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OP-WHAR180033 155..183 “TO SECURE THESE RIGHTS”: THE CAMPAIGN TO END SCHOOL SEGREGATION AND PROMOTE CIVIL RIGHTS IN ARIZONA IN THE 1950S MARITZA DE LA TRINIDAD During the 1950s Mexican Americans in Tucson participated in civil rights campaigns as members of organizations such as the Alianza Hispano Americana, Arizona Council for Civic Unity, and Tucson Council for Civic Unity. Their goal was to end school segregation laws and to pass legislation abolishing segregation in public accommodations and facilities. Mexican American civil rights leaders and their allies in Tucson worked with an inter- racial coalition of civic-minded activists to promote civil rights for all Arizonans in the post–World War II era. This article contributes to our un- derstanding of civil rights activism by Mexican Americans in Tucson and their role in advancing the larger anti-segregation and civil rights movements in Arizona and the Southwest. In 1948, Dr. Fred G. Holmes organized the Arizona Council for Civic Unity (ACCU) to promote interethnic and intercultural understanding. Inspired by President Harry S. Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights (PCCR), Holmes formed the ACCU with a cross-section of diverse Arizonans to chal- lenge both de jure and de facto segregation locally and in concert with larger civil rights activism in the United States.1 The ACCU had two affiliates, the Tucson Council for MARITZA DE LA TRINIDAD is an assistant professor of Mexican American Studies and History at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. She received an M.A. in Latin American Studies from San Diego State University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Arizona. 1 In 1947, Dr. Fred G. Holmes, M.D. worked with Louis Wirth of the American Council for Race Relations in Chicago when the report To Secure these Rights, The Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights was released in October 1947. In December 1946 President Truman signed Executive Order 9808, creating the President’s Committee on Civil Rights (PCCR). The PCCR was charged with investigating civil rights violations, segregation, violence against ethnic, racial, and religious minority groups, and provide public policy recommendations to improve race relations. The Western Historical Quarterly 49 (Summer 2018): 155–183. doi: 10.1093/whq/why033 VC The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Western History Association. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail:
[email protected] Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/whq/article-abstract/49/2/155/4951745 by Arizona State University Ross-Blakley Law Library user on 03 July 2018 Civic Unity (TCCU) and the Greater Phoenix Council for Civic Unity (GPCCU).2 This interracial coalition of civic-minded individuals and organizations, including the Alianza Hispano Americana (Alianza), was composed of people who believed that dis- crimination against any person based on “race, creed, color, or national origin” vio- lated the human spirit and the spirit of democracy of the U.S. and Arizona constitutions.3 In 1949, the ACCU issued a report entitled, Close the Breach: A Study of School Segregation in Arizona.4 The report described the extent to which Mexican, See The President’s Committee on Civil Rights, To Secure These Rights: The Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1947); Arizona Council for Civic Unity, Close the Breach: A Study of School Segregation in Arizona (Phoenix: Arizona Council for Civic Unity, Inc., 1949), Records of The Tucson Council for Civic Unity, 1948–1966, MS 317, Special Collections, University of Arizona Library. 2 Members of the ACCU and TCCU included Anglo, Mexican, African, Japanese, Chinese and Jewish Americans from diverse occupational and professional backgrounds. Some of these members were also members of the Alianza Hispano Americana, and members of the Alianza were also members of the TCCU. Members of the GPCCU led the civil rights struggle in Phoenix. See Matthew C. Whitaker, “Creative Conflict’: Lincoln and Eleanor Ragsdale, Collaboration, and Community Activism in Phoenix, 1953–1965,” Western Historical Quarterly 34 (Summer 2003): 154–90; Civic unity leagues were also common in California between 1948 and 1965. They were organized to support the election of local citizens to public office, and campaigned to end discrimination in housing, public accommodations and services, schools, and the criminal justice system. See Juan G�omez Qui~nones, Chicano Politics: Reality and Promise, 1940–1990 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990), 52–3; Oliver Rosales, “Civil Rights “beyond the fields”: African American and Mexican American Civil Rights Activism in Bakersfield, California, 1947–1964,” in Civil Rights and Beyond: African American and Latino/a Activism in the Twentieth-Century United States, ed. Brian D. Behnken (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2016), 42–62; Shana Bernstein, “Interracial Activism in the Los Angeles Community Service Organization: Linking the World War II and Civil Rights Eras,” Pacific Historical Review 80 (May 2011): 231–67; Kenneth C. Burt, “Edward Roybal: Latino Pioneer and Coalition Builder,” in Leaders of the Mexican American Generation: Biographical Essays, ed. Anthony Quiroz (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2015), 328–33. 