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Whiteness in the Middle: Mexican , School Desegregation, and the Making of Race in Modern America

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The State University

By

Danielle R. Olden, M.A.

Graduate Program in History

The Ohio State University

2013

Dissertation Committee:

Kevin Boyle, Advisor

Lilia Fernandez

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu

Copyright by

Danielle R. Olden

2013

Abstract

“Whiteness in the Middle” examines Keyes v. School District Number

One (1973) in order to trace the history of racial formation in the post-World War II

United States. As the first case to address de facto segregation, or segregation that was not mandated by law but by social practice, in the North, Keyes is an important moment for understanding postwar racial processes. Historians have uncovered the malleability of racial constructions during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Americans struggled to define who was white and who was not. By the 1940s, the argument goes, the boundaries of whiteness had been defined and racial categories were entrenched. So the great movements for social justice that swept through the nation in the postwar period—civil rights foremost among them—took place within a stable, even rigid system.

Those movements thus sought not to redefine racial categories but to dismantle the inequalities that adhered to them.

This project offers a dramatically different interpretation. Rather than being fixed,

I show, race remained a fluid category well into the postwar period. To make my case, I look at the ambiguous racial space in-between black and white, the racial categories that permeate the history of race in the . Keyes provides an excellent case study into the dynamics of race-making because the outcome of the Supreme Court’s decision ultimately hinged on whether Mexican American students were white or nonwhite. The

ii battles that surrounded the case, both at the grassroots level and at the national level, demonstrate that the space in between black and white is where the bulk of race work is done. While remained constant, the boundaries of whiteness were ambiguous and unstable. People’s ability to transgress these boundaries or make them work for their own interests was always a possibility, even after World War II, by which time racial categories were supposed to be well established and unchanging. The struggles to define the boundaries of whiteness were at the heart of Denver’s school desegregation drama and played a prominent role in determining its outcome.

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For my family.

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Acknowledgments

This project started off being something completely different than what it is today, and there have been many ups and downs along my personal and professional path as I was researching and writing the dissertation. My completion of it is no small task, and I have many people to thank for it. First, I never would have made it to graduate school without the love, support and understanding of my family. To my mom, Laura, you are a remarkable woman. You have always been my greatest role model and my biggest source of strength. I am proud to be my mother’s daughter. To my grandparents, Thomas and

Ruth Gonzales, your encouragement and support of my educational goals made my decision to pursue graduate studies easier. Grandma, your work in support of the education of Mexican-American youth inspired me to pursue this project. Grandpa, I wish you were here to see me now, but I hope I have made you proud. Please know how much I miss you every single day. To my sisters, Laura Leigh and Whitney, being a part all of these years now has made me truly value the time we get to spend together. Now that I am finally done, I am looking forward to more visits together. And to my extended family in Laramie, I am so thankful for you and I hope I have made you proud as well.

This project would not have been possible without the emotional and financial support that my family has always given me.

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My intellectual trajectory began at the University of , where I learned to love history. I chose U.S. history partly because I loved taking classes from William

Moore, who later became one of my research mentors. It was not until I learned about the McNair Scholars Program, however, that I began to think that I, too, might become a history faculty member. While in the program, Zackie Salmon and Susan Stoddard provided outstanding guidance and mentorship as I conducted research, wrote my first article based on original research and applied to graduate schools. Without McNair, I am unsure I would have even applied to graduate school. I look forward to the day when I can mentor a young McNair Scholar and pay it forward just a little bit.

At Ohio State University, my faculty mentors have consistently proven themselves to be the best in the business, commenting on writing, grant submissions, and job applications, and writing countless letters of recommendation for me. From my first seminar courses with them to my dissertation defense, they guided my intellectual development, structured my graduate training, and shared their teaching secrets with me.

Kevin Boyle, Lilia Fernandez and Judy Wu are the kind of scholars, teachers and mentors whom I hope to emulate. They have given selflessly to me as a scholar and for that I am truly thankful. Also at Ohio State, Susan Hartmann and David Stebenne provided invaluable feedback on my writing. Robin Judd, who was Graduate Studies Chair while I was completing this dissertation, went the extra step to make sure my peers and I had the resources we needed to be successful. I would also like to thank Ed Munoz and Adrian vi

Burgos for their support of my work as I neared its completion. My colleagues in the

Ohio State Department of History have provided critiques, comments and advice as I made my way through graduate school and the dissertation writing process. I would especially like to thank the Modern U.S. Writing Seminar for allowing me to present aspects of the project.

As I developed my topic, conducted research, spent agonizing hours trying to write, stared blankly at my computer screen two hours before a deadline, and navigated the academic job market I had the love and understanding of several important women.

Eva Pietri, Yalidy Matos, Delia Fernandez, Tiffany Lewis and Mei-Ling Rivera-Cerezo gave me feedback, provided support, made me laugh, and distracted me when I needed it.

I would not have made it through with my sanity intact without your friendship. Thank you.

Finally, this dissertation would not have been possible without the financial support of numerous entities. At Ohio State University, I received research support from the Department of History, the College of & Humanities, the Graduate School, the

Office of Diversity and Inclusion, and the Diversity and Identity Studies Collective at

OSU (DISCO). During the early stages of my dissertation research, I received critical support from the Coca-Cola Critical Difference for Women research program, and as I neared completion of my project, I received a much needed year-long fellowship from the

OSU Graduate School that allowed me to dedicate myself to writing. vii

Vita

October 5, 1983…………………………………….. Born in Laramie, WY

2006………………………………………………… B.A. in History, University of Wyoming

2008………………………………………………… M.A. in U.S. History, Ohio State University

2010-2011…………………………………………… Instructor of Record, Ohio State University

2007-2013…………………………………………… Graduate Teaching Associate, Ohio State University

Publications

Refereed Journal Articles

“The Hispano-Americano Women’s Club and the Laramie Woman’s Club: A Glimpse into Intercultural Relationships in Laramie, Wyoming, 1950-1960.” Annals of Wyoming 79, nos. ¾ (Winter 2008): 14-27.

Book/ Reviews

“Invisible Man,” review of Wendell E. Pritchett, Robert Clifton Weaver: The Life and Times of an Urban Reformer (: University of Chicago Press, 2008) in ehistory (www.ehistory.osu.edu), Feb. 2009.

Fields of Study

Major Field of Study: History

Minor Fields of Study: Modern U.S. History History of Comparative Race/Ethnicity Women’s and Gender History viii

Table of Contents Abstract ...... ii Dedication ...... iv Acknowledgements ...... v Vita ...... viii List of Figures ...... x

CHAPTER PAGE Introduction ...... 1 1. A “Spanish Fantasy Past”: Mexican Americans and Race in U.S. History ...... 33 2. in the Mile High City, 1945-1970 ...... 66 3. , Race, and Segregated Education in the Twentieth Century ...... 111 4. “A Wholly Different Origin”: Mexican Americans, and the Formation of Minority Students ...... 153 5. Community Response in Black, White and : En Route to the U.S. Supreme Court ...... 188 6. Not Over Yet: The Struggle to Implement Court-Ordered Desegregation .. 230 Conclusion: Keyes v. School District No. 1 and Contestations Over Mexican- American Racial Identity ...... 273 References ...... 284 Appendix A: Map of Denver ...... 298

ix

List of Figures

Figure 1. Map of Denver……………………………………………………….….301

x

Introduction

On April 18, 1974 Lila Lewis, a parent of four school children, stood in front of the Denver Board of Education and presented pictures of each of her children. She asked the board members if they could identify the race to which they belonged. When no one responded, she did not wait for an answer but rather made her point, that her children’s racial identity could easily be mistaken. Because her children were mixed race, she claimed, with varying shades of skin and facial features, they were inconsistently racialized by the school district. When she asked for documentation from the schools, officials sent her a letter that named two of her children as “” and two of them as

“Hispano,” even though all four children had the same parents and the same last name.

She told the board that there were hundreds of students just like her children who were being incorrectly classified and that it was the prerogative of parents to decide the race of their child. She demanded that administrators create a questionnaire to be sent home with students that would ask parents to racially classify their children for official school purposes. That way, their racial identity would be more accurate.

Lewis’ appeal to the Denver Board of Education illuminated a long-standing and inescapable reality: race was not a scientific or natural phenomenon but a social construct, easily altered, shaped and negotiated. In a system of racial understanding that was structured around a black-white color line, Mexican Americans presented a challenge

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Were they white, or were they nonwhite? Neither teachers nor administrators could look at Lila Lewis’ children and determine their race without considerable discussion and debate. The fact that the four of them had been classified differently—two Anglo and two Hispano—demonstrated the uncertainty inherent to racial processes. Yet the fact that

Lewis felt compelled to present her appeal to the Board reveals the absolute centrality of racial understanding to her children’s educational experiences, indeed, their very well- being.

Why did Lewis go to such lengths to discover how the Denver schools had officially designated her children’s racial background? Just ten days earlier, District

Court Judge William Doyle had issued his plan for desegregation in the Denver Public

Schools, calling for re-districting the entire school system, a part-time pairing plan, and busing students to achieve maximum racial balance. Racial balance, of course, meant that school children had to be racially classified and then distributed throughout the city.

The order paid particular attention to black students, Anglo students and Hispano students. Depending on how a student was racially categorized, he or she could remain in his or her neighborhood school for all or part of the day, or he or she could be bused to another school for all or part of the day. Race, therefore, was of the upmost importance to parents like Lila Lewis. In Denver, the debate over school desegregation was not only about the constitutionality of court ordered desegregation in a city that had never mandated segregated schools, the pros and cons of busing, or the social upheaval and violence that accompanied integration; it was also about the meaning and application of race itself.

2

This complex process occurred because in 1969 white, African American and

Mexican American parents filed suit against the Denver school system, claiming it segregated students according to race. The resulting case, Keyes v. School District

Number One, was one of the most important legal battles of the postwar era. The plaintiffs drew on the principles laid down in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. But they also pushed the boundaries, since Brown only applied to de jure segregation, whereas Denver practiced de facto segregation. De jure segregation was segregation by law, as practiced by southern states starting in the late nineteenth century.

De facto segregation was segregation not by law but by social practice and custom, as was common in the North. When the Supreme Court ruled in the parents’ favor, Brown came north—triggering the great busing controversies that roiled the nation in the mid-

1970s.

While Keyes was important for the legal precedents it set, it also reveals modern

America’s intricate system of racial formation. In 1973, the Congress of

Educators (CHE), an educational advocacy group that promoted greater attention to

Mexican-American students, intervened in the case, arguing that the interests of

Mexican-American children were not being sufficiently addressed by the plaintiffs. They sought desegregation but maintained that Mexican Americans constituted their own, distinct racial category and that the educational needs of Mexican American pupils were different from both black and white children. That Mexican Americans were a distinct racial group was a new argument, as Mexican American civil rights efforts since the

1920s had consistently emphasized their claim to whiteness. By the 1970s, however, the

3

CHE maintained that Mexican Americans were a separate, identifiable race, distinct from both whites and blacks. The group successfully argued its right to intervene and along with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), which represented them in the case, became a prominent player in Denver’s school desegregation struggles over the next several decades.

Although scholars now understand race to be a social construction that changes over time and space, a persistent color line has remained central to the ways the majority of people conceive of race and its power over our lives. This color line, defined as white and black, has played a crucial role in twentieth-century race relations, but it does not tell the whole story. Historians are now complicating this black-white binary of race, demonstrating the flexibility of racial categories and the importance of local histories for grasping the dynamics of racial processes. Whiteness in the Middle contributes to this important work by interrogating the racial identity of Mexican Americans in Denver, because it was really that question—what are Mexican Americans?—that was at the center of Denver’s school desegregation controversy, both at the local level and when the

Supreme Court considered the case. By examining the debate over racial classifications and the question of racial balance in Denver schools, I show that it was really the space in-between black and white that determined how the Courts understood ; how they developed a remedy for racial segregation; and how the Denver community interpreted, worked with or challenged the desegregation plan.

Some city residents, like Lila Lewis, pointed out the difficulty involved in trying to achieve racial balance when race was, in fact, so flexible. Knowing that, we can view

4 the history of school desegregation in a different way. It was not simply a black and white issue. In Denver, the case involved whites, blacks and Mexican Americans from the start, a fact that complicated the issue and the legal ramifications of the Courts’ decisions. In fact, Keyes re-defined the way people thought about segregation in the post-

Brown world and it situates very firmly why the U.S. West is so important to broader understandings of U.S. history and the history of racial formation. As the number of

Mexican Americans and other Latinos/as grows in the U.S. and as these populations shift to areas where they did not previously have a substantial presence we can look to the history of school desegregation in Denver to shed light on the various problems and complications that arise when trying to achieve equal educational opportunity for multiracial student bodies.

Racial Formation in the United States

The history of race in the United States highlights the power of ideas to shape our lives from the most minute details of social interactions to our ability to vote, to get a job, and even to live free from terror and violence. Throughout most of the nation’s history, race played an important part in determining who could and could not cross the country’s borders and who could and could not become a U.S. citizen. It even determined if one was slave or free in a nation built on the fundamental right of individual liberty. It has also played a prominent role in the history of education, establishing who had access to learning, where one went to school and with whom he or she went to school. Race operates both independently, as an organizer of beings into various categories, and

5 in conjunction with other forms of social differentiation, including class, gender, and sexuality. Out of that differentiation developed a complex system of social stratification that maintains power structures. Race was certainly not the only factor that influenced one’s life chances, but it remained the most pervasive, intractable variable.1

Race has not been a static category, however. Its meaning as well as its application has changed significantly over time, often through hard-fought battles that dramatize the unnaturalness of a system of human categorization that often defies logic.

As Ariela Gross has so poignantly pointed out, it took real work to create race.2 It also took work to recreate race, suggesting that even as race is understood in static terms, in the real world it operates in very fluid, dynamic and shifting ways.

This study is premised upon the idea that race is a social construction, an ideological complex that operates differently across time and space. It is grounded in discovering and exposing what sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant call the process of racial formation, whereby racial knowledge is formulated and refined in response to new political, economic and social dynamics. Their theory of racial formation accounts for the fact that race is historically contingent and often contradictory, yet the power of the state to both reify and dismantle racial knowledge is not diminished, even when these contradictions are exposed.3 In fact, as several scholars have shown, the

1 Michael Omi & Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1880s, 2nd ed. (: Routledge, 1994).

2 Ariela Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Rae on Trial in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).

3 Michael Omi & Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1880s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994).

6 state—and in particular, the law—has played a critical role in the making and remaking of American racial knowledge.4

I use the term racial knowledge to denote the system of racial understandings that structure race and imbue it with power. This includes popular conceptions of race as

“common sense,” or the idea that we all know what race is when we see it.5 We know, for example, that an individual is white because he or she has white skin. Race is easily discernible because there are particular visual markers—skin color, the shape of our facial features, hair texture, and even height –that we know are associated with certain racial groups. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries census workers were given the authority to select people’s race based on their common sense, visual evaluation of that person.6 In Denver teachers were given the same authority when they were asked to mark the race of their students, making a visual assessment that was then used by school officials and the courts to determine the racial make-up of the district. The idea that race is common sense has wide social and cultural acceptance, and thus operates systemically to legitimize racial thinking and limit our ability to expose its fallacies. Racial knowledge also includes a series of cultural assumptions about how people of particular racial groups behave and how they interact with others. Here race works jointly with

4 See, in particular, Derrick A. Bell, Race, Racism and American Law (New York: Little Brown & Co., 1973); and Ian Haney Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race, 2nd ed. (New York: New York University Press, 2006). Also see Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Ariela Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Rae on Trial in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).

5 See Omi & Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 62; and Ian F. Haney López, Racism on Trial: The Fight for Justice (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004).

6 Clara E. Rodríguez, Changing Race: Latinos, the Census and the History of Ethnicity (New York: New York University Press, 2000).

7 class and gender. In the twenty-first-century United States, for instance, a light-skinned, wealthy, Mexican-American man may be viewed as white, which might lead some people to assume he is hard-working, intelligent, and committed to law and order. A darker- skinned, poor Mexican-American woman, however, could easily be assumed to be un- skilled, lazy, a sexual deviant, and all too willing to accept a welfare check.

Racial knowledge is most clearly articulated through the mechanism of racial categorization. Over the course of U.S. history, racial categories have been changed and redefined several times over. They have also been ordered and reordered into specific racial hierarchies that guide race relations among people of varying racial identities and shape power relations.7 Adding to the complexity of these processes, racial categories often compete with each other for social power and state recognition. That is, there is often more than one category that defines a group of people at any given time and people frequently self-identify their race in ways distinct from the way society categorizes them.

Focusing on the history of Latinas/os and the U.S. Census, Clara Rodríguez skillfully demonstrates these dynamics. Not only has the state classified Latinas/os in multiple,

7 For an excellent discussion of the creation of racial hierarchies, see Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: Radical Activism in (University of Press, 2006). Pulido proposes that different racial/ethnic groups are racialized against one another in the United States. She argues that this “differential racialization” then creates racial hierarchies, which are not static. Rather, racial hierarchies look different at various moments and are regionally specific. For an alternative theory of racial differentiation, see Claire Jean Kim, “The Racial Triangulation of ,” Politics and Society 27, no. 1 (1999): 105-38. Kim maintains that instead of racial hierarchies being linear, they are fields, or “discursively constructed, shared cognitive map[s]” that runs along two axis.7 The first axis is that of superior/inferior and the second axis is that of insider/foreigner. Black and white represent the poles of the inferior/superior axis. Asian Americans are situated in-between these two extremes, in-between black and white. Alternatively, Asian Americans are situated on the foreigner side of the insider/foreigner axis, marking them as distinct from both blacks and whites. Thus, Asian Americans are racialized as both in- between black and white and as foreign, completely outside the domain of what is considered American. In this way, they are “racially triangulated.”

8 conflicting ways over the twentieth century; those classifications were often at odds with the way Latinas/os self-identified.8

As an ideology, race derives its power from the ways people think about racial differentiation and how they apply those ideas to their lived experiences. Without social context, that is, race has no meaning. Inconsistencies and contradictions in the application of racial knowledge make sense because people can shape it into what they want it to be so as to make it conform to the immediate context. According to Barbara

Fields:

The idea one people has of another, even when the difference between them is embodied in the most striking physical characteristics, is always mediated by the social context within which the two come into contact. This remains true even when time-honored tradition provides a vocabulary for thinking and talking about the other people that runs counter to immediate experience. In that case, the vocabulary and the experience simply exist side by side. That is why travelers who knew Africans to come in all colors could speak of “black” Africans; why whose acquaintance included both Muslim and Christian Africans could speak of “pagan” Africans; and (later) why slave owners who lived in fear of insurrection could speak of “docile” Africans.9

Throughout most of the nineteenth-century, scientists provided legitimization for racial thinking by claiming to provide scientific proof that differences in intelligence, cognitive and physical ability, and behaviors were determined by race. Starting in the

1920s, however, a new school of sociological thought began to take shape. This new social of race challenged biological explanations by rejecting the argument that

88 Rodríguez, Changing Race.

9 Barbara Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, J. Morgan Kousser & James M. McPherson, eds. (New York: Oxford University press, 1982): 143-177, quote on 149.

