The Bricks before Brown vs. Board of Education

• In Event: 519 - Section on Race, Class and Gender Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 07. Perspectives Through History and Memory

Abstract

Brown v. Board (1954) is often held-up as one of the greatest accomplishments of the Civil Right movement (Kluger 1975, 2004). However, it was built upon a careful scaffolding of earlier school desegregation cases brought to court by Asian, Native, and Mexican Americans (Kuo 1998; Perea 2004; Der 2008; Blalock-Moore 2012). Such contributions have been largely overlooked, forgotten or excluded. The few works that do exist focus on single cases and do not investigate similarities and differences between cases (Wollenberg 1974). This paper fills this gap, producing a systematic, comparative analysis of the ways that race, class, and gender were deployed and negotiated in the cases preceding Brown.
Racial formation and social movement theory allows the author to expand this civil rights narrative to consider the legal and historical contributions of other racial groups. First, I provide the descriptive statistics of 100 desegregation cases decided prior to 1954, noting the racial, geographic, and historical patterns. Second, I describe three touchstone cases: the Mexican American case of Mendez v. Westminster (1947), the Native American case of Piper v. Big Pine (1924), and the Asian American case of Tape v. Hurley (1885). Finally, I compare and contrast how race, class, and gender were deployed across all the cases. Historians and legal scholars have written on the significance of the Tape, Piper and Mendez cases individually. However, there has yet to be an attempt to compare these cases side-by-side with Brown through the lens of sociology.

Author

• Marisela Martinez-Cola, Emory University