3 I use the term interracial rather than interethnic even though interethnic reflects the prevailing ethnicity theory used by social science researchers before and after World War II. More recent theories offered by Michael Omi and Howard Winant highlight the lived experiences of African Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans that belie the ethnicity theory because of their racialized status in the United States. They argue that the “ethnicity paradigm” that prevailed in the 1940s and 1950s due to Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 report, An American Dilemma “lay outside the experience of those identified (not only today, but already in Park’s and Kallen’s time), as racial minorities: Afro-Americans, Latin Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans.” (p. 26). I use Anglo American to be consistent with primary and secondary sources. I use Mexican Americans, Mexicanos and Tucsonenes depending on historical reference and to be consistent with terms used by Mexican people in Tucson. Many people in Tucson refer to themselves as Mexicanos regardless of citizenship. The Mexican-origin population includes U.S.-born Mexican Americans, Mexican immigrants who were Mexican nationals, naturalized citizens, legal residents, and undocumented immigrants. See Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 2014, 21-29, 53-69. 4 Close the Breach was written by University of Arizona faculty Emil Haury, Professor of Anthropology, Glenn H. Nelson, Professor of Education, Edward H. Spicer, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Harry T. Getty, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, and Charles Lebeaux, Instructor, 156 SUMMER 2018 Western Historical Quarterly Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/whq/article-abstract/49/2/155/4951745 by Arizona State University Ross-Blakley Law Library user on 03 July 2018 Black, and Native American students were segregated in public schools, especially in rural areas. It noted that Arizona strictly enforced the segregation of Black students more than any other western state despite a relatively small population.5 By the late 1940s, de jure and de facto school segregation of these students were pervasive in urban and rural areas throughout the state, especially the segregation of Black students, which was sanctioned by Arizona law.6 In 1909, the territorial assembly enacted a law permitting school officials to segre- gate African American pupils in public schools despite their low proportion of the state’s population at 1.5 percent. Upon statehood in 1912, legislators amended the law to mandate segregation at the elementary school level since the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that segregation of African American pupils was constitutional under Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).7 In 1921, legislators made segregation at the high school level optional “wherever 25 or more Negro pupils were enrolled.”8 By 1928, school officials were permitted to segregate African American students “in all schools other than high schools.”9 Then in 1934, the Arizona Supreme Court broadened School Board Trustees’ power to “classify and segregate groups of pupils for any reason, at any time.”10 School officials interpreted this provision as authorization to segregate Department of Sociology. The influence of the PCCR’s report To Secure These Rights is evident in the ACCU’s report because the report is referenced in Close the Breach; ACCU, Close the Breach: A Study of School Segregation in Arizona (Phoenix: Arizona Council for Civic Unity, Inc., 1949), Records of The Tucson Council for Civic Unity, 1948–1966, MS 317 Special Collections, University of Arizona Library. 5 In 1900, the “Negro” population represented only 1.5 percent of the state’s population and a mere one percent in 1910. In 1930, “Negro” pupils represented a mere 1.7 percent of the entire public-school enrollment; Case, C.O. Superintendent of Public Instruction, State of Arizona, The School Law of Arizona, 1917, Phoenix: State Board of Education, 1917, 16. 6 Laura K. Mu~noz, “Romo v. Laird: Mexican American School Segregation and the Politics of Belonging in Arizona,” Western Legal History 26, nos. 1–2 (2013): 97–132; Jeanne M. Powers, “Forgotten History: Mexican American School Segregation in Arizona from 1900–1951,” Equity & Excellence in Education, 41, no. 4 (2008): 467–81; Laura K. Mu~noz, Separate but equal? A Case Study of Romo v. Laird and Mexican American Education, Organization of American Historians Magazine of History 15, no. 2 (2001): 28–30; Mary Melcher, “This Is Not Right’: Rural Arizona Women Challenge Segregation and Ethnic Division, 1925–1950,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 20, no. 2 (1999): 190–214; Keith Crudup, “African Americans in Arizona: A Twentieth-Century History” (PhD diss., Arizona State University, 1998) and Melcher, “This Is Not Right’: Rural Arizona Women Challenge Segregation and Ethnic Division,”190–214. 7 Terry Goddard, The Promise of Brown v. Board of Education: A Monograph in Commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education (Arizona State Government, 2005) www.azag.gov; Case, C.O. Superintendent of Public Instruction, State of Arizona, The School Law of Arizona, 1917 (Phoenix: Superintendent of Public Instruction, 1917), 35–9. 8 Case, C.O. Superintendent of Public Instruction, State of Arizona, The School Law of Arizona, 1921 (Phoenix: Superintendent of Public Instruction, 1921, 26–7 and Powers, “Forgotten History,” 470–71. 9 Powers, “Forgotten History,” 470. 10 Arizona Council for Civic Unity, Close the Breach, 7. Maritza De La Trinidad 157 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/whq/article-abstract/49/2/155/4951745 by Arizona State University Ross-Blakley Law Library user on 03 July 2018 Mexican-origin, Native American and other non-White students as they saw fit or for so-called pedagogical reasons. 11 Although state segregation laws did not specifically target Mexican-origin stu- dents, schools segregated these students in both urban and rural areas. The ACCU’s report noted that school officials segregated Mexican American and Native American students for so-called language “difficulties” and “cultural differences,” albeit not uni- formly.12 Some schools segregated Mexican-origin pupils in first through eighth grade, while others did so in the first four grades or first grade only