9 race was inherent and by emphasizing culture as the core of minority group difference.

Robert Park’s research at the University of Chicago, for example, found acceptance among Progressives who sought to overcome the racial turmoil of the previous four decades. They used Park’s “race-relations cycle” to justify their Americanization work in the poverty-stricken, racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods of American cities.

According to this theory, there are four stages of race relations: contact, conflict, accommodation and assimilation. Immigrants experienced this cycle until they were— ultimately—fully assimilated into the American way of life.10

Park’s conceptualization came to dominate the academic study of race and eventually filtered into popular conceptions of racial difference. This is most clearly seen at the end of World War II when cultural pluralism became the most common way of understanding race in the United States.11 Cultural pluralism replaced assimilationist thinking among scholars and non-scholars by promoting the idea that Americans should celebrate ethnic diversity while promoting unity and erasing group separatism. During the 1950s the Denver Public Schools used this approach to address increasing racial tensions between an expanding multiracial student body. Mexican Americans, school officials thought, were a particular problem. Believing a cultural pluralist approach would solve their racial problems, the district implemented course material that discussed the “cultural contributions” of Mexican Americans to , and developed a Joint

City-Schools committee to address the high drop-out, truancy and delinquency rates

10 See Robert E. Park, Race and Culture (New York: Free Press, 1950).

11 Omi & Winant, Racial Formation in the United States,

10 among Mexican-American students.12 Though there were debates among assimilationists and cultural pluralists over whether cultural identity could be or should be maintained, they agreed on the premise that culture, or ethnicity, was the true marker of group difference and that race was one among many factors that influenced that culture.13

Omi and Winant call this the Ethnicity Paradigm, which subsumes race as one aspect of ethnic identity, understood in terms of culture, , , and ancestry.

As a social category, they say, “race was but one of a number of determinants of identity or ethnicity.”14 Their critique of the Ethnicity Paradigm is of central importance to my work because they explicate the significant limitations of ethnicity in explaining and remedying deeply embedded social, economic and political inequalities in the American past and the present. Because the cultural approach to race was developed out of a need to explain the divisions between various European ethnic groups and the

Anglo-American majority at the turn of the twentieth-century, it privileges the European immigrant experience, what Omi and Winant called “the immigrant analogy.”15

European immigrants experienced discrimination and faced intense nativist , yet they were fully absorbed into the nation and, by the middle of the twentieth-century, had

12 The district even created a textbook for this purpose. Denver Public Schools, People of Denver: Book One, Spanish-Speaking People, (1951). Though Mexican Americans were the focus of these cultural pluralist efforts, the district also created ways to integrate other groups into the curriculum of the schools. See Tom I. Romero, Jr., “Of Race and Rights: Legal Culture, Social Change, and the Making of a Multiracial Metropolis, Denver 1940-1975,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of , 2004), 366-426.

13 Omi & Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 16.

14 Omi & Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 15.

15 Omi & Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 17.

11 secured relative equality with Anglo-Americans.16 All minority groups should be able to do the same thing, the argument runs: just as the dominant culture had eventually accepted European immigrants as full members of American society, they would eventually accept all minority cultures. Proponents of the Ethnicity Paradigm were persuaded to make this argument because they did not consider the significant role that race played in the United States, at both the institutional and individual level.

Most prominently, Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma presented a critique of American race relations that not only embraced the Ethnicity Paradigm but propelled it to the forefront of social science thinking. Published in 1944, the book argued that World

War II marked a critical juncture in race relations in the United States. The American promise of liberty and equality for all stood in stark contrast to the African-American experience. This was the American dilemma, according to Myrdal. For America to resolve this contradiction, he said, African Americans must have access to the promise of liberty and equality for all. Thus, they must be fully integrated in American life. He viewed this integration as inevitable because his understanding of minority difference was premised upon the experiences of European immigrant groups. An American

Dilemma was influential at the policy level, proof that the Ethnicity Paradigm had become the primary theoretical foundation for thinking about and articulating racial

16 For a more critical appraisal of the immigrant experiences of various European immigrant groups, see David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the American Working Class (New York: Verso Books, 1999); and Working Towards Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from to the (New York: Basic Books, 2005). For a somewhat different take, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Thomas Guglielmo, White on Arrival: , Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945 (Oxford University Press, 2004).

12 difference. Among the general population, many policymakers, and some scholars this framework has remained intact for the last seven decades.17

That Myrdal’s assessment has remained so central to popular understandings of postwar race relations is problematic for two reasons. First, it fails to account for the continued racial inequality, prejudice and violence that non-Europeans faced throughout the postwar decades and into the present. Moreover, as Omi and Winant point out, the neoconservative turn to colorblindness as the new national norm starting in the late-1960s

(largely as a response to movements for racial justice) demonstrates not only the continued salience of race but its reconstitution in a new sociopolitical milieu, the so- called post-racial era.18 As an explanatory tool, ethnicity has been unable to account for these developments because it operates within a paradigm that does not acknowledge the centrality of race.

Myrdal’s treatise is emblematic of another major limitation in our understanding of race in the United States as well: the Black/White Paradigm. An American Dilemma was principally concerned with the integration of African Americans into the (white) mainstream of American life. Certainly the contradiction that he outlined was used strategically for a number of different efforts—Mexican-American civil rights organizing, for example—yet Myrdal focused only on black-white relations. The subsequent praise

17 For instance, it was cited in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case that legally ended “separate but equal” in the United States and began the process of school desegregation in 1954. Its framework— assimilation—has remained a driving force behind the Supreme Court’s analysis of race since then. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1944).

18 Omi & Winant, Racial Formation in the United States. 13 for the book and its frequent appearance in debates over equal rights reinforced the paradigm’s power.

Like the Ethnicity Paradigm, the Black/White Paradigm significantly narrows the conversation about race. It does so by slighting or simply omitting the experiences of racialization, racial violence, and discrimination that nonblack, nonwhite groups face.

This not only erased their experiences from historical memory but also had disastrous consequences for the long-term efforts to eradicate racial discrimination and achieve racial equality for Mexican Americans in the United States by shaping how we conceive of race, how we develop research on race, how we articulate the meaning of race and how we go about trying to solve the problem of racial injustice.19 Historians and Ethnic

Studies scholars have demonstrated the important contributions Latinas/os, Asian

Americans and American Indians made to the American experience. And they have shown the limitations and inaccuracies built into the Black/White Paradigm.20 Yet it still remains a pervasive force, influencing not just scholarship, but public policy and jurisprudence as well. According to legal scholar Juan Perea:

Many scholars of race reproduce this paradigm when they write and act as though only the Black and White races matter for purposes of discussing race and social policy with regard to race. The mere recognition that “other people of color” exist, without careful attention to their voices, their histories, and their real presence, is merely a reassertion of the Black/White paradigm.21

19 Juan F. Perea, “The Black/White Paradigm of Race: The ‘Normal’ Science of American Racial Thought,” California Law Review 85, no. 5 (Oct. 1997): 1213-1258.

20 For two pathbreaking pieces, see Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: The Chicano Struggle Toward Liberation (New York: Harper and Row, 1972); and Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (: Little, Brown & Co., 1989), to name a few.

21 Juan F. Perea, “The Black/White Paradigm of Race: The ‘Normal’ Science of American Racial Thought,” California Law Review 85, no. 5 (Oct. 1997): 1213-12588. For a defense of the Black/White Paradigm, see 14

This is true among many historians of school desegregation. Though it is imperative that we continue to interrogate the ways in which black students were denied equal education and the ways in which civil rights activists challenged these inequalities, there are comparatively few histories of Mexican-American students and their struggles to overcome school segregation and educational discrimination in postwar America.22

The work being done on multiracial student bodies is a new and burgeoning area of inquiry, demonstrating that the history of school desegregation in modern America is much more complicated than we previously thought.23 Because the Black/White

Paradigm is so pervasive, however, scholars have been trying to frame their research questions within the parameters of the paradigm—that is, after all, the nature of paradigms—and have missed the richness of the history of struggles for equal educational

Roy L. Brooks & Kirsten Widner, “In Defense of the Black/White Binary: Reclaiming a Tradition of Civil Rights Scholarship,” Berkeley Journal of African-American Law & Policy 12, no. 1 (2010): 107-144.

22 For example, see Gilbert G. Gonzalez, Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation (: Balch Institute Press, 1990); Ruben Donato, The Other Struggle for Equal Schools: Mexican Americans During the Civil Rights Era (State University of New York Press, 1997); Ruben Donato, and in Colorado Schools and Communities, 1920-1960 (State University of New York Press, 2008); Guadalupe San Miguel, Jr., Let All of Them Take Heed: Mexican Americans and the Campaign for Educational Equality in , 1910-1981; Guadalupe San Miguel, Jr., Brown, Not White: School Integration and the in (Texas A&M University Press, 2005); Philippa Strum, Mendez v. Westminster: School Desegregation and Mexican-American Rights (University Press of , 2010); Richard Valencia, Chicano Students and the Courts: The Mexican American Legal Struggle for Educational Equality (New York New York University Press, 2010); and Mario T. Garcia & , Blowout!: Sal Castro and the Chicano Struggle for Educational Justice (Chapel Hill, University of Press, 2011). For excellent legal scholarship, see Kristi L. Bowman, “The New Face of School Desegregation.” Duke Law Journal 50, no. 6 (April 2001): 1751-1808; and Tom I. Romero II, “Our Selma is Here: The Political and Legal Struggle for Educational Equality in Denver, Colorado, and Multiracial Conundrums in American Jurisprudence,” Journal for Social Justice 3, no. 1 (2012).

23 In particular, see Neil Foley, The Quest for Equality: The Failed Promise of Black-Brown Solidarity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Brian Behnken, Fighting Their Own Battles: Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Texas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); and Guadalupe San Miguel, Jr. Brown, Not White: School Integration and the Chicano Movement in Houston (Texas A&M University Press, 2005). 15 opportunity in the U.S. Many scholars have also neglected the dynamics of racial formation in histories of school desegregation because race was taken as a given: rather than examine how racial processes were at work in debates over integration and desegregation, scholars assumed racial categories were fixed. To get a fuller picture of school segregation efforts, we must examine the ways in which school segregation created multiracial boundaries around access to public education and how it limited efforts to achieve equal education, even after Brown v. Board of Education and other judicial and legislative victories. In 1970s Denver, residents tried to maneuver around the court-ordered desegregation plan by claiming alternative racial identities or by pointing out the arbitrariness of racial classifications, the elimination of which would have made it nearly impossible to create racial balance.

This history of school desegregation demonstrates that it was the race work in between black and white that most clearly highlights both the tragedy and absurdity of race in modern America. As people tried to articulate, negotiate, and adjudicate

Mexican-American racial identity, they brought to the surface debates about racial formation that challenged “common sense” understandings of race, ethnicity and culture, debates that centered on the boundaries of whiteness.

Shades of Whiteness: Elucidating the Role of in Racial Processes

Defining who is and is not white has been a critical component of American and race relations. The Naturalization Act of 1790 prescribed that only “free white persons” could become U.S. citizens. Though naturalization law changed over the next century and a half, whiteness remained a prerequisite for naturalization for all

16 individuals except—after 1868—those who were clearly black.24 That year Congress adopted the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship to African Americans. In

U.S. racial understandings, whiteness and blackness seemed easily distinguishable. Both popular and legal thinking held that an individual was black if he or she possessed one drop of black blood. This rule of hypodescent was not firm, however, because people with “black blood” frequently “passed” as white. Though passing was a well-known occurrence, the idea that blackness was easy to discern remained in place, marking a racial order premised on an ideology of and black inferiority.

Ian Haney Lopez’s path breaking legal history, White by Law: The Legal

Construction of Race demonstrates the remarkable history of adjudicating whiteness and citizenship in the period between 1878, when the first racial prerequisite case was brought before the courts, and 1952, when Congress finally removed racial restrictions from naturalization requirements. During that time, fifty-two persons filed suits claiming that, as white persons, they were unduly denied citizenship. Two of these cases reached the U.S Supreme Court. As individuals who occupied racial positions in-between black and white, they had a choice; they could claim to be either white or black. Either way they were just as entitled to citizenship. All but one of the fifty-two chose to claim whiteness.25

24 Ian Haney Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race, 2nd ed. (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

25 Ian Haney Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race, 2nd ed. (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

17

The petitioners came to the U.S. from around the globe, “including Canada,

Mexico, Japan, the Philippines, India, and Syria,” reflecting the beginnings of a major shift in immigration to the United States in the late nineteenth-century. This was a shift that had not been envisioned by either the framers of the Constitution or those passing early immigration and naturalization law.26 Consequently, immigrants’ very existence within the nation posed significant challenges for a legal system built on a black-white understanding of race. These individuals were not supposed to exist within the imagined nation, yet they did; they lived and worked in the U.S., raised children there, and contributed to the development of the country, but they were deemed ineligible for citizenship. That does not mean they did not try. Their legal claims to citizenship provide important insights into the making of race during the seventy years after the Civil

War.27 The racial knowledge that their court cases built upon, refined and created persisted well into the late twentieth-century, informing racial understandings in the battle to desegregate Denver Public Schools in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Of the fifty-two petitioners who brought suit between 1870 and 1952, all but one of them was deemed outside the white race and thus were denied citizenship.28 The one person who was ruled to be white was Ricardo Rodriguez, a citizen of who filed for naturalization in the United States in 1893 after ten years of residence.29 Legally, all

26 Haney Lopez, White by Law, quote on 35. Also see Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

27 Ngai, Impossible Subjects.

28 Haney Lopez, White by Law, 43-44.

29 Neil Foley, “Straddling the Color Line: The Legal Construction of Hispanic Identity in Texas,” in Not Just Black and White: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in 18

Mexican citizens residing in the Southwest at the time of the U.S.-Mexican War were white because the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo—which ended the war and ceded northern Mexico to the U.S. in 1848—granted them U.S. citizenship. Because whiteness was a prerequisite for citizenship, they were legally white. Until 1897, however, no

Mexican who entered the nation after 1848 had tested the courts on whether they, too, were formally white and entitled to naturalization.30

According to Martha Menchaca, Rodriguez’s petition for citizenship was challenged by two Populist Party leaders the day after he submitted his final paperwork.

They wanted to end the practice of naturalizing Indian Mexicans, who—they said—were racially ineligible. Believing that there were “illegal” Mexican voters swaying elections for the Democrats in , they hoped to set a legal precedent for denying citizenship to Mexicans. In short, they sought to disenfranchise Mexican-American voters.31 Rodriguez’s challengers asserted that he was Aztec and thus should be denied citizenship on the grounds that he was neither white nor black. To sidestep the Treaty of

Guadalupe Hidalgo, they also presented evidence that suggested the treaty never intended for Mexicans to be granted citizenship; while diplomats had discussed the matter with

Mexican officials and the U.S. Senate had debated it, it was never made official. Instead

the United States, ed. Nancy Foner & George M. Fredrickson (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004): 341-357.

30 Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell, 257.

31 Martha Menchaca, Naturalizing Mexican Immigrants: A Texas History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 122-126.

19 the eighth and ninth articles of the treaty stipulated that Mexicans might someday be granted citizenship by an act of Congress. This never happened.32

A federal court in Texas ruled in favor of Rodriguez. Judge Thomas Maxey determined that Rodriguez was, scientifically speaking, probably not white, remarking,

“As to color he may be classed with the -colored or red men. He has dark , straight black hair, and high cheek bones.”33 Rodriguez was also not black, being neither from nor of African descent. Turning next to the question of Rodriguez’s Indian- ness, Judge Maxey relied on the man’s own testimony. In questioning, Rodriguez denied that he was Aztec but he also denied that he was Spanish. Rather, he was “a pure full blooded Mexican.”34 Taking the man at his word, Judge Maxey ruled that Rodriguez was not Indian and that U.S. treaties with Mexico required that Mexicans be allowed to naturalize. Regardless of how they appeared, or how anthropology classified them,

Mexicans were “white by treaty.”35

Though Rodriguez successfully argued his whiteness, it is interesting to note that all of the others who tried to do so were denied. Some of them might have more easily argued their blackness because common sense understandings of race relied most prominently on color. Given the racial system they entered when they came to the United

States, however, it is understandable that all but one of them chose to argue they were white. Being white allowed them a certain level of prestige, even if they were poor.

32 Menchaca, Naturalizing Mexican Immigrants, 124.

33 In re Rodriguez, 81 F. Supp 337 (W.D. Texas, 1897), 337-38.

34 In re Rodriguez, 349.

35 Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell, 254.

20

W.E.B. DuBois called this mentality the “psychological wages of whiteness.”36 By 1870, when the first case was filed, this mentality was discernible even to those who had been in the country a short time. Claiming blackness would have been a step down for these migrants, who sought citizenship in a nation that clearly privileged whiteness. Arguing they were white rather than black was strategic, given the racial constraints that existed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although it is possible they rejected blackness out of confusion over the wording of statutes—black was defined as persons of

“African nativity, or African descent,” whereas whites were simply “white persons” with no reference to European ancestry—the intensity of anti-black racism and the multiple benefits of whiteness had to have been a significant factor in their decision to claim a white identity.37 As the opposite of blackness, whiteness held much appeal.38

The boundaries around whiteness were so intensely protected that even those with white skin were suspect. Immigrants from as well as those from southern and eastern were viewed by Anglo-Saxon nativists as unfit for full American citizenship. Historians debate the ways in which these European immigrants were racially identified by others and by themselves, the processes through which they were

36 W.E. Burghardt DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880, Free Press Edition (New York: Free Press, 1998). The book was first published in 1935. David Roediger builds upon DuBois in his now famous The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, Rev. edition (New York: Verso Books, 1999). George Lipsitz similarly advances an argument that whites have a “possessive investment in whiteness” that often leads them to protect their whiteness (their investment) by whatever means possible. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How Benefit from (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998). Legal scholar Cheryl Harris argues that whiteness is a type of property with actual value. “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (Jun. 1993): 1707- 1791.

37 Haney Lopez, White by Law, 37.

38 Haney Lopez argues, “[T]he prerequisite cases show that Whiteness exists not only as the opposite of non-Whiteness, but as the superior opposite.” [emphasis original] White by Law, 20.

21 racialized, and how that changed over the course of the first half of the twentieth-century.

Some argue European immigrants occupied an “inbetween” racial status, meaning they were racially located somewhere between white and nonwhite, though were definitely closer to white than people with darker coloring.39 These scholars have demonstrated how working class politics were intimately tied up in race and how, for European ethnics, the process of becoming white was centered on labor.40 Others argue that the project of racialization went beyond labor, showing how , , and popular culture played a role in making immigrant “others” fully white.41 Still other historians insist

European immigrants were “white on arrival.”42 Although they did experience some prejudice because of their different cultural backgrounds, immigrants’ whiteness was never successfully challenged.

Legal history offers insights into this debate. Although the evidence that various

European “undesirables” experienced nativist hostilities is overwhelming, there is little evidence that white ethnics were ever really in danger of being classified as nonwhite by the American legal system, which had tremendous influence over the lived experiences of ordinary people. Though some European immigrants who filed for naturalization were challenged, the Courts did not deny that they were white, an outcome that was quite

39 David Roediger & James R. Barrett, “Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality, and the ‘New Immigrant’ Working Class,” Journal of American Ethnic History 16, no. 3 (1997): 3-44; David R. Roedgier, Working Toward Whiteness; and Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

40 Roediger, Wages of Whiteness; and Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness.

41 Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color.

42 Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

22 different from most non-European immigrants.43 Similarly, the history of law in the U.S. reveals that state and local statutes prohibiting sexual relations and marriage between white and nonwhite races never extended to relations between Anglo-

Saxon natives and “inbetween” European immigrants. The record is quite clear, however, that miscegenation law worked in complex ways to create and reinforce particular racial boundaries that were meant to maintain white purity and safeguard property and power.44

Moreover, these laws operated nationwide, forbidding relations and criminalizing intimacy between whites and nonwhites and cementing a racial order built around notions of white supremacy, whereas European immigrants found themselves on the white side of the divide in these instances. According to the law, there was no “inbetween” white racial identity for European immigrants; they were legally white.

European immigrants, however, have formed the basis for the study of whiteness in U.S. history. David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the

American Working Class launched an extensive scholarly effort to interrogate whiteness by examining the history of working-class European immigrants. Roediger’s analysis, which he expands and refines in Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs, focuses on how the politics of labor were closely connected with maintaining and, for European immigrants, obtaining whiteness. As “” workers secured their place within organized

43 Haney Lopez, White by Law; and Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell; and Ngai, Impossible Subjects. For an excellent analysis of the ways in which, race, gender and sexuality manifested in multiple and complex ways in U.S. immigration and naturalization policy, see Martha Gardner, The Qualities of a Citizen: Women, Immigration and Citizenship, 1870-1965 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

44 Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

23 labor, they helped reinforce the color line between whites and blacks, gaining inclusion for themselves at the expense of black workers. For Noel Ignatiev and Brodkin, the “darkening” of Irish and Jewish immigrants, respectively, drew its power from the low-wage, menial work these immigrants performed. Being white meant being shielded from degraded labor. Only when these immigrant groups gained access to other, more respectable work did they become white.45

This scholarship has furthered our understanding of the interconnectivity of race, class and gender in U.S. history by exposing the “messiness” of racial processes.46 It has also opened up other avenues of research by highlighting the historical utility of examining whiteness as a process of becoming. And it has expanded our thinking on whiteness by exposing its constructed nature. Yet in some ways the focus on European immigrants has reified the Ethnicity Paradigm, even though these authors try very hard to overcome ethnicity by focusing on the racialization of white ethnics. Their narratives are still largely about the assimilation of various European groups into the American mainstream. Thus, the process of becoming white is really about the process of assimilation, translated into a different scholarly language. Although these histories of whiteness do not prove European immigrants had to become white, they do provide us

45 Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 2008); and Karen Brodkin, How Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998).

46 David Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness, 8.

24 with a new way of theorizing about whiteness and interrogating the usefulness of whiteness as a socio-historical category of analysis.47

These contributions, combined with the insights of interdisciplinary fields— literary studies, folklore, sociology, political science, and legal studies, to name a few— have laid the groundwork for the now burgeoning field of . As an antiracist project—its core political position—it seeks to demonstrate the ways in which whiteness has been deployed to include and exclude particular groups from full American citizenship. Thus it seeks to dismantle and destabilize whiteness.48 “Central to th[e] process of unlearning white supremacist attitudes and values,” argues feminist scholar bell hooks, “is the destruction of the category of ‘whiteness.’49 This is the heart of

Whiteness Studies.

My own interest in whiteness lies in its role in the construction of racial hierarchies and the resulting power relations. Specifically, I seek to examine the “middle” racial space to uncover the foundations of the structure as a whole. Because the middle holds up either end of the spectrum, it tells us a great deal about how it was built and how it operates. Ariela Gross supports this contention in her extensive history of litigating

47 For a critical review of whiteness scholarship up to that point, see Eric Arnesen, “Whiteness and the Historian’s Imagination,” International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 60 (Fall 2001): 3-32. For a less critical review, see Peter Kolchin, “Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America,” The Journal of American History 89, no. 1 (Jun. 2002): 154-173.

48 See Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic, eds., Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997); and Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, Linda C. Powell & L. Mun Mong, eds., Off White: Readings on Race, Power and Society (New York: Routledge, 1997).

49 bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation, 1st ed. (Turnaround Books, 1992), as cited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Interrogating ‘Whiteness,’ Complicating ‘Blackness’: Remapping American Culture,” American Quarterly 47, no. 3 (Sep. 1995), 428-466, quote on 446.

25 racial identity in the United States. She demonstrates that the courts were remarkably inconsistent in how they determined race, particularly when it came to deciding the racial positioning of people not clearly white or black. She posits that these individuals are central to our understanding of racial processes in the U.S. for two important reasons.

First, the very presence of such racially ambiguous people in the nation’s courtrooms shows us that the margins between black and white were larger than we previously thought. Second, “the margins of a category create the core. People revealed what race meant to them only when they needed to adjudicate its boundaries. And in drawing those boundaries, they were creating race.”50 By debating the racial identity of Mexican

Americans and making that debate the central axis upon which the question of school segregation rotated, Denver residents—parents, teachers, school administrators, lawyers, judges and the students themselves—were making race. Throughout this process, whiteness centered the debate and drew dividing lines between various groups of people as they staked out their positions on school desegregation and equal educational opportunity. Among Mexican Americans, claiming or rejecting a white identity played an important role in determining their reactions to the call for desegregation and their responses to the desegregation plan.

My project rests on a wide range of primary sources, including the records of

Denver municipal offices and community organizations, the Denver Board of Education, the Denver city council, and the courts as well as the records of school board members, lawyers, city and state officials, and community activists. In addition to documentary

50 Ariela Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell, 11.

26 collections, I also consulted newspapers, magazines, newsletters and other contemporary publications. My examination of the litigation relies on trial and court conference transcripts, briefs, and court opinions. I collected most of these documents at the

Archives of the University of Colorado at Boulder, which houses an extensive collection of documents donated by Gordon Griener, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs in Keyes.

Trying to understand the postwar history of the city and the roles of community organizations and activists in the case took me to several different libraries in Denver, including the Western History and Genealogy section of the ; the

Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library; the Colorado State Archives; the

Penrose Library at the ; and the Archives at the Auraria Library.

Collectively, these sources allow me paint a picture of the case, both in the courtroom and in the community, and its role in shaping racial understandings in Denver in the late-

1960s and 1970s.

Throughout the text, I use several different terms to describe racial and ethnic groups, so it is important to clarify how I am using them and why I choose to use some terms over others. The terminology used to talk about various racial and ethnic groups is highly contested among both scholars and the general public. Moreover, because one of my goals is to expose the ambiguity of racial understandings, it is somewhat problematic to choose racial labels because I risk over-simplification. For clarity and consistency, however, I have chosen specific terms. To denote people traditionally understood as

“Caucasian,” or those with European ancestry, I use the term “white.” When citing from sources I use “Anglo,” which was the term used to designate white people in Colorado

27 and much of the Southwest during this period. I use “black” and “African American” interchangeably, while I use “Negro” or “colored” when I am citing the sources.

To describe people of Mexican descent, I use the term “Mexican American.” Part of the argument I make in this project is that Mexican Americans and other Latinas/os form a distinct race, separate from whites. At the same time, I interrogate Mexican

American efforts to claim whiteness, which were sometimes successful. In Denver, the most common term used to describe Mexican Americans was “Hispano,” although

“Spanish,” “Spanish-American,” “Spanish-speaking,” or “Spanish-surnamed” were sometimes used as well.51 I have chosen not to use “Hispano” to avoid the language of ethnicity and to focus on race, even though that was the most common term used in

Colorado in the postwar period. I do, however, use “Hispano” when making particular references to the sources. “Chicano” became a commonly used term in the 1960s as a new movement for Mexican-American rights gained momentum. The Chicano

Movement in Denver was central to shaping the discourse around racial identity that emerged among activists and the wider Mexican-American community. I do not use

“Chicano” throughout the text because it was not in wide usage until the late 1960s and one of the central divides that ran through the Mexican-American community was between those who claimed to be “Hispano” and those who claimed to be “Chicano.”52

“Mexican American” is a neutral term, denoting Americans of Mexican descent.

51 Eleanor G. Crow, “A Time for Change and Challenge: Civil Rights in Colorado, 1966-1968,” Colorado Civil Rights Commission Activities Report, 1969.

52 This debate is discussed in chapter five.

28

At specific times I use the term “nonwhite” to refer, collectively, to the groups of people historically racialized by most whites as “other,” including Mexican Americans.

Though I argue that whiteness is fluid and dynamic and that grouping all people constructed as non-white into one category essentializes their experiences, it is also true that most people within certain groups have remained outside the boundaries of whiteness.

I avoid using this term as much as possible but at times I refer to the large and diverse group of people who have historically experienced racial discrimination in the U.S., the people who have been denied the privileges of whiteness in everyday life. I adhere to

Stephanie Wildman’s argument that we must sometimes be “strategically essentialist” in how we talk about race if we want to really expose racial inequality. Critical theorists have demonstrated the problems with essentialism. “But strategic essentialism,”

Wildman suggests, “recognizes that we have to name things in order to talk about them and that sometimes we should.”53

Chapter one situates Mexican Americans within the broader history of racial formation in the United States. Beginning with Spanish colonization and moving into the mid-twentieth century, I trace the racialization of Mexican Americans in the Southwest.

Although they were legally white, Mexican Americans occupied varying locations within the racial hierarchy. Most whites, however, viewed them as a separate, nonwhite race. In the 1930s, Mexican-American civil rights activists began their assault on separate

53 In her piece, Wildman is talking about naming “Latinas/os,” but her argument is applicable to the category “nonwhite” as well. One is more specific than the other, but both terms have been used to describe groups of people, in racial terms. Stephanie M. Wildman, “Reflections on Whiteness and Latina/o ,” in Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror, Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic, eds. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997): 482-292.

29

“Mexican” schools by appealing to the long-standing legal argument that they were white.

Securing whiteness from the courts became a central strategy, even when their supposed whiteness actually made the segregation of Mexican-American students not appear to be segregation at all.

Chapter two provides the historical context for school desegregation efforts in

Denver in the late 1960s. It examines race relations after World War II, demonstrating the complexity of inner- and inter-group relations and the tensions that arose between

Denver’s black and Mexican-American communities over scarce resources and attention from city officials leading up to the 1968 call for school desegregation. I show that long before Keyes, Denver’s racial problems defied the black-white binary of race. Moreover, the battle over desegregation was informed to a large extent by the conflicts that emerged after World War II among and between Denver’s white, black and Mexican-American populations.

In chapter three I trace the Public Schools (DPS) and the educational experiences of black and Mexican-American children in the 1950s and 1960s.

I demonstrate that although most of these children received different educational experiences than most white children, there were also differences between the experiences of black and Mexican-American children within DPS. Language and relevant curriculum were central factors. The desire for bilingual and multicultural education, therefore, became one of the focal points of Mexican-American parents and community leaders as Keyes made its way through the courts. This fact differentiated their needs and desires from those of black parents and community leaders, and was one

30 of Mexican Americans’ major arguments in support of the distinct racial identity of

Mexican Americans.

Next I turn to the courtroom. Chapter four examines the plaintiffs’ legal strategy and the role that Mexican-American racial identity played in the District Court trial.

Throughout the trial race was prominent in the arguments of both the plaintiffs and the defendants, as they each sought to define “minority” and what constituted a segregated school. While the plaintiffs tried to argue that Mexican Americans were a minority, the school district countered by insisting they were white. The litigation shows that although race was supposed to be “common sense,” it was much more complex. Defining racial categories was no simple task, especially when it came to categorizing Mexican

Americans.

Chapter five looks at the Denver community response to the case and to the larger debates that surrounded equal educational opportunity. Like other cities around the nation, Denver experienced increased tensions and violence in response to Court ordered desegregation. Even though Mexican Americans were the largest nonwhite group in the city, the response was mostly understood in black and white terms. Mexican Americans did respond, but their efforts to improve the quality of education for their community were seen as separate from the issue of desegregation by most Denver residents. The emergence of a strong, militant Chicano Movement in Denver increased public awareness that Mexican Americans were not happy, but their grievances regarding Denver Public

Schools were mostly ignored as Mexican-American activists were unable and/or unwilling to articulate their demands within the black-white framework guiding the

31 community response to Keyes. Here I also discuss the Appeals Court decision and, finally, the 1973 ruling of the Supreme Court. Through a reworking of legal racial knowledge, the Court both recognized Mexican Americans’ experiences of discrimination and reinforced the black/white binary.

Chapter six interrogates the remedy stage of the case, exploring the interactions between the District Court, the plaintiffs, the School Board, various community organizations, and Denver citizens. While the court struggled to define racial identities and balance interests, different community factions tried to do the same as they sought to achieve the best possible scenario for their own children. I reveal that even after the

Supreme Court decided the case, racial understandings were still very much in question.

It was during the remedy stage, in fact, that the ambiguity and malleability of race was most evident. As the court monitored the school district’s implementation of its desegregation plan, the debate over the racial categorization of Mexican Americans remained at the center of the conflict. Throughout the case, from its beginnings in the segregated classrooms of Denver schools to a landmark Supreme Court decision that had national implications to the District Court’s monitoring of its plan, racial formation remained a fluid, highly contingent, and unfinished process.

32

Chapter 1

A “Spanish Fantasy Past”: Mexican Americans and Race in U.S. History

Mexican Americans’ Tenuous Whiteness

As In re Rodriguez demonstrated, Mexican Americans were legally white. But theirs was a tenuous whiteness. An individual’s ability to secure the privileges of being white varied depending on many factors, including location, time period, color, class and language. In many places, Mexicans and Mexican Americans were viewed as “others.”

They were dirty, lazy, and stupid, certainly not of the same race as , as Euro-

Americans or whites were most commonly referred to in the Southwest. Informal segregation ensured that many Mexican Americans lived in separate neighborhoods, sent their children to separate schools, and had access to only the most menial and lowest paying jobs. Signs such as “No or Mexicans allowed” could be seen throughout the

Southwest.54

54 See Acuña, Occupied America; Albert Camarillo, in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848-1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979); and David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987).

33

Yet even as more and more Anglos settled into the Southwest, their views of the

Mexicans and Mexican Americans they encountered were shaped by a very complex negotiation between the racial order they knew—understood in black and white terms— and that which existed in northern Mexico when it was conquered by the United States.

Racial understanding in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico was largely guided by color and class as defined by the Spanish colonization of centuries earlier. Racial intermixing between Spanish colonizers, African slaves the Spanish brought with them, and the Indigenous populations of Mexico led to a majority-mixed Mexican nation by the time it gained its independence from Spain in 1821. Thus, Mexicans had European,

African and Indigenous roots.55

In colonial elites sought ever greater power through a confluence of gendered and racialized social relations that ensured lighter skinned offspring and economic prosperity for their families. This “pigmentocracy,” as Ramón Gutiérrez calls it, reproduced particular racial understandings about color and class that gave whiteness its social meaning.56 Those with lighter complexions were more often the elites of society while those with darker complexions were more likely to reside at the lower end

55 Martha Menchaca, Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); and Laura E. Gómez, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (New York: New York University Press, 2008). Also see Gary B. Nash, “The Hidden History of Mestizo America,” The Journal of American History 82, no. 3(Dec. 1995): 941-964.

56 Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford: Press, 1991). Ian Haney Lopez has argued that the logic of racial thinking, particularly as it is codified in the law, has played a prominent role in the physical appearance of our society. He states, “While admittedly laws cannot alter the biology governing human morphology, rule makers can and have altered the human behavior that produces variations in physical appearance. In other words, laws have directly shaped reproductive choices.” White by Law, 11. Also see Pascoe, What Comes Naturally; and Pablo Mitchell, Coyote Nation: Sexuality, Race, and Conquest in Modernizing New Mexico, 1880-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

34 of the socioeconomic spectrum. Families often tried to better their financial fortunes by whitening their heirs. Middle- to upper-class Mexican families sought European suitors for their daughters in hopes that they might gain social standing through his ability to literally reproduce whiteness through the birth of lighter-skinned children.57

Those who were successful often imagined for themselves a Spanish past that justified their current social position and ensured their future prosperity. Miroslava

Chávez-Garcia keenly demonstrates the power of this dynamic in California where, she argues, the racial hierarchy became largely “land-based.” People could whiten themselves by acquiring land and becoming a ranchero. By the 1840s, the racial order operated through a confluence of property, class and color.58 “Indeed,” notes historian

Vicki Ruiz, “the doxa that money bought color can be applied across the Spanish empire in the New World. After 1848, members of the California elite desperately sought to hold on to their constructed claims of a Spanish heritage, claims that had passed from one generation to the next, rising with a sense of urgency in the wake of the Treaty of

Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Gold Rush and the accompanying political, economic, and cultural dislocations.”59 Through the deployment of this “Spanish fantasy past,” in the

57 Douglas Monroy, Thrown Among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); and Miroslava Chávez-Garcia, Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s (Tucson: The University of Press, 2004). Linda Gordon demonstrates that a desire to whiten families through European “blood” was so powerful that in 1904 a Mexican family in Arizona sought out Euro-American orphans to adopt as their own, hoping that their whiteness would lead to more social standing and the ability to make more money for the family. The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

58 Chávez-Garcia, Negotiating Conquest, 67.

59 Vicki L. Ruiz, “Morena/o, blanca/o y café con leche: Racial Constructions in Chicana/o Historiography,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 20, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 343-360, quote on 349. 35 words of journalist Carey McWilliams, elite Mexicans (re)invented themselves as purely

Spanish and celebrated Spanish colonization as a means of claiming a white, European identity.60

Conquest created a clash of cultural understandings about race that had long-term implications for how Mexican Americans were racialized and how they, in turn, racialized each other and other groups.61 In areas of the Southwest where the Anglo population remained relatively small, like New Mexico, racial dynamics played out in different ways than in areas where Anglos became the majority, like Texas and

California.62 In territorial New Mexico, which was the largest geographical area of the

Southwest, including all or parts of Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, , ,

Texas, , and Wyoming in addition to present day New Mexico, Mexicans and

Indians far outnumbered Anglos, making it difficult for the latter to control the territory.

