or school segregation] in schools regardless of cause.” In 1982, the United States Supreme Court not only upheld the constitutionality of Proposition 1, but also offered a new legal standard in busing cases -- an intentionality standard -- that made attaining a remedy of mandatory busing for school desegregation virtually impossible. The resolution in Crawford signaled the beginning of the end of mandatory busing for integration and a rejection of Brown v. Board of Education.

Key elements:

School desegregation in a metropolitan school district

State court desegregation lawsuit

1968 East LA (Chicano) student demonstrations

1968 South Central LA (African American) student demonstrations

“Community control”

Busing

Racial and ethnic diversity coexist with segregation

Proposition 1, an anti-busing amendment to the California constitution

Changing legal standards for school segregation remedies: from “regardless of cause” to “intentionality”

Author

• Herbert Sosa, NAEd/Spencer Foundation