Anglos needed some Mexicans to aid them in running local governments and establishing a social order in the vision of Anglo Americans. Thus, elite Mexican men were given the vote and empowered to lead their communities. In return, these elites were whitened. As whites, they held certain rights that were withheld from the majority of people in the

60 Carey McWilliams, North From Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States (Philadelphia: L. B. Lippincott Co., 1949). A good explanation and application of McWilliams’ argument can be found in Stephen J. Pitti, The Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 98-102.

61 See Tomás Almaguer, “Race, Racialization, and Populations in the United States,” in Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century, Daniel Martinez HoSang, Oneka LaBennett, & Laura Pulido, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012): 143-161.

62 According to Laura Gómez, there were fewer than 1000 Anglos living in New Mexico when the Mexican-American War began. Conversely, Anglos outnumbered Mexicans in Texas by 1830, the result of Mexico’s lax immigration policies, and in California by 1850, the result of the discovery of gold in 1848. Manifest Destinies.

36 territory, even though both they and their Anglo superiors understood that their whiteness was fragile and that they were still racially inferior. Aware that their position was based on their tenuous whiteness, Mexican elites sought to prove their worth—in a sense, prove their whiteness—by creating a stark dividing line between themselves and those beneath them. Not only did they disenfranchise Pueblo Indians, but they also espoused a virulent form of anti-black racism and pro-slavery sentiment.63

Similar dynamics played out in California, where elite Mexicans, the gente de razón, tried to distinguish themselves from the local Indian population, Indios barbaros, and the increasing Mexican immigrant population. They were mostly unsuccessful.

Anglo settlers saw no distinctions between elite and Indios. They were racially constructed as “interlopers and greasers,” regardless of how the elite saw themselves. Stephen Pitti provides evidence for this racial thinking in northern

California in the 1850s.

The editor of the Santa Clara Register wrote in 1853 that “the Spanish races and American Indian tribe are distinguished by the great abundance and coarseness” of body hair, and he asked readers if “the beasts, whether wild or domesticated, are hairy.” Certain that the more evolved “Anglo- American branch of man” was engaged in a struggle with “the Spanish races,” he concluded that while Mexicans in the Santa Clara Valley possessed the “natural good” of animals, they were clearly unable “to elevate themselves to the same degree reached by the Anglo Saxon race.”64

63 Laura E. Gómez, Manifest Destinies.

64 Quoted in Pitti, The Devil in Silicon Valley, 35.

37

While some Mexicans in New Mexico thus secured the benefits of whiteness, elite

Mexicans in California found that as more and more Euro-Americans arrived, their racial positioning became ever firmly attached to that of those who had been beneath them.

The racial logic that dictated these outcomes is perfectly in line with the ways in which race has historically operated. Racialization played out in particular ways based on the time and place specific contexts in which it was occurring. These racial understandings were the result of negotiations born out of necessity, negotiations between the Mexican racial order that was built around color and class, and the U.S. racial order, built around a black-white color line. Under both systems, whiteness was highly valued and protected, a construction that was reinforced by the re-racialization of Mexican

Americans after 1848.

After the U.S. Civil War the battles over who was and was not white continued to dominate the racial formation process, as Neil Foley demonstrates in The White Scourge:

Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture. In central Texas, newly freed African Americans, poor whites and Mexican Americans struggled to shore up their positions through a racialization process that, according to Foley, took place within the evolving class structure of the tenant farming system. In the complex social world of multiracial central Texas, black-white understandings of race could not suffice to explain race relations and class formation. As a distinct cotton culture developed, the racial order that emerged demonstrated the interconnectedness of color, class, land, nationality, religion and language. In this complex social matrix, says Foley, “Mexicans walked the

38 color line.”65 When the Republic of Texas was founded, only free white persons were granted constitutional rights. Indians and free blacks were denied the right to purchase land, while Mexicans occupied an undefined middle-ground somewhere “between

(nonwhite) Indian and (marginally white) Spanish.”66 Allowed to purchase land if they assisted in the rebellion against Mexico, Mexicans still had to prove they were not Indian or black to finalize the sale. In short, they had to prove their whiteness to the satisfaction of local officials. One petitioner stated that he was a native Texan, born to Texas parents, and was “a free white person of Spanish and not of African blood.”67

Granted legal and political whiteness if they could prove it, upper-class “Spanish” were nonetheless grouped with poor “Mexicans” by most Anglos. Some Socialists, meanwhile, maintained that Mexican tenant farmers possessed more “white-hearted manliness” than many white tenant farmers because of their more radical political leanings and activism within the Texas Socialist Party, which tried to organize Mexican and Anglo tenants in the second decade of the twentieth-century.68 As Foley points out, contradictions abound in the construction of whiteness and in the ways in which people tried to police its boundaries. Mexican Americans were white when it was convenient for them to be white, and they were nonwhite when it justified their lower social positioning.

65 Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 13.

66 Foley, The White Scourge, 19.

67 Quoted in Foley, The White Scourge, 19.

68 Quoted in Foley, The White Scourge, 12.

39

The Great Depression ruptured the tenant farming system in central Texas, and along with it the racial order that had been built there. As New Deal agricultural programs reorganized farm labor, people found ways to both reinforce the old order and remake it to reflect new dynamics, particularly the dislocation of farmers

(“Oakies” and “Arkies”), expanding mechanization, and a growing reliance on Mexican immigrants as migrant labor. The shift to mechanized farm equipment meant that farm owners needed large numbers of workers only at harvest time. This created a huge population of migrant farm workers, mostly poor whites and Mexican Americans and increasing numbers of Mexican immigrants. The Agricultural Adjustment

Administration provided government subsidies to farm owners to produce smaller yields, which incentivized the dislocation of sharecroppers. Most poor blacks headed for the cities, replaced by cheaper Mexican immigrants who were being recruited by U.S. agribusiness. Many poor whites chose to head west to the California promised land.

Those who remained struggled to maintain their whiteness within a cotton culture that had dubbed them “.”69

As a result of these changes, the American ideal of agrarian whiteness died.

White Americans increasingly associated Mexicans and Mexican Americans with migratory farm work and the devastating poverty that came with it. For Mexican

Americans, their demotion to migrant labor and the increasing reliance on Mexican immigrants made them keenly aware of their precarious racial position within the shifting racial and class structure of central Texas. The state and the courts continued to

69 Foley, The White Scourge.

40 recognize Mexican Americans as white. Many Anglos, however, increasingly saw no distinctions between the elite Spanish and the poor Mexicans. A sign in a restaurant window captured the white-but-not-white racial positioning of Mexican Americans in early twentieth-century Texas. “We serve White’s [sic.] only, No Spanish or Mexicans,” it declared.70

Anglos also racialized Mexican Americans in postwar Colorado in different ways to justify their needs. Most people understood Mexican Americans to be “Hispanos,” and that is how many Mexican Americans self-identified. Hispano was both a term commonly understood to denote mestizo peoples who had resided in New Mexico and

Southern Colorado since at least 1598, as well as a distinct identity that many people proudly embraced.71 Hispanos, they said, were descendents of the Spanish colonizers whose families had been residents of New Mexico and southern Colorado for centuries.

Hispanos celebrated their cultural or ethnic differences while holding firm to their “other white” status. Anglo elites often endorsed this construction, if it benefitted them. In some ways this was similar to the “Spanish fantasy past” that many Mexican Americans embraced throughout the Southwest.72

It was also different, however, because many people in this region considered their claims to a Spanish past and their experiences as Hispanos in the United States to be unique. “In a nutshell,” writes Laura Gómez, “the exceptionalism thesis emphasizes New

70 “Sign in a restaurant window in south Texas, ca. 1940,” Photograph in Foley, The White Scourge.

71 According to Rubén Donato, most histories of Hispanos in New Mexico and southern Colorado begin in 1598 with the establishment of a Spanish outpost in northern New Mexico by Don Juan de Oñate. Mexicans and Hispanos in Colorado Schools and Communities, 2.

72 See Mitchell, Coyote Nation.

41

Mexico’s unique status among southwestern states—as having, for example, a long history of Mexican American elected officials at all levels of government, relatively low levels of racial of Mexican Americans (compared to Texas and California), and an intense, long-standing claim to Spanish, rather than Mexican, heritage.”73 Rubén

Donato’s history of Mexicans and Hispanos in Colorado—one of the only scholarly works on the subject—uses the exceptionalism thesis as a framework for understanding

Mexican-American communities and the educational experiences of Mexican-American students. He argues that there were differences between the lived experiences of

Mexicans and Hispanos in Colorado because Mexicans were newcomers and Hispanos were long-time citizens who never identified as Mexican. They were Spanish for over two hundred years, Mexican for twenty-seven years and American since 1848. Thus they never developed much allegiance to Mexico or a strong Mexican identity.74 Because of relatively low immigration from Mexico, the Spanish cultural influence on the region played an important role in how many people conceptualized Mexican-American racial identity. Over time, many of these Hispanos migrated north and settled into parts of northern Colorado and Southeastern Wyoming, bringing with them the cultural forms and racial knowledge they had gained in New Mexico. “Hispano” continued to be the most common way of referring to Mexican Americans as well as the most widely accepted

73 Gómez, Manifest Destinies.

74 Donato, Mexicans and Hispanos in Colorado Schools and Communities.

42 self-identification among Mexican Americans in this region well into the twentieth- century.75

But the territory that made up New Mexico and Colorado was not exceptional.

The historical record demonstrates that there was profound Mexican influence in the area, even in the Spanish period. That influence remained throughout the Mexican period and far into the American period. Furthermore, although this region had a legacy of electing

Mexican-American officials, the belief that anti-Mexican sentiment was nonexistent or less harmful than in other areas of the Southwest is purely mythical. Consider the debates that emerged when New Mexican residents sought statehood. The arguments against statehood were centrally about the racial fitness of the territory’s inhabitants.

Many officials felt it should not be admitted as a state until the number of Anglos exceeded the number of “Mexicans.” In response, leaders in New Mexico, intent on statehood, racialized elite Mexican Americans—Hispanos—as “Spanish.” They argued that these people were the descendants of the original European colonizers. As

Europeans, they had a rightful place within the expanding U.S nation-state. Anglos in

New Mexico thus used racial logic to their own advantage. They conceded the “other

75 My own grandmother migrated north from Las Cruces, New Mexico with her family in the mid-1930s. They eventually settled near Laramie, Wyoming (close to the Wyoming-Colorado border) where my great- grandfather worked first as a sheep herder and then for the Union Pacific Railroad Company. In the 1950s, she and other Mexican-American women in Laramie formed the Hispano-Americano Women’s Club. The name “Hispano-Americano” was selected after considerable debate over naming themselves. They finally chose “Hispano” because they felt it best represented who they were as a people, and “Americano” because it highlighted their Americanness. 43 whiteness” of some Mexican Americans to get what they wanted and, at the same time, reiterated the naturalness of white supremacy.76

In Colorado, Donato’s evidence demonstrates that Anglos treated Mexicans and

Hispanos in the same discriminatory ways. “We were excluded,” recalled Jesus Esparza, who lived in La Junta, Colorado, a sugar beet town. “We were not allowed to use the swimming pool and other facilities. Some restaurants would not serve us. In many cases it was not written anywhere. But it was common knowledge. We knew to stay away.”77

Throughout southern Colorado, part of the so-called “Hispano Homeland,” Mexican

Americans had similar experiences.78 Although Donato tries to distinguish between the experiences of Mexican Americans in sugar beet towns in northern Colorado, the

Arkansas Valley, and the Western Slope, and those in southern Colorado, he concedes,

“…despite the deep history of Hispanos in the region, their U.S. citizenship, and their

‘Spanish American’ identities, they were treated like their Mexican and Hispano peers in sugar beet towns.”79 There was nothing unique about the ways in which local Anglos

76 Gómez, Manifest Destinies; and Linda C. Noel, “‘I am an American’: Anglos, Mexicans, Nativos, and the National Debate over Arizona and New Mexico Statehood,” Pacific Historical Review 80, no. 3 (Aug. 2011): 430-467.

77 Interview, Jesus Esparza, conducted by Rubén Donato, Nov. 17, 2004, quoted in Mexicans and Hispanos in Colorado Schools and Communities, 75.

78 Richard Norstrand argues that a “Hispano homeland” exists in the Southwest based on Hispanos’ historical legacy in the region and their geographical isolation. He also addresses the critiques of the term “Hispano” and the criticisms of those who argue Hispano claims to a distinct Spanish identity are inaccurate. “Hispanos, like any other people, have the right to determine their own philosophical outlook and choose their own ethnic identity, however legitimate it may or may not be.” The Hispano Homeland (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992): 19.

79 Donato does effectively demonstrate that sugar beet companies played a significant role in the schooling experiences of Mexican Americans because Mexican-American children were essential to the companies as workers. High absenteeism and drop-out rates were accepted because they were expected to be in the fields. He fails to interrogate race in this dynamic, however. Mexicans and Hispanos in Colorado Schools and Communities, quote on 90. 44 racialized Mexican Americans in this region. Most of the time they were seen as an inferior race, though sometimes the elite were racialized as white if it benefited Anglos.

The hollow proclamations of Colorado gubernatorial candidate Stephen McNichols a century later reflected this long-standing bargain. In trying to appeal to readers of a

Mexican-American newspaper in Denver, he told them that he understood that they were among the first white settlers in the region and that if elected he would work to end discrimination against them, as “other whites.”80

Mexican American Civil Rights and the Rise of the “Other White” Legal Strategy

As the “We serve White’s only, No Spanish or Mexicans,” sign made clear, anti-

Mexican-American sentiment was widespread. In the southwest, this sentiment led to the racial segregation of Mexican Americans. One of the areas where segregation developed most rapidly was in schooling. By the 1930s most Texas towns with substantial populations of Mexican Americans had created separate “Mexican” schools. Unlike in the South, where the segregation of black children was mandated by law, the segregation of Mexican-American children in the West was achieved through various local practices; it was de facto. Even in Texas, where the segregation of black students was de jure, the segregation of Mexican Americans was not. One of the most common practices was to establish separate schools or separate classrooms within integrated schools for children who could not speak English. As Spanish-speakers, the argument went, these students needed extra attention in learning English. Their presence in classrooms with Anglo

80 Letter from Stephen L. R. McNichols, Oct. 3, 1956, reprinted in “Promise Made by McNichols in 1956,” El Tiempo (Denver, CO), Oct. 4, 1962, 3. 45 students also brought down the quality of education for Anglos because teachers had to spend more time with non-English speakers. Thus, Mexican Americans were segregated not because of their race but because of sound educational practice. School officials assumed that all Mexican Americans lacked sufficient skills, or at least that is how they justified the practice of establishing separate schools.81 This was a common assumption in Colorado as well.82

Of course it was also true that many Anglos viewed them as a separate, inferior race. A survey conducted by the American-Statesman, an Austin, Texas newspaper, in the 1950s revealed that the majority of Anglos supported separate Mexican schools either because they feared racial mixing or because they believed Mexican Americans were culturally and/or intellectually inferior. “Most of those who approve of segregation make no attempt to cover up their prejudice against Latin-Americans,” wrote the newspaper.

“They say Latin-Americans are ‘a different race,’ ‘socially inferior,’ ‘not clean,’ ‘we don’t believe in mixing races.’”83 Teachers often shared these perceptions. One student who attended a segregated Mexican-American classroom in Monte Vista, Colorado remembered the harsh treatment they received from educators.

[Our teacher] would take us to the bathroom and wash our hands with a brush. She brushed us so hard that it almost made our knuckles bleed. While she was washing our hands she would say, “You dirty little Mexicans!” I remember some of us getting hit with a rubber hose. We were treated like animals. I still have nightmares about that school. I

81 Steven H. Wilson, “Brown Over ‘Other White’: Mexican Americans’ Legal Arguments and Litigation Strategy in School Desegregation Lawsuits,” Law and History Review 21, no. 1(Spring 2003): 145-194.

82 Donato, Mexicans and Hispanos in Colorado Schools and Communities.

83 Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell, 269.

46

don’t want to say that all Anglo teachers were like that. I did have some good Anglo teachers.84

In Greeley, Colorado Anglos were hesitant about educating Mexican-American children. Some felt it was pointless to educate them because they would end up in the sugar beet fields anyway. Many actually feared that educating Mexican Americans too much would give them the tools to escape the sugar beet colonias. The district constructed a one-room schoolhouse specifically to educate Mexican Americans of all ages—those who had not already dropped out. Six-year-olds sat in the same classroom as thirteen-year-olds. Soon enough people voiced concerns about the lack of age- appropriate curriculum that the district decided to construct a partition in the middle of the classroom. Elementary aged students were housed on one side and junior high aged students were housed on the other. Rather than send these students to other schools in the district, school officials decided it was best to keep them segregated.85 In most cases, a

Spanish surname was enough to slot a student in a Mexican school. But as Carey

McWilliams pointed out, the “common practice has been simply to assign all children with Spanish or Mexican names to a separate school. Occasionally, the school authorities inspect the children so that the offspring of a Mexican mother whose name may be

O’Shaugnessy will not slip into the wrong school.”86 In their efforts to create and maintain segregated schools, local school officials saw no difference between “Mexicans,”

“Latin Americans,” “Hispanos,” “Spanish,” “Spanish-speaking,” or “Spanish-surnamed.”

84 Anonymous interview, conducted by Rubén Donato, Oct. 1998, quoted in Mexicans and Hispanos in Colorado Schools and Communities, 94.

85 Donato, Mexicans and Hispanos in Colorado Schools and Communities, 71.

86 Carey McWilliams, “Is Your Name Gonzales?” The Nation, Mar. 15, 1947, 302.

47

In 1929, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) was established in Corpus Christi, Texas as an organization dedicated to the advancement of

American citizens of Latin American descent. As an elite, middle-class organization,

LULAC promoted a vision of Mexican-American uplift that, while not explicitly claiming whiteness, promoted whiteness through its philosophy and agenda. Determined to prove their Americanness, LULAC leaders only accepted American citizens and encouraged members to speak English and assimilate into the dominant (white) American way of life.87 As such, they distanced themselves from Mexican nationals and advanced a group identity that privileged their whiteness by clinging to a staunch .88

In fact, they stressed a “Latin American” identity specifically to denote their

Americanness as opposed to Mexicans, who were foreign. The organization never even used the word “Mexican” in its founding documents.89

87 Benjamin Márquez, LULAC: The of a Mexican American Political Organization (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993); Craig A. Kaplowitz, LULAC, Mexican Americans, and National Policy (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2005); and Mario T. García, “Americans All: The Mexican-American Generation and the Politics of Wartime Los Angeles, 1941-1949,” Social Science Quarterly 65 (Jun. 1984): 278-289.

88 Several scholars have persuasively argued that in many arenas “American” was constructed as “white,” the result of long-standing anti-immigrant sentiment, and the advent of immigration restriction and the accompanying state apparatus for enforcing restriction, namely the border patrol. World War I and the Red Scare also contributed to an ideology of Americanness that centered whiteness, , and English- speaking ability. It was also common for people to use “American” and “white” interchangeably, as is best exemplified in the court records of various racial designation trials. “It can be argued,” insists Claire Sheridan, “that the distinction between ‘American’ and ‘white’ disintegrates. If one is white, one is American, as whiteness is the norm. White identity first defines American identity and then is, itself, obscured.” “‘Another White Race: Mexican Americans and the Paradox of Whiteness in Jury Selection,’” Law and History Review 21, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 109-144, quote on 136. Also see Ngai, Impossible Subjects; and Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell; and Ignacio M. Garcia, White but Not Equal: Mexican Americans, Jury Discrimination, and the Supreme Court (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2008).

89 Neil Foley, “Over the Rainbow: Hernandez v. Texas, Brown v. Board of Education, and Black v. Brown,” in Michael A. Olivas, ed. “Colored Men” and “Hombres Aquí”: Hernandez v. Texas and the Emergence of Mexican-American Lawyering (Houston: Arte Püblico Press, University of Houston Press, 2006): 111- 122, especially 112. Cynthia Orozco offers a compelling counter-narrative to this history of LULAC 48

One of the ways LULAC tried to achieve its goals was through litigation.

Dismantling segregated “Mexican” schools was a priority.90 Just one year after it was founded, in 1930, it filed the first legal challenge to the segregation of Mexican

Americans. In Del Rio Independent School District v. Salvatierra, LULAC tried to get a district court to issue an injunction against the school district to end segregation. As the first school segregation case that dealt with Mexican-American students, it set an important precedent. Ruling that school districts could not segregate students based on

“ethnic background” without a consideration of their individual skills, the court also rejected the argument that Mexicans could legally be segregated from “other white races.”91 Nonetheless, the court concluded that the district’s actions did not constitute illegal segregation as the students were being placed in separate schools based on their lack of English-speaking ability and/or because they were the children of migrant families who missed much of the school year. On the surface, the ruling was a victory for LULAC because the court had ruled that Mexican-American children could not be segregated from other white students. The court’s acceptance of the district’s reasons for

through her examination of women in the organization. In their interactions, LULAC women were much more interested in creating intra-racial alliances with Mexican immigrants and their work in their communities, which emphasized families and children, brought them into close contact with immigrant women. No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009).

90 San Miguel, Jr., “Let Them All Take Heed.”

This section on Mexican-American civil rights efforts and the development of the whiteness strategy focuses on Texas and California because these were the major population centers for Mexican Americans in the United States and where most civil rights efforts were initiated between the 1920s and the 1970s. Moreover, nearly all of the school desegregation cases that historians have examined took place in one of these two states.

91 Quoted in Wilson, “Brown Over ‘Other White.’”

49 segregating Mexican-American students, however, was a major blow to LULAC’s efforts to eradicate school segregation and achieve full equality with Anglos.92 After Del Rio, this justification for segregating Mexican American students became even more entrenched in school systems throughout the Southwest. Although Mexican Americans were legally another group, they were culturally incompatible with Anglos based largely on their language differences.93

The first challenge to this system came in 1945 when Gonzalo Mendez filed suit on behalf of his two children and 5,000 other students of Mexican descent who were forced to attend separate schools in Orange County, California. In Mendez v.

Westminster the plaintiffs argued that the school district deliberately segregated Mexican and Mexican-American children into separate schools that were inferior to Anglo schools.94 Mendez brought together a host of different civil rights organizations that were seeking to end racially and ethnically motivated school segregation. The American

Jewish Congress, the Japanese American Citizenship League, the American Civil

Liberties Union, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

(NAACP), and the Attorney General of California all submitted briefs in support of the

92 Wilson, “Brown Over ‘Other White’”; Bowman, “The New Face of School Desegregation”; and Margaret E. Montoya, “A Brief History of Chicana/o School Segregation: One Rational for Affirmative Action,” Berkeley Law Journal 12, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 159-172.

93 Wilson, “Brown Over ‘Other White.’”

94 See Gonzalez, Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation; and Vicki L. Ruiz, “South by Southwest: Mexican Americans and Segregated Schooling, 1900-1950,” OAH Magazine of History 15, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 23-27.

50 plaintiffs.95 Mendez has also been cited by scholars as a major precursor to Brown v

Board of Education, which was filed just a few years later. The NAACP Legal Defense

Fund (LDF), in fact, saw in Mendez a “useful dry run” that gave them the chance to their arguments.96 Prior to this, the LDF had focused its efforts on creating equal schools for black students, the idea being that when forced to actually create equal white and black schools, school districts would be unable to afford the expense and would be forced to integrate. Now black civil rights lawyers were beginning to shift their focus to a complete dismantling of the separate but equal doctrine.97

Although the court ultimately ruled that the school district could not arbitrarily assign Mexican Americans to segregated schools, the court’s justification was problematic for the long-term goals of Mexican-American civil rights activists. The first problem was that Judge Paul McCormick began his opinion by pointing out that Mendez was not a case about racial discrimination. “It is conceded by all parties that there is no question of race discrimination in this action,” he wrote. Rather, “segregation per se is practiced.”98 Although the plaintiffs’ attorney, David Marcus, said several times in his

95 Foley, “Over the Rainbow,” 116.

96 Wilson, “Brown Over ‘Other White.’”

97Jeanne M. Powers & Lirio Patton, “Between Mendez and Brown: Gonzales v. Sheely (1951) and the Legal Campaign Against Segregation,” Law and Social Inquiry 33, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 127-171, especially 137.

For a good discussion on the tenuous relationship between Thurgood Marshall of the LDF and George Sanchez, a prominent researcher and Mexican American civil rights activist who was active in integration efforts, as well as the problems that arose between those trying to eradicate the segregation of black students and those trying to do the same for Mexican-American students, see Foley, Quest for Equality; and Foley, “Over the Rainbow.” Also see Behnken, Fighting Their Own Battles.

98 Mendez v. Westminster, 64 E Supp. 546, quoted in Powers & Patton, “Between Mendez and Brown,” 139.

51 briefs and in his comments during the trial that his clients were being discriminated against because of their ethnic background or heritage, he told Judge McCormick “[W]e do not contend that there is such a thing as the Mexican race. That will eliminate the question of race. We do, however, contend that this adopted procedure of compulsory attendance at these particular districts is based upon the fact that they are of Mexican or

Latin descent.” He concluded, “Mexicans are white.”99

The second problem with the groundwork that Mendez laid was that the court ruled Mexican Americans could not be segregated because there was no state statute that demanded as such. Thus, segregation was unlawful not because it violated the constitution or because it unfairly targeted certain groups; it was unlawful because existing California law only allowed the establishment of separate schools for “Indian children, and children of Chinese, Japanese or Mongolian parentage.”100 This was a severe blow to the NAACP’s efforts because they were hoping to use the ruling in

Mendez to tackle state laws that permitted or required the segregation of black students.

Judge McCormick’s ruling was made on limited grounds, however, making it useless to

LDF lawyers. Although he suggested that separate but equal was probably unconstitutional, his opinion gave further legitimacy to school segregation practices, as long as it was enshrined in state statute. Not only was this bad news for black, Indian and

Asian students, but it was also gave further legal backing to the idea that Mexican

99 It is important to note that these arguments did not come out until the trial, effectively eradicating the usefulness of the briefs submitted by the LDF and diminishing the hopes of black civil rights lawyers that Mendez might set a precedent they could build upon. Reporter’s Transcript, Mendez v. Westminster Jun. 26, 1945, quoted in Powers & Patton, “Between Mendez and Brown,” 141.

100 Mendez v. Westminster, 64 E Supp. (note 5), quoted in Powers & Patton, “Between Mendez and Brown,” 139. 52

Americans were white. The reality of deeply embedded, systemic prejudice against them, perhaps most clearly evident in the creation of segregated “Mexican” schools, did not affect their racial positioning in the eyes of the court.

Jeanne M. Powers and Lirio Patton have shown that Judge McCormick’s seemingly contradictory ruling makes sense when we consider how legalism—the system of rules and precedent that guides the legal system—informed his analysis of the case.

His determination that Mexican Americans were white was a logical decision based on existing legal rules. There was no precedent that allowed for any other reading of

Mexican-American racial identity. The claims of some Mexican Americans that they were white gave further legitimization to this determination.101

When the defendants appealed the decision, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed Judge McCormick’s decision and confirmed the precedent laid down in the Del

Rio case that separate schools for Mexican-American students—based on their “foreign language handicaps”—was a perfectly legitimate, educationally sound practice. The

Appeals Court also more explicitly addressed the District Court ruling that the case was not about racial discrimination. To reach this determination, the court had to racially categorize Mexican Americans. Marking them as white meant that the case was not about constitutional protections because up to that point U.S. courts had ruled that these protections extended only to those who were of a different race than the majority white population. The court struggled in its definition of racial categories, even going so far as to lay out various taxonomies of race and attempting to situate Mexican Americans

101 Powers & Patton, “Between Mendez and Brown,” 143.

53 within them. By doing so, argue Powers and Patton, “Stephens [who wrote the court’s opinion] suggested the indeterminacy of racial categories, yet never questioned the assumption that people could be sorted into racial categories and that legal rights varied across these categories.” [emphasis added]102 As Steven Wilson has argued, “With the

Ninth Circuit’s support for language segregation in Mendez and implied endorsement of segregation as long as it was rooted in statute, Mexican Americans grew dependent on legal arguments that relied heavily on alleged advantages derived from their ‘white’ status.”103

Nonetheless, Mendez was an important victory for Mexican-American civil rights activists in California. They had gotten what they wanted, even though the decision had limited the grounds upon which they could fight future battles over school discrimination.

The decision, however, was only applicable in the Ninth District. After the Appeals decision came down, the Texas Attorney General, Price Daniel, felt it was important enough to issue an advisory memo to all Texas school districts reiterating the basis upon which school officials could and could not segregate Mexican and Mexican-American students. Only those students who were “linguistically deficient” could be assigned to separate schools.104

Even before the Ninth Circuit ruled in Mendez, LULAC began to plan another suit, this time against five school districts near Austin, Texas. Ten Mexican American

102 Powers & Patton, “Between Mendez and Brown,” 147.

103 Wilson, “Brown Over ‘Other White.’”

104 San Miguel, Jr., Let Them All Take Heed, 120. Also see Wilson, “Brown Over ‘Other White.’”

54 parents sued, arguing that these districts segregated pupils of Mexican descent from “so- called white or Anglo American” pupils based “solely on the basis of Mexican ancestry.”105 Delgado v. Bastrop Independent School District was decided in 1948 when

Judge Ben C. Rice ruled that the segregation of students of Mexican descent was illegal because it arbitrarily discriminated against them. He did not condemn all segregation on the basis of language differences. Rather, he ruled that these five school districts had no scientific basis for determining each child’s level of English proficiency and thus their automatic placement of children of Mexican descent into separate schools was in violation of the law. If the schools used “scientifically standardized” tests to determine each child’s proficiency, then the practice of segregated schools based on language difference was perfectly legitimate. The Texas State Superintendent of Public Instruction announced shortly thereafter that any school with separate educational facilities for

English deficient students would institute the Inter-American Test in Oral English in compliance with Delgado. He also expressed confidence that the schools would fairly administer the tests and would refrain from prejudicial behavior towards any student.

This had little effect: most Mexican-American students continued to be assigned to separate schools, regardless of their English-speaking skills.106

The case also highlights the evolving whiteness strategy of Mexican-American civil rights activists who sought relief from the courts. In their brief to the court in

Delgado, the attorneys for the plaintiffs laid out two key arguments. First, they pointed

105 Complaint, Delgado v. Bastrop, Civil Action No. 388, 9, 10; cited in Powers & Patton, “Between Mendez and Brown,” 149.

106 San Miguel, Jr., Let Them All Take Heed; and Wilson, “Brown Over ‘Other White.’”

55 out that under Texas law, there was no requirement to segregate Mexican-American students. Second, prior decisions that protected segregation, such as Plessy v. Ferguson, were not applicable to cases involving Mexican Americans because “those cases uphold segregation of different races; Mexican-Americans are of the same race as Anglo-

Americans.”107 Using the Ninth Circuit Court’s ruling in Mendez to buttress their argument, the attorneys pointed out that states could not segregate any group of people unless state law allowed it. Under Texas law, the schools were required to segregate black students only or, in their formulation, “children of a race different from the white race.”108

In trying to assert their claims the attorneys relied heavily on case law, which declared that Mexican Americans were white. Mexican-American civil rights lawyers had tried to establish racial discrimination in other cases, but the courts were not receptive to their claims. For example, just a year earlier a Texas man had tried to overturn his death penalty conviction by arguing that his case had not been decided by a jury of his peers, the jury having been composed of Anglos only. His appeal was thrown out by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals when it determined that as person of Spanish descent, he was a member of the white race. Because the Fourteenth Amendment applied to race discrimination only, not nationality, he had no case.109

107 Plaintiffs’ Brief, Delgado v. Bastrop, 1947, 1, quoted in Powers & Patton, “Between Mendez and Brown,” 150.

108 Plaintiffs’ Brief, Delgado v. Bastrop, 1947, 2, quoted in Powers & Patton, “Between Mendez and Brown,” 150.

109 Salazar v. State, 193 S.W.2d, cited in Powers & Patton, “Between Mendez and Brown,” 151; Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell, 280-281; Garcia, White but Not Equal, 84-95.

56

In 1951Aticeto Sanchez appealed his murder conviction on the same basis. There were no Mexican-American grand juror commissioners or grand jurors in Fort Bend

County, near Houston, where he had been convicted, he argued, and thus he had not received a fair trial. According to the brief submitted by his attorneys, James DeAnda and John Herrera, this fact was the consequence of “a systemic, continual, and uninterrupted practice in Fort Bend County of discriminating against the Mexican

Americans as a race, and people of Mexican extraction and ancestry as a class.”

[emphasis added]110 Their strategy reflected both their long-standing experiences with racial discrimination in the Southwest and their continued effort to obtain and hold onto the benefits of whiteness. They indicated that even though they believed they were white, they were a different class of white—a white ethnic group. Because Anglos thought of them as a separate race and treated them as such, then the court should recognize that social reality and grant them the relief they sought.

Just as in Salazar, the appeals court rejected their argument, stating that Mexican

Americans “are not a separate race but are white people of Spanish descent, as has often been said by this court. We find no ground for discussing the question further.”111 Other attempts to establish racial discrimination against Mexican Americans had led to similar results. Mexican Americans thus wore a “Caucasian cloak” that made it very easy for state authorities to discriminate against them without the fear of judicial intervention.112

110 Quoted from Wilson, “Brown Over ‘Other White.’”

111 Quoted from Wilson, “Brown Over ‘Other White.”

112 Ariela J. Gross, “‘The Caucasian Cloak’: Mexicans Americans and the Politics of Whiteness in the Twentieth-Century Southwest,” Georgetown Law Journal 95, no. 2 (Jan. 2007): 337-392; Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell. 57

Ignacio Garcia has perceptively argued that the racial segregation of Mexican Americans in Texas was upheld by “both allow[ing] and deny[ing] Mexican Americans their whiteness.” Segregation worked precisely because Mexican-American whiteness was denied in certain areas—the labor market, the political arena, the schools and public accommodations, for example—and upheld in the courts.113

This presented a major problem for Mexican Americans who were trying to eliminate discrimination. Their adoption of the whiteness strategy makes sense when we consider it in the context of their past efforts at attacking discrimination and established legal precedent, which relied on a black-white understanding of race. Of course their actions and strategies, even the way they conceived of their own racial identities, were always the result of the way others racialized them. Even as some Mexican Americans were trying to claim whiteness to gain social inclusion in their communities, they were arguing in the courts that they experienced racial discrimination, insisting that Anglos treated them as nonwhite. When that strategy did not work, they began to claim they were white in order to win legal recognition of their plight while still foregrounding their belief that Anglos were racist against them.114 This is what LULAC tried to achieve in

Delgado. Ironically, when the organization’s lawyers cited Salazar to bolster its claims to whiteness, they were actually using negative civil rights case law to support their civil rights efforts. Salazar had lost his claim and jury discrimination against Mexican

113 Garcia, White but Not Equal, 81.

114 Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell, 286.

58

Americans continued unabated.115 According to the dictates of whiteness, however, the lawyers felt it made sense.

Whatever the courts said, school districts continued to segregate Mexican-

American students on the basis of their perceived language deficiencies. This should have persuaded civil rights advocates that the whiteness strategy was not worth pursuing because it was not achieving their ultimate goal: the elimination of separate “Mexican” schools. Instead, they continued to pursue it, partly because they saw no other way to move forward and partly because securing whiteness was an important project. Rejecting whiteness would have been tantamount to rejecting full American citizenship at a particular historical moment—immediately after World War II—when they felt it was just outside their grip. It also would have been an incredibly risky strategy to reject whiteness in the pre-Brown period. The courts, after all, had already affirmed a state’s right to segregate according to race.

A major shift occurred in 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled in Hernandez v.

Texas. The case was almost identical to Sanchez. Pete Hernandez was convicted of murder in 1951 by a jury that included no Mexican Americans. His case was appealed to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals by DeAnda and Herrera, who were now joined by

Carlos Cadena and Gustavo “Gus” Garcia. They were backed by LULAC and the

American G.I. Forum. The attorneys used the same strategy they had used in Sanchez, this time extending their argument by claiming that because Hernandez had not been allowed due process, he was being denied equal protection under the law. To support this claim, they cited the Supreme Court decision in Norris v. (1935), which stated

115 Powers & Patton, “Between Mendez and Brown.” 59 that the exclusion of African Americans from juries because of their race or color denied

African-American defendants equal protection of the law and was a violation of the

Fourteenth Amendment.116

The court would have none of it. As Steven Wilson points out, the Texas Court of

Criminal Appeals had heard a case very similar to Hernandez a decade earlier and in its opinion had highlighted the difference between race and nationality, maintaining that until the Supreme Court ruled “that nationality and race bear the same relation” they had to rule that state bias based on national-origin discrimination was not a denial of equal protection.117 In Hernandez the court affirmed the earlier decision, ruling that Norris did not apply in this case because, once again, Mexican Americans were white. In their opinion the judges cited a case they had heard earlier in which they pointed out that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applied to two groups only, whites and blacks. Irritated that this issue kept coming up in their court, the judges even remarked, “no member of the Mexican nationality challenges that statement [that they were white].” They seemed to mock Hernandez’s lawyers for trying to argue they were a

“special class” of whites who should be granted a “special privilege”—the right to a trial by jury that included people of their nationality.118

116 The case arose from the rape conviction of Clarence Norris, one of the nine “” who had been accused of raping two white women in 1931. Norris was convicted by an all-white jury, which the Supreme Court overturned. Wilson, “Brown Over ‘Other White’”; and Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell.

117 Wilson, “Brown Over ‘Other White.”

118 In their brief, DeAnda and Herrera had tried to bolster their argument that Norris applied to Mexican Americans by saying that if the court did not apply Norris, then the Supreme Court’s decision was “tantamount to extending ‘special benefits’ to blacks.” Wilson, “Brown Over “Other White.’”

60

Hernandez’s legal team appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, marking the first time the nation’s highest court heard a case that dealt with the civil rights of Mexican

Americans. The lawyers pursued the same strategy they had used in the lower court, this time focusing their energies on providing evidence to back up their claim that most

Texans viewed them as another race and treated them as if they were another race.119

When Herrera spoke about the discrimination Mexican Americans faced in Jackson

County, he described the bathroom signs in the county courthouse where Hernandez had been convicted; above one bathroom the sign was blank, while above the other, a sign read “Colored Men” and “Hombres Aqui.”120 Clearly, Anglos in Texas viewed Mexican

Americans as an inferior race. The defendants countered by reiterating, “There are only two classes—white and Negro—within the contemplation of the Fourteenth

Amendment.”121

In a landmark victory, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that in Texas,

Mexican Americans were treated as “a distinct class.” Its opinion, written by Chief

Justice Earl Warren, pointed out the harsh discrimination Mexican Americans faced in

Texas while simultaneously reinforcing their whiteness. This was exactly what

Hernandez’s lawyers and those backing him had wanted. They had gained official recognition of their second-class status while also bolstering their claims to whiteness.

119 See Sheridan, “‘Another White Race.’”

120 Garcia, White but Not Equal; Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell, 288. For more analysis of Hernandez, see the edited volume, Michael A. Olivas, ed. “Colored Men” and “Hombres Aqui”: Hernandez v. Texas and the Emergence of Mexican-American Lawyering (Houston: Arte Püblico Press, University of Houston Press, 2006).

121 Quoted from Wilson, “Brown Over ‘Other White.’”

61

As a result, Mexican American civil rights lawyers became firmly wedded to the “other white” argument.122

As several scholars have noted, it is telling that the Supreme Court was considering Hernandez as it was considering Brown v. Board of Education. Both cases were about the denial of equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment and both plaintiffs were seeking the eradication of state-sanctioned discrimination. They even used similar arguments, with one critical difference. African Americans linked the discrimination they experienced to race, while Mexican Americans linked it to ethnicity.123 Operating within the Black/White Paradigm, neither the plaintiffs nor the justices saw a reason to connect the two cases, even though there were such striking similarities and several of the people involved in both cases had worked together on a broader civil rights agenda. Chief Justice Warren even citied the segregation of Mexican-

American students in Texas schools as proof that Texans viewed them as “a distinct class.” Yet this did not enter into the court’s consideration of segregation practices that separated black and white students.124

Brown was a fundamentally important decision because it reversed the Court’s doctrine of separate but equal and laid the groundwork for the eradication of Jim Crow in the South and later, de facto segregation in the North and West. But Mexican Americans were left out of its framework, partly as a result of their “other white” strategy and partly

122 Wilson, “Brown Over ‘Other White’”; and Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell, 288.

123 Bowman, “The New Face of School Desegregation”; Wilson, “Brown Over ‘Other White’”; Foley, “Over the Rainbow;” and Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell.

124 Bowman, “The New Face of School Desegregation,” 1776.

62 as a result of the pervasive black/white binary. Consequently, Mexican-American civil rights activists saw no reason to invoke Brown in subsequent school segregation battles.

In Hernandez v. Driscoll Consolidated Independent School District (1957), the first post-

Brown case that dealt with Mexican-American students, DeAnda represented a plaintiff class that sued the district for automatically placing its students in segregated classrooms within the same school during the first and second grades. Students who did not speak

English were also required to stay in first grade for four years before they would be advanced to the second grade, where they would also spend several years.

Once again, DeAnda framed his argument around the “other white” strategy.

Rather than cite Brown, he cited Hernandez to claim that the district was denying equal protection to Mexican Americans. Because Mexican-American students were “members of the Caucasian or Caucasoid race,” the school district had no right to segregate them.

The only reason he even mentioned Brown in his initial memorandum was to note it was irrelevant for his case. Brown, after all, was about racial segregation and Driscoll was not. 125 Moreover, DeAnda did not challenge all language segregation. He condemned that which arbitrarily placed all Mexican Americans, regardless of their English proficiency, into separate classrooms. Sometimes, he reasoned, it was necessary to keep students apart from the others if they needed special attention and time to learn English.

The only way that could be determined was by a test, as had been ordered in Delgado.

Thus, DeAnda pursued a fairly moderate path that was perfectly in line with the philosophy and activism of the American G.I. Forum and LULAC. In a sense, this was

125 Wilson, “Brown Over ‘Other White’”; Foley, “Over the Rainbow.”

63 more than a legal challenge to segregated classrooms for Mexican-American students; it was also about finding legitimization as American citizens. In the post-World War II period, this “barrio Americanism” defined the activism of middle-class Mexican

Americans like those pursuing school desegregation litigation.126 This mindset, which promoted social uplift, assimilation, and patriotism, found its most salient feature in its appeal to whiteness and the subsequent development of the whiteness strategy. Along the way, Mexican Americans helped cement a “Faustian pact with whiteness” that promised them the benefits of whiteness while strengthening the black/white color line and upholding anti-black racism.127 While this pact did give some more privileged and light- skinned Mexican Americans the benefits of full inclusion as American citizens over the course of the post-World War II period, it did not have the intended result. Full inclusion continued to elude Mexican Americans in the Southwest. In an ironic twist that illustrates the power of race—however illogical, malleable, and contradictory—Mexican-

American appeals to whiteness helped to reinforce a system that treated them as second- class citizens and locked them into a legal strategy that provided school districts with the ammunition they needed to continue and even expand the segregation of Mexican-

American students.

126 Garcia, White, but Not Equal. Also see Thomas Guglielmo, “Fighting for Caucasian Rights: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and the Transnational Struggle for Civil Rights in World War II Texas,” Journal of American History 92, no. 4 (March 2006): 1212-1227; and Lorena Oropeza, ¡Raza Sí! ¡Guerra No!: Chicano Protest and Patriotism during the Viet Nam Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

127 Neil Foley, “Becoming Hispanic: Mexican Americans and the Faustian Pact with Whiteness,” in Reflexiones 1997: New Directions in Mexican American Studies, ed. Neil Foley (Austin: Center for Mexican American Studies, University of Texas, 1998): 53-70.

64

In Denver, the legacy of Mexican-American racialization played out in complex ways among the city’s multiracial population. In the decades following World War II, the number of Mexican Americans and African Americans grew exponentially, forcing different groups of people into struggles to define both their space and place in the increasingly diverse and modernizing city. As the racial geography of the city transformed and the metropolis expanded, white, black, and Mexican-American residents came into competition with one another over limited resources and access to local decision-makers and power brokers. As the next chapter shows, these changes wrought multi-layered racial tensions and confrontations that exploded with the call to desegregate

Denver schools.

65

Chapter 2

Race Relations in the Mile High City, 1945-1970

In 1948, white Denverites were asked what they thought about black life in the city. Were African Americans satisfied with their conditions? At the heart of the question was the issue of racial strife. In a city like Denver, far removed from the South, there simply was not the same level of racial conflict. Thus, when white city residents responded that they thought African Americans were satisfied, they were also marking their city a sort of racial haven. An astounding 50 percent said they were satisfied, while another 33 percent said they did not know. Only 17 percent said that African Americans were not happy.128 Clearly, the white perception was that Denver did not have a race problem.

Seven years later, in 1955, the city was still celebrating its ability to transcend race when the Rocky Mountain News proclaimed the Mile High City a cultural and humane frontier. Describing a recent study conducted on human relations in the city, the article credited residents for their progressive views on race related matters. “This is

128 “A Report of Minorities in Denver with Recommendations by the Mayor’s Interim Survey Committee on Human Relations,” c.a. 1948, 18, Denver Commission on Community Relations (abbreviated hereafter as DCCR), WH903, Denver Public Library, Western History and Genealogy (abbreviated hereafter as DPL-WHG), Denver, CO, Box 1, Folder 1.

66 heartening news but not unexpected,” the article proclaimed, “because Denver, by tradition and for nearly a century, has the solid reputation of being a city reasonably free of narrow views on minorities.”129 Yet shortly before these two assessments, in 1947, Denver Mayor Quigg Newton established a Mayor’s Committee on

Human Relations (MCHR) to investigate allegations of discrimination in the city.

Newton had been pressured by the Urban League and the NAACP to create such a commission. The city needed an apparatus, civil rights leaders urged, to deal with the increasing numbers of complaints and the expanding population of the city.130 The

Committee later became the Commission on Community Relations (CCR), a permanent advisory council to the mayor. Throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, it stood as a buffer between the city administration and increasingly vocal Denver residents as they tried to navigate the city’s changing demographics, calls for civil rights, heightened racial tensions, political dissidence, and eventually, school desegregation efforts that put their city in the national spotlight.

129 “Toward the Full American Dream,” Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO), May 12, 1955, 44.

130 Phil Goodstein, Denver in Our Time: Volume I: Big Money in the Big City: A People’s History of the Modern Mile High City (New Social Publications, 1999), 36.

67

Migration and Growth: The Birth of a Modern, Urban Metropolis

Between the end of World War II and 1970, Metropolitan Denver’s population expanded tremendously, from 612,128 to 1,229,798.131 During and after the war, many people migrated to the area to take up jobs in the city’s newly created government sector or in new military industries. Lowry Air Force Base and Fitzsimmons Army Hospital employed thousands. When the Air Force Finance Center relocated from Saint Louis in

1951, the number of migrants increased further.132 Even when the last shots were fired in

World War II, national defense spending remained high, creating new job opportunities in bomber modification hangers at Denver’s Stapleton Airfield and the newly established

Rocky Mountain arsenal.133 Bomb making and missile plants, including the Glenn L.

Martin Company—later Lockheed Martin—moved to the outskirts of Denver. Several other military contractors, including Rockwell International, Honeywell, Litton Industries and Kaman Corporation, among others, opened shop in the area. Even Coors beer company got into the business of making military weapons.134

During the first decade after the war, therefore, the Denver metro area was an up and coming metropolis. In fact, it experienced the third largest increase of any major city

131 Goodstein, Denver in Our Time, 32; Population Figures, U.S. Census, received from the Denver Regional Council of Governments (DRCOG), n.d., William McNichols Papers, DPL-WHG, WH1015 Box 51, Folder 35.

132 Frederick D. Watson, “Removing the Barricades from the Northern Schoolhouse Door: School Desegregation in Denver,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado, 1993),” 9.

133 Robert L. Perkin, “: An Informal History of Denver and the Rocky Mountain News (1959): 571-573. Mr. Perkin was a Denver news columnist.

134 Phil Goodstein, Denver in Our Time, 16.

68 west of the .135 Growth such as this was not un-like other northern and western cities, where a diverse body of Americans migrated into the expanding industrial, military and civil service sectors, causing one of the more profound demographic shifts in

American history.

Much of that growth came from increasing black and Mexican-American populations. Before the war Denver’s black population never exceeded 7,000 people but by 1950, there were 15,901 African Americans calling Denver home.136 By 1960, that number almost doubled to 30,251, about six percent of the city’s population.137 Between

1950 and 1960, the Mexican-American population more than doubled from 19,009 people to slightly over 40,000.138 By 1970, Denver’s total population was 514,678, almost 28 percent of which was nonwhite. African Americans had grown to 9.1 percent of the total population, while Mexican Americans made up 16.8 percent.139 The growth

135 Perkin, “The First Hundred Years,” 575; also Tom I. Romero, II, “The Tri-Ethnic Dilemma: Race, Equality, and the Fourteenth Amendment in the American West,” Temple Political & Civil Rights Law Review (Spring 2004): 12.

136 Watson, “Removing the Barricades,” 7;Phil Goodstein, DIA and Other Scams: Volume 2 of Denver in Our Time: A People’s History of the Modern Mile High City (Denver: New Social Publications, 2000), 20. The total black population of the state of Colorado was 20,177. “The Spanish American in Denver,” internal report, c.a. 1964, 24, CCR, Box 6, Folder 1.

137 Goodstein, DIA and Other Scams, 20. The total black population in Colorado in 1960 was 39,992. “The Spanish American in Denver,” 24, CCR, Box 6, Folder 1.

138 Metropolitan Council for Community Service, Inc., “Report on the Latin American Research and Service Agency,” May 1964, 2, Latin American Research and Service Agency Collection (hereafter LARASA Papers), WH1842, DPL-WHG, Box 48, Folder 20.

139 The entire metro area had a total population of 1,229,798, of which 4.1 percent was black and 11.3 percent was Mexican American. The total minority population of Metro Denver was 16.8 percent. Population Figures, U.S. Census, received from the Denver Regional Council of Governments (DRCOG), n.d., McNichols Papers, Box 51, Folder 35.

69 of these nonwhite populations increased racial tensions in the city over the postwar period.

One of the major reasons racial tensions increased was because the black and

Mexican American populations had almost no political representation in the city and thus no one to speak for their needs and priorities. The one place they had some representation was on the Commission on Community Relations. Yet even on that commission, middle class whites dominated both as appointed officials and as staff, at least until the late 1960s. As an advisory council, moreover, the Commission generally served the needs of the mayor and, in particular, the Democratic Party, over the needs of underrepresented communities in the city. Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, for example, the Commission and its director, Minoru Yasui, were constantly accused of playing party politics and fostering a belief in gradualism that angered many up and coming activists, particularly young African Americans and Mexican Americans.140

Yasui was accused of favoring Japanese community organizations and harboring anti- black and anti-Hispano prejudices. In the spring of 1970 two Mexican-American

Commission consultants resigned in opposition to these perceived prejudices and denounced the Commission as nothing more than a patronage machine.141 The liberal

140 These frustrations are revealed in CCR meeting minutes, internal memos and correspondence throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, as well as city and community newspapers ( including the Denver Post, the Rocky Mountain News and the West Side Recorder), and organizational newsletters. Phil Goodstein also addresses these conflicts in DIA and Other Scams, 5-42. Also see Christine Marín, A Spokesman of the Mexican American Movement: Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales and the Fight for Chicano Liberation, 1966-1972 (: R & E Research Associates, Inc., 1977).

141 Letter from Roger Cisneros to Mayor William McNichols, May 25, 1970, McNichols Papers, Box 51, Folder 16; Letter from Armando Atencio to Mayor William McNichols, May 25, 1970, McNichols Papers, Box 51, Folder 16.

70 establishment backed Yasui and the actions of the Commission, insisting that it was helping to eradicate racism in the city.142

Yet even Commission members began to see their irrelevance to the community and their lack of representation, at least in terms of particular socioeconomic and age groups. In 1970, a majority of members passed a resolution that called for a change in the composition of the board. Fifty percent of the board must be composed of members from Denver’s poor community or youth, the resolution said. By 1970 a growing number of the poor and youth in the city were black or Mexican American.143 Regardless of this reform, the Commission never became the harbinger of change that some thought it could be. The Commission was one vehicle through which minority voices could find solutions, but because of its limited advisory role and its dependency on the Mayor’s office for its budget—and thus its existence—it ultimately failed to provide the support and representation that were needed to ensure equality and fairness in municipal affairs. In terms of the city power structure at large, black and Mexican-Americans Denverites had little voice.

At the center of the power structure was the Denver City Council. Before World

War II, the Council was little more than a rubber stamp on the actions of the mayor, who

At the time, the Japanese and Japanese-American population in Denver was approximately 4, 725, less than one percent of the total population. Eleanor G. Crow, “A Time for Change and Challenge: Civil Rights in Colorado, 1966-1969,” Colorado Civil Rights Commission, Dec. 1969.

142 Letter to Mayor McNichols from Dan Brown, Chairman, Cooperative Endeavor, June 5, 1970, McNichols Papers, Box 51, Folder 15; Letter to Dan Brown from W.H. McNichols, June 9, 1970, McNichols Papers, Box 51, Folder 15; Letter to Mr. Min Yasui from Gerald L. Bader, Jr., June 5, 1970, McNichols Papers, Box 51, Folder 15.

143 Resolution Passed by a Committee of Residents of the Community of Denver—Participants in the Fall- Winter Conference of the Commission on Community Relations, Jan. 9, 1970, McNichols Papers, Box 51, Folder 1.

71 held most of the power in determining city affairs. In 1947, city reformers pushed for a

Charter Convention, where delegates amended the city’s founding constitution in an effort to eliminate machine politics in Denver, what they called “bossism.”144 Bossism thrived in the city, mostly run by the Democratic Party and the “17th Street Crowd,” business interests with strong connections to both and Wall Street.145 The new charter revoked some of the mayor’s power and gave it to the nonpartisan city council. The Council consisted of nine members elected from nine districts representing equally populated areas. It was responsible for creating city ordinances and legislating city affairs. The Mayor reported to the Council but had complete control over their administration in terms of who they appointed to various city posts.

In 1971, the Council was expanded to thirteen members, eleven elected from equally populated districts and two elected at-large. This change was the direct result of pressure from black, Mexican-American and poor residents who argued they had no representation in city politics. Mexican Americans, for example, were so dispersed throughout the city electing a Mexican American to the Council was extremely difficult, especially with low voter turnout and the tense racial climate of the 1960s and early

144 “Charter Convention of Vast Importance,” Rocky Mountain News, May 31, 1947, 12; “Demand for New Charter Climaxes Long Denver Fight against Bossism,” Denver Post, June 1, 1947, 1; and “Speer Amendment Gave Mayor Great Power,” Denver Post, June 3, 1947, 10. In 1913, Progressive reformers instituted a commission form of government with a nonpartisan council. The nonpartisanship of the council was meant to curtail machine politics in the city. By 1916, however, Democratic Boss Robert Speer was elected mayor and he pushed through the Speer Amendment, which ended the short-lived commission government and established a mayor-council government with power centralized in the Office of the Mayor. The Amendment did retain a nonpartisan council, though it had little authority. Goodstein, Denver in Our Time, 11.

145 Goodstein, Denver in Our Time, 28-35, 38.

72

1970s.146 In 1939, Denver elected its first Mexcian-American city council member,

James Fresques, who also served as Council President from 1946-1947 and again in

1950-1951. Elvin Caldwell, the first black Council member, was elected in 1955.

Although these important milestones had been passed in previous years, the need for dedicated representation for these communities persisted. Both Fresques and Caldwell were Denver professionals, on the upper cusp of the middle class. Both were light- skinned. Both were city power brokers: the exception, not the rule. Fresques was a

Republican and Caldwell was a Democrat, but both preached the philosophy of accommodation and partisan politics above meeting the demands of the Mexican

American and black communities.147

The Board of Education, which oversaw the Denver Public Schools, operated under a similar dynamic. The Board consisted of seven members, elected from the city on an at-large basis. Although Mexican Americans wanted a few at-large seats on the

City Council, in general the at-large nature of the Board of Education excluded them in favor of affluent whites who were elected to fill the vast majority of seats. Because there was no consideration for districts, there was no consideration for sections of town with heavy concentrations of black or Mexican-American voters.148 Poor Denverites had almost no chance of electing someone from their neighborhoods. It took active

146 The need for Hispano representation on the Council was discussed thoroughly by the CCR, as were various strategies to achieve the desired representation. Memo to Commission on Community Relations from Min Yasui, Executive Director, re: 1970 Re-apportionment of Councilmanic Districts, Sep. 12, 1969, McNichols Papers, Box 51, Folder 10.

147 Goodstein, DIA and Other Scams.

148 By the mid- to late-1960s there were identifiable Mexican-American neighborhoods, as the city’s Mexican-American population grew and white Denver residents moved to the growing Denver suburbs. 73 organizing and strong voter turnout on behalf of these populations to get one of their own elected. It finally paid off in 1968 when the first black board member, Rachel Noel, was elected. A Mexican-American board member was not elected until 1971, when Bert

Gallegos won on an anti-busing platform. As a result, the Denver Board of Education was composed entirely of whites from the middle- and upper-classes until 1968, a major factor in the deliberate maintenance of segregation in the city’s schools.

Long before 1968, however, Denver was plagued with racial problems. From the city’s beginnings, Denver residents sought to segregate its small African American community.149 Although Jim Crow was not institutionalized in Denver—in fact, the

Colorado State Constitution outlawed segregation—black residents knew there were certain places they could not go. Although the black population was relatively small in the first half of the twentieth-century, Denver was clearly a segregated city.150

Segregation was maintained not through legal mandates but by informal practices that reinforced racial boundaries within city space. On the eve of World War I African

Americans had begun settling in the Five Points neighborhood in northeast Denver, an area that at that time was only about three square miles (see Appendix I).151

Here a thriving black community developed with black owned restaurants, bars, clubs, theatres, and other businesses, in addition to schools and churches. As in other

149 Lyle Dorsett, The Queen City: A History of Denver, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Pruett Publishing Company, 1985), 103-107; James Harvey, “Negroes in Colorado,” (M.A. Thesis, University of Denver, 1941), 41-67; Lionel Lyles, “An Historical-Urban Geographical Analysis of Black Neighborhood Development in Denver,” (Ph.D. Diss., University of Colorado, 1977), 75-77; George Wayne, “Negro Migration and Colonization in Colorado: 1870-1930,” Journal of the West 15 (Jan. 1976).

150 Goodstein, DIA and Other Scams, 12; Lyles, “An Historical-Urban Geographical Analysis.”

151 Watson, “Removing the Barricades,” 7-8.

74 black communities, churches became the center of community life. The Shorter African

Methodist Episcopal (AME) and Zion Baptist churches, which had been established in the late nineteenth century, attracted more and more congregants as Five Points grew.

Black Denverites formed branches of the NAACP in 1915, the Colored Citizens

Association in 1919 (which eventually became the Denver Urban League in 1946) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1941, as well as other community organizations such as the East Denver Improvement Association and the Denver Colored

Civic Association.152 For most of the twentieth-century ten different black publications were in print, highlighting Denver as the black capital of the Mountain West region and connecting the city’s African-American population with events around the country. The most prominent, the Colorado Statesman, was published from 1895 until 1961, when it shut down under increasing attacks that it was too conservative and that its focus on moral uplift through hard work and patience was outdated.153 The Denver Blade and the

Denver Star, among others, also appeared during the postwar period.

Denver’s black community was distinct from those in other major northern cities, in that the initial migration in the postwar period was largely middle class. People transferred with their military or civil service sector jobs or relocated to fill the high demand for such workers. Over time successive generations of African Americans met with job discrimination and found it difficult to maintain middle class status. But the stream of migrants into Denver after the war was different from those heading to cities

152 Goodstein, DIA and Other Scams, 12, 39-40; Crow, “A Time for Change and Challenge.”

153 Goodstein, DIA and Other Scams, 40.

75 like Chicago or . Denver’s therefore looked quite different from these other cities. Poverty was a mainstay in some areas, but there were other areas of Five Points that would be almost unrecognizable as a ghetto. There were no multi-story high rise projects: public housing consisted of smaller apartment buildings and a large number of single-family dwellings. The fact that Five Points appeared so much more prosperous, in relative terms, than other cities’ poorer areas was one of the major reasons many white

Denver citizens did not see a race problem.

The twentieth-century history of Mexican Americans in Denver is slightly different. During the first half of the twentieth century, they tended to be dispersed throughout the city. According to many more prosperous Mexican Americans,

Colorado’s population of Spanish speaking residents were mostly descendants of nuevomejicanos, or New Mexicans, and had lived in the area for generations, although by the late 1940s Mexican braceros were making their way to the beet fields and other agricultural jobs in both southern and northern Colorado.154 Some of these workers ended up in Denver when they found unfavorable conditions in migrant camps. But most migrant workers who came to northern Colorado were recruited from the southern half of the state and New Mexico, rather than Mexico.155 The Great Western Sugar Company, desiring a cheap, vulnerable work force, recruited tens of thousands of Mexican and

154 Arthur Campa, “Mutual Understanding,” speech delivered at the Sixth Annual Cultural Workshop, Denver, CO, Nov. 2, 1961, LARASA Papers, Box 48, Folder 20; Arthur Campa, “Culture Patterns of the Spanish Speaking Community,” n.d., LARASA Papers, Box 48, Folder 20; Joanne Reckler, “Winner of Human Relations Award Proud of His Heritage,” Rocky Mountain News, Feb. 7, 1965, 11; Crow, “A Time for Change and Challenge.” See also “The Spanish American in Denver,” CCR, Box 6, Folder 1.

155 Fred O. Ford, “History of Migrant Labor in Colorado,” 60th Annual Conference of Social Welfare, Panel: Migrant Labor, Oct. 11, 1950, 3, CCR Papers, Box 5, Folder 20.

76

Mexican-American workers starting in the second decade of the twentieth century.

According to one historian of Denver, the sugar giant deliberately over-recruited workers from the Southwest and Mexico to keep labor costs as low as possible.156

From the 1910s onward many migrant laborers who were dissatisfied with their employers began to relocate to the city. During World War II, the number of rural

Mexican-American workers moving to Denver increased, many finding work on the railroads and other industries in and around the city.157 Even though there was some migration from Mexico, the Colorado Civil Rights Commission reported in 1969 that only about 1,500 of the state’s approximately 200,000 Mexican Americans were foreign born.158

During the 1950s, as the city’s Mexican-American population expanded through natural growth and in-migration, they became more concentrated in the western part of the city. The West Side neighborhood was about 160 city blocks and housed more than

15,000 people by the mid-1960s. It was the prototypical inner-city neighborhood that had once been predominantly white, but by 1970 had become predominantly Mexican

American, with 62.1 percent of its population Mexican American, 1.9 percent black, and

36 percent white. This was in stark contrast to the city as a whole, which was 16.8 percent Mexican American, 9.1 percent black, and 74.1 percent white.159 The West

156 Goodstein, DIA and Other Scams, 123-124.

157 Ford, “History of Migrant Labor in Colorado,” 5, CCR Papers, Box 5, Folder 20.

158 Crow, “A Time for Change and Challenge.”

159 U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of Population and Housing: 1970, Census Tracts, Final Report, PHC (1)—56, Denver Colorado SMSA, 1, 15-16, 132; George Rivera, Jr., Aileen F. Lucero, & Richard 77

Side’s transition was the result of a number of factors, including housing segregation that forced some middle-class Mexican Americans to remain in the barrio, the low socioeconomic status of most Mexican Americans, and the out-migration of whites into other areas of the city, particularly South Denver and the expanding suburbs of the

Denver metropolitan area, including Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder and Jefferson counties.160 In addition to the West Side, Mexican Americans also became concentrated in other areas in the 1950s and 1960s. In the central city area near Capital Hill, many

Mexican American families settled among or near black families. Curtis Park, adjacent to Five Points, housed mostly low-income Mexican Americans (see Appendix I).161 In comparison to African Americans, however, Mexican Americans were not as residentially concentrated.

In the same way that African Americans established civil rights and community organizations, so did Mexican Americans. Mutualistas, or mutual aid societies, were among the first groups to form. These offered support and financial assistance in times of hardship to participating families.162 Denver chapters of the G.I. Forum and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) formed during the 1940s. Later, several

Castro, “Internal Colonialism in Colorado: The Westside Coalition and Barrio Control,” in La Gente: Hispano History and Life in Colorado (Denver, CO: Colorado Historical Society, 1998): 203-221, 207.

160 The Denver Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA) was comprised of Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Denver, and Jefferson counties. Commission on Community Relations, “A Community Profile: The City of Denver, Colorado,” Nov. 1969, 1, McNichols Papers, Box 51, Folder 1.

161 Memo, Commission on Community Relations, n.d., CCR Papers, Box 1, Folder 18, 2; Goodstein, DIA and Other Scams, 178.

162 Several mutualistas existed in Denver, including Alianza Hispano America Lodge, Alianza Service Club, Sociedad de Mexico, Sociedad Protectora, and the Spanish-American Citizens Association. Document, re: efforts to organize and help in Denver, c.a. 1950, CCR Papers, Box 2, Folder 16.

78 groups were established to aid the Mexican-American community in the city, including the Latin American Research and Service Agency (LARASA) and the Latin American

Educational Foundation (LAEF), both of which supported research on Denver’s Mexican

American community, promoted awareness of the problems they faced and offered assistance and guidance to policymakers and individual Mexican Americans. During the late 1960s, the West Side Coalition, the , and the Crusade for Justice all formed as a part of the burgeoning Chicano Movement.163

Employment

Although both Mexican Americans and African Americans were established in the city by the 1950s, having created strong community ties and various social and civic organizations, both groups struggled to obtain equal access to housing, jobs and education. They also competed with each other in the employment and housing markets, a fact that exacerbated tensions between the two groups. According to the Colorado Civil

Rights Commission, in fact, high tensions were actually the consequence of competition between these two groups for access to decent jobs and city resources.164

163 Goodstein, DIA and Other Scams, 126-167; Metropolitan Council for Community Service, Inc., “Report on the Latin American Research and Service Agency”; Memo to Roger D. Olson, Executive Officer to the Mayor, from Min Yasui, CCR, re: Activist Organizations in Denver,” Mar. 20, 1970, McNichols Papers, Box 51, Folder 17; On the West Side Coalition, see Rivera, Jr., et. al., “Internal Colonialism in Colorado”; and Richard Gould, The Life and Times of Richard Castro: Bridging the Cultural Divide (Denver: Colorado Historical Society, 2007). On the Crusade for Justice, see Marín, A Spokesman of the Mexican American Movement; Ernesto Vigil, “Rodolfo Gonzales and the Advent of the Crusade for Justice,” in La Gente: Hispano History and Life in Colorado (Denver, CO: Colorado Historical Society, 1998); and Ernesto B. Vigil, The Crusade for Justice: Chicano Militancy and the Government’s War on Dissent (Madison, WI: University of Press, 1999). For a general history of LULAC, see Márquez, LULAC; and Kaplowitz, LULAC.

164 Crow, “A Time for Change and Challenge,” 1969, 24.

79

Jobs in the city were stratified along race, class and gender lines, with hiring discrimination widespread. In 1949, the MCHR reported that of twenty-four requests or referrals it had received in the first three months of the year almost half were seeking assistance in dealing with employer discrimination.165 “Negroes and Spanish have a slight mental inferiority,” proclaimed one local employer in the late 1940s.166 Within a few years, though, job opportunity began to open up in manufacturing and other industrial work, particularly within the industrial corridor on the East Side. Mexican

Americans and African Americans began to fill up the factory floors that lined the tracks of the Burlington Northern railroad. They made hard-rock mining equipment at Gardner

Denver, underground gas tanks for service stations at Eaton Metal Products Company, radiator hoses for Gates Rubber, and boxes for Russell Stover Candies at Deline Box

Company. Thousands toiled day after day in the stench of the city’s packinghouses.

Armour, Swift, Cudahy, and Wilson were the biggest firms, but around a dozen more operated as well. By the mid-1950s, Mexican Americans and African Americans were more likely to work in some of these factories than were whites, many of whom had become white collar workers in the city’s growing banking, investment, insurance and telecommunications industries.167

165 In 1949 the MCHR was still largely unknown to most of Denver. Minority persons did not generally know such a committee existed and if they did, they were unsure what help they could actually offer. This may account for the low number of complaints and referrals. Helen Peterson, Report of the Director, MCHR, Apr. 13, 1949, CCR Papers, Box 1, Folder 3.

166 Quoted in Stephen J. Leonard & Thomas J. Noel, Mining Camp to Metropolis (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1990), 391-92.

167 Gould, The Life and Times of Richard Castro, 72-76, 82.

80

After years of only being able to work as janitors or in domestic service, working- class Mexican Americans and African Americans found factory work highly desirable.

The jobs paid more and offered working class families the opportunity to buy a home and participate in the growing consumer economy. As a result, competition for them was intense. The MCHR began to notice this in late 1952 after a scuffle between black and

Mexican American men at Joe’s Place, a small tavern on the East Side. The Commission noted what appeared to be increased hostilities between these two groups and a discussion was held on whether this was a cause for concern. Commission members worried that competition between blacks and Mexican Americans would lead to further tensions and would harm their efforts at improving human relations in the city. In the end, they determined that increased tensions between the two was not a reason to be overly concerned and thus, no action was taken.168

Although factory jobs had opened up to nonwhites by the early 1950s, working class jobs that interacted with the white public were mostly closed off. Department store clerks, servers, bank clerks, delivery truck drivers, telephone installation positions, and others were open to whites only, in large part because companies argued their white customers did not want to be served by nonwhites.169 Middle-class, white Denver residents were particularly opposed to black store clerks.170

168 Meeting Minutes, MCHR, Sep. 17, 1952, CCR Papers, Box 1, Folder 7.

169 “Consumers for Fair Employment Launched,” All Told, Official Newsletter of the Denver Coordinating Council for Education and Research in Human Relations, Nov. 26, 1957, 1, CCR Papers, Box 1, Folder 3.

170 Report, “Anti-Discrimination Legislation,” no date, ca. 1955, 2, CCR Papers, Box 5, Folder 14.

81

In 1957, members of the Denver Coordinating Council for Education and

Research in Human Relations and other supporters of fair employment practices in

Denver formed Consumers for Fair Employment, a grassroots organization whose goal was to persuade local business owners that Denverites wanted to see minorities working in their establishments and serving the public. By placing stickers that said “I am a customer who would welcome being served personally by those whose race, creed or color may be different than my own” on dollar bills or checks used to pay for services, they hoped to convince business owners that white Denver residents were ready to be served by nonwhites. The sticker campaign had limited reach, but by the late 1960s some African Americans and Mexican Americans had begun to work in positions that served the white public.

Fewer nonwhites worked white collar jobs. Yet the large number of federal positions within the city provided a pathway to middle class status for African Americans and, to a lesser extent, Mexican Americans. As a “little Washington,” Denver city leaders proclaimed their city had more federal jobs per capita than any other city in the nation other than Washington D.C.171 Because these were federal positions, by the 1960s they were largely open to anyone with the required skills and education necessary. Many

African Americans took up employment in Fitzsimons Army Hospital, Lowry Air Force

Base, the Air Force Finance Center, and other government agencies. Mexican Americans were employed in these positions but they were less likely to be hired because of lack of

171 During World War II, civil defense plans dictated that the capital be moved to Denver in case Washington D.C. was threatened, and the Supreme Court was only one vote short of moving the capital to Denver for the remainder of the war. Goodstein, Denver in Our Time, 16.

82 education and training. A few simply could not speak or read English well enough to fill out an application or sit through an interview.

As a consequence, by 1955 Mexican-American families were more likely than

African-American families to receive public assistance. Certainly there were other factors that contributed to their socioeconomic status, but the inability of most Mexican

Americans to secure decent paying jobs was at the heart of this phenomenon. A full fifty percent of those receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children (ADC) were

Mexican American while only fifteen percent were black. The remaining thirty-five percent were white.172 At a time when Mexican Americans constituted about eleven percent of the population as a whole, their heavy dependence on the city welfare department is telling, and contributed to the perception that they were a problem for the city. By 1967, Mexican American household income was $4,636 annually, while that of blacks was $5,031. White household income was $5,917.173 Of 40,000 families living in poverty that same year, 48.5 percent were Mexican American, 22.6 percent were black, and 28.9% were white.174 The lower socioeconomic status of Mexican Americans in the city, relative to black Denver residents, contributed to black-brown disagreements and tensions throughout the ensuing two decades. This was particularly true once factories

172 Denver Department of Public Welfare, “The ‘Spanish-American Problem,’” Feb. 28, 1956, 1, CCR Papers, Box 5, Folder 22.

173 Crow, “A Time for Change and Challenge,” 23.

174 At that time, poverty was defined as a family of four living on $3,000 or less a year. Crow, “A Time for Change and Challenge,” 23.

83 started shutting down or moving to the growing suburbs surrounding the city or to other states in the mid-1960s, a trend that continued throughout the 1970s.175

Housing

Although Mexican Americans were not as concentrated in particular neighborhoods as African Americans, the West Side neighborhood became extremely overcrowded over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, as did the Five Points area. As both of these groups sought relief from overcrowding by moving out into adjacent areas, they—African Americans in particular—were met with hostility from many white residents.

Housing covenants had been a mainstay of Denver’s residential market for decades. The CCR, for its part, recognized that the problem of restrictive clauses was probably their biggest obstacle to achieving integrated housing and racial harmony in the city. Even though the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed restrictive covenants in 1948, they continued to exist in varying forms around the nation. In Denver, violations of the court’s decision ranged from blatant disregard to covert misrepresentations that skirted the ruling. As in other metropolitan areas, Denver realtors and bankers formed agreements that prohibited them from selling to or financing properties in areas dominated by whites to nonwhites.176 Real estate agents even started listing properties in

175 Gould, The Life and Times of Richard Castro, 82-83.

176 “Realtors Profit from ‘Ghetto: Denver Inquirer Feature: ‘People Are Talking…’,” Denver Inquirer, Feb. 23, 1953, in Keyes (Wilfred) v. Denver School District Collection (abbreviated hereafter as Keyes et. al. 84 certain areas by including the caveat “no discrimination,” instead of the common phrase

“protected by covenants.” In reality, this was merely a way of informing potential white buyers that this property was in a transitioning neighborhood and would soon be re- segregated.177

So, African American, Mexican American, and Jews continued to be excluded from certain Denver neighborhoods and subdivisions.

According to the Denver Coordinating Council for Education and Human Relations, restrictions against Jewish buyers had nearly disappeared by the mid-1950s.178 Mexican

Americans and Japanese Americans still faced restrictions in some areas, but this was influenced by class as well as race. More expensive areas were much more difficult to buy into than working class sections of the city where home prices did not exceed

$16,000.179 On first impression, a study conducted in 1954 corroborates these findings.

According to the study’s results, a much higher percentage of Denverites were willing to

Collection), Accession 1 (1963-1986), Archives, University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries, Boulder, CO, Box 2, Folder 4.

177 Mrs. Kenneth Whiting, “The Picture of Housing in Denver, 1955-1962,” speech given at the Coordinating Council luncheon, Oct. 16, 1962, CCR Papers, Box 2, Folder 5. The Coordinating Council for Education and Human Relations was a body of 80 different community organizations and agencies committed to eradicating prejudice and discrimination in Denver. It was housed under the Commission on Community Relations, which offered the group office space and administrative assistance. “Rough draft of the letter to be directed to foundations by the Denver Coordinating Council,” ca. Jan. 12, 1960, CCR Papers, Box 1, Folder 22.

178 Whiting, “The Picture of Housing in Denver, CCR Papers, Box 2, Folder 5. Historians have shown that by World War II, Jews had, in essence, transformed from “other whites” to whites. Thus, by mid-century they were fully assimilated into American life and able to take advantage of the benefits of whiteness, including home ownership in racially restricted areas. See especially Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness; Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; and Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks.

179 Letter to Edward Miller, Chairman, Governor’s Commission on Human Relations, from Edward Rothstein, Community Consultant, Nov. 30, 1955, 2, Keyes et. al. Collection, Accession 1, Box 2, Folder 4; Whiting, “The Picture of Housing in Denver, CCR Papers, Box 2, Folder 5.

85 sell to anyone regardless of race than just five years earlier: forty-five percent were willing to do so in 1954 compared to just fifteen percent in 1949.180 More revealing, though, is that people were more likely to sell to Mexican Americans or Japanese

Americans than they were to African Americans. Fifty-seven percent of those surveyed said they would sell to a Japanese American or Mexican American buyer while only forty-seven percent were willing to sell to a black buyer.181 The public had clearly distinguished between the city’s various minority groups and had built a racial hierarchy of sorts. The CCR recognized this as well when in the late 1940s it remarked, “…people in Denver are most in favor of discrimination against Negroes; next against ‘Spanish-

Americans and Mexicans’ and ‘Orientals such as Chinese and Japanese;’ least against

Jews.”182 In response to an interviewer, one man who lived in Denver’s Capital Hill area said that he would not sell to a black buyer or a “real Mexican.”183 This man was drawing a contrast between “real Mexicans” and Hispanos, a differentiation that was probably based on skin pigmentation and class as much as nationality. Whites were willing to accept some Mexican Americans and Japanese Americans, if they were of the

180 “Racial Bias Wanes: More People Willing to Sell Homes to Anyone,” Denver Post, Sep. 2, 1954, in Keyes et. al. Collection, Accession 1, Box 2, Folder 4. The study consisted of telephone interviews with 101 individual homeowners in white neighborhoods with home values ranging from $6,000 to $40,000. It was conducted by five Lisle Fellowship students studying for six weeks in Denver, under the direction of Charles Gray, Denver realtor. The Lisle Fellowship program was created in 1936 as a non-profit organization with the goal of fostering intercultural understanding around the nation and the world. Lisle Homepage, accessed May 10, 2011, http://www.lisleinternational.org.

181 “Racial Bias Wanes,” Denver Post, Sep. 2, 1954.

182 “A Report of Minorities in Denver with Recommendations,” c.a. 1948, 16-17, CCR Papers, Box 1, Folder 1.

183 “Racial Bias Wanes,” Denver Post, Sep. 2, 1954.

86 proper socioeconomic status and had the right coloring (not too dark), but most people continued to see African Americans as too racially distinct for inclusion.

While revealing, the study’s findings are misleading because they do not account for the high level of discrimination practiced not by individual home sellers but by real estate companies, banks, and insurance companies. Even if individual racial bias was waning, as the Denver Post claimed in reporting on the research, systemic—or institutionalized—discrimination was built into the real estate market. Convinced that

African Americans would lower property values, agents directed prospective black buyers to traditionally black neighborhoods. Banks made it especially difficult to secure financing. Even if they were approved, black buyers often paid much higher interest rates for their loans and/or the down payment was three to five times as much as it would have been for a white buyer.184 Many times, when African Americans applied for housing in private developments, they were allowed to file an application, but faced constant delays. Agents did everything they could to discourage potential buyers, a practice that often led to the buyer walking away from the development.185

Even though Mexican Americans did not face hurdles as difficult as African

Americans, they were still overwhelmingly concentrated in dilapidated or deteriorating housing in older, overcrowded sections of the city. Approximately 26.9 percent of

Mexican American housing was deteriorating in 1964, while about fifteen percent was

184 “Realtors Profit from ‘Ghetto,” Denver Inquirer, Feb. 23, 1953.

185 Letter to Edward Miller from Edward Rothstein, Nov. 30, 1955, 1-2, Keyes et. al. Collection, Accession 1, Box 2, Folder 4.

87 considered dilapidated.186 Home ownership was very low among Mexican Americans; most tended to rent instead. They paid more and got less for their money than whites who also lived in rentals and many of these homes lacked even basic sanitation like hot running water and reliable plumbing.187 In Five Points, conditions were no better.188

Public housing offered only limited relief The Denver Housing Authority (DHA) reported that about one third of all tenants in public housing were Mexican American, twenty-five percent were African American and the remaining families were white. All were of similar economic circumstances.189 Of those, 19.1 percent of white renters lived in substandard units while 24.3 percent of nonwhite renters did so.190 The problem of housing for Denver’s black and Mexican-American residents was compounded by the fact that the DHA was slow to build units. In 1963, residents started to complain that no new housing units had been built since 1954, even though 1,500 new units had been authorized by the federal government in 1957 and another 500 had been approved a few years later.191 When the Denver Welfare Department was asked to relocate more than

186 “The Spanish American in Denver,” CCR Papers, Box 6, Folder 1.

187 “The Spanish American in Denver,” CCR Papers, Box 6, Folder 1.

188 “Whittier Urban Renewal Project,” As discussed by Robert Cameron and Paul Cormier of the Denver Urban Renewal Authority at Meeting of Commission on Community Relations, Jun. 27, 1961, 1-2, CCR Papers, Box 2, Folder 1.

189 Austin Robinson, Denver Housing Authority, “Report of the Denver Housing Authority on Problems with Spanish-American People,” n.d., 1, CCR Papers, Box 5, Folder 22.

190 Local Housing Authority Special Tabulations, Table A: Occupancy, Tenure by Color of Occupants: 1960, Denver, Colorado, Mar. 6, 1961, CCR Papers, Box 2, Folder 1.

191 “Anti-DHA Charges Rate a Hearing,” Editorial, Denver Post, Jan. 6, 1963, in Helen Lucero Papers, WH2029, DPL-WHG, Box 1, unprocessed.

88

1000 families into decent, affordable housing in 1962, they were unable to find more than forty units. A year later, they still had more than 400 families to place.192

The DHA was also plagued with complaints about poor building maintenance and management corruption. Tenants accused some managers of treating them disdainfully.

It was no coincidence that most of these complaints came from Mexican-American and

African-American tenants. In March, 1963 the Federal Housing Authority finally investigated these accusations and found most of them to be valid. In the Las Casitas and

Sun Valley projects on the West Side, investigators found that managers had been constantly harassing people who were late with their rent. He told them to pay him half of it in cash and he would mark it paid in the books. Several tenants agreed to this, feeling that they had no other choice. But their accounts were not cleared; the manager merely pocketed the money.193 Las Casitas was predominantly occupied by Mexican

Americans.

Even as the number of people who needed housing increased, urban renewal projects targeted blighted areas of the city for rejuvenation, a process that destroyed more housing units than it created. As urban renewal intensified in the early 1960s, resentment started to grow among people who felt that these renewal projects were little more than

“poor people removal.” The Denver Urban Renewal Authority (DURA) listed three current projects and two new projects in the planning stages in 1964. Avondale, Blake

192 “Anti-DHA Charges Rate a Hearing,” Editorial, Denver Post, Jan. 6, 1963, in Helen Lucero Papers, Box 1.

193 “Housing Unit Manager Fired,” Denver Post, Mar. 5, 1963, in Helen Lucero Papers, Box 1. For his part, the manager argued that he was innocent. He claimed he was merely trying to help the tenants and was only guilty of having too big a heart. “Ex-Manager of Housing Unit Tells of Errors,” Denver Post, Mar. 8, 1963, in Helen Lucero Papers, Box 1. 89 and Whittier were underway, while West Colfax and Jerome Park were in the works.

Only West Colfax had a majority white population.194 As in many other cities, urban renewal efforts were guided mostly by the imperatives of local business owners, financial executives and like-minded politicians who were much more concerned about developing an attractive, easily accessible business district than housing poor people, particularly poor blacks and Mexican Americans. From the beginning DURA was highly influenced by several former and future bankers who sat on its board.195 They employed a “slash and burn” approach, whereby they entered an area, pushed people out, destroyed all or most dwellings and completely rebuilt the area to reflect the modern, sleek environment that was thought to be best suited for business.196

To facilitate their slash and burn tactics, DURA sought out the aid of the CCR.

As the Whittier project on the east side of town got under way, Housing Authority employees anticipated they would run into problems with the area’s African-American residents, who composed ninety-eight percent of the neighborhood’s population.197 In addition to forcing out renters, DURA also cleared out home and business owners. But they only offered people the value of their home appraisal, regardless of what they paid or how much they had invested in improving their property. Because housing prices and interest rates were inflated in this area, homeowners had often paid more than the fair

194 Meeting minutes, CCR, Apr. 12, 1964, 3, CCR Papers, Box 2, Folder 1.

195 Goodstein, Denver in Our Time, 278-279.

196 Goodstein, Denver in Our Time, 281.

197 “Negroes and Housing: Implications of Whittier Project,” c.a. June 1961, 1-2, CCR Papers, Box 2, Folder 1.

90 market value of the property. Thus, people were forced out of their homes and compensated for less than they had invested. One black man who owned a home in the

Blake urban renewal area had tried to find housing elsewhere in the city but was turned down numerous times. He finally purchased a property for $6000 and then invested an additional $3000 in improvements. DURA appraised his home at $5,500 and would not offer him more.198 Other people had similar experiences as the Whittier project progressed.

Housing discrimination, lack of housing, a deficient Denver Housing Authority, and urban renewal all contributed to the Denver housing crisis, especially for the poor and working class. Throughout the postwar period, as the populations of nonwhite people increased in the city, tensions rose. This is most clearly seen in the Five Points neighborhood, where black residents began inching eastward in the late 1940s due to overcrowding and a desire for better housing. As they moved further east, they began to encroach on the Park Hill area of Denver, a middle- to upper-class white neighborhood that prided itself on its upstanding community organizations and schools. By 1949, Park

Hill homeowners were starting to voice their opposition. “I feel I have the right to choose my neighbors,” one resident said, “and that’s why I bought my property in a white neighborhood.”199 Others rejected outright racial language and insisted it was their property value that concerned them most. “Me, I don’t mind Negroes; it wouldn’t bother

198 “Whittier Urban Renewal Project,” As discussed by Robert Cameron and Paul Cormier of Denver Urban Renewal Authority at Meeting of Commission on Community Relations, June 27, 1961, 2, CCR Papers, Box 2, Folder 1.

199 “Smashing Against the Invisible Wall,” Editorial, Denver Post, Apr. 17, 1949, Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 2, Folder 5.

91 me or my family to be next door to them—but when they move in I can just kiss $5,000 goodby [sic.] on the value of my home,” argued a long-time Park Hill property owner.200

Whether through expressly racist language or the more subtle but no less effective rhetoric of property values, white Park Hill residents tried to keep black families out.

When a new two-block subdivision meant to alleviate some of the overcrowding in the

Five Points and Whittier areas was proposed for the outskirts of the area, Park Hill citizens made their objections known: no blacks allowed.201 Plans for the subdivision were scrapped. But the eastward migration of African Americans continued over the next two decades.

By the mid-1950s, block-busting began to quickly change the outlying areas of the neighborhood from predominately white to predominately black. Panic at the possibility of dwindling home values led to massive sell-offs and realtors funneled in black buyers only, essentially re-segregating the area within a short time.202 A 1958 survey of African American opinions on housing options revealed that most of those interviewed who were actively looking for homes outside the traditional black area were looking towards Park Hill.203 Out of this situation, some residents formed the Park Hill

Action Committee (PHAC) in 1960 to prevent block-busting and promote inter-racial

200 “Smashing Against the Invisible Wall,” Editorial, Denver Post, Apr. 17, 1949, in Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 2, Folder 5.

201 “Smashing Against the Invisible Wall,” Editorial, Denver Post, Apr. 17, 1949, in Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 2, Folder 5.

202 Mrs. Kenneth Whiting, “The Picture of Housing in Denver, CCR Papers, Box 2, Folder 5.

203 Charles Gray, “Initial Report: Survey of Negro Opinion on Housing Problems and Negro Housing Demand,” in cooperation with the Denver Coordinating Council for Education and Research in Human Relations, Aug. 16, 1958, 3, CCR Papers, Box 2, Folder 1.

92 harmony in the area. Their efforts were recognized in 1961 when the CCR awarded the organization the Human Relations Award for its initial efforts at stopping panic-selling and paving the way for an integrated neighborhood.204 Although Park Hill remained internally segregated, with black families on the fringes of the community, Park Hill schools were effectively integrated several years before the Keyes drama began to unfold in the late 1960s. The PHAC would become one of the central grassroots organizations calling for city-wide school desegregation.

Inter-Racial Violence and Police-Community Relations

Inter-racial tensions stemming from housing problems and competition for jobs frequently came to a head in outbreaks of violence among citizens and less than cordial interactions between the , and black and Mexican-American youth. In 1949, clashes between Mexican-American and Jewish boys at Lake Junior

High School, on the West Side, reached such proportions that the area’s residents feared gang warfare. Lake was about twenty percent Mexican American, twenty percent Jewish and sixty percent Anglo.205 People on both sides tended to exaggerate the situation, including the numbers of youth involved in the skirmishes. Jewish parents argued that

Mexican-American youth liked to provoke other children to the point of fighting. One human relations expert who interviewed students, parents and school officials at Lake found that most Jewish kids believed the Mexican Americans were carrying “killing

204 Meeting Minutes, CCR, Feb. 27, 1961, 2, CCR Papers, Box 1, Folder 26; Mrs. Kenneth Whiting, “The Picture of Housing in Denver, CCR Papers, Box 2, Folder 5; Goodstein, DIA and Other Scams, 62.

205 Meeting Minutes, MCHR, Oct. 11, 1949, 1, CCR Papers, Box 1, Folder 3. 93 knives” and sometimes guns. Conversely, Mexican Americans involved in the fighting said that they were tired of the teachers at Lake showing favoritism towards their Jewish classmates and that they were constantly being called “dirty Mexicans” and “wetbacks” by these same classmates.206 According to many Mexican-American parents, when their kids tried to make friends with some of the Jewish students, they were turned away.207 A study of community attitudes conducted by the University of Denver and the Denver

Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith found that anti-Semitic sentiment did exist among Mexican-Americans westsiders.208 Clearly, relations between these two groups within the West Side community were strained, a fact reflected in student tensions at

Lake.

This was, in many ways, a result of divergent class interests and racial processes.

By the late 1940s, Jews were considered by many to be white. Anti-Semitism was still a reality but it had diminished significantly, in large part because the horrors of genocide in

Europe during the war made people uncomfortable with anti-Jewish sentiment. Jews were also a part of the working class mainstream by that point and saw fewer barriers to

206 Meeting Minutes, MCHR, Oct. 11, 1949, 1, CCR Papers, Box 1, Folder 3; Memo, Louis L. Sidman to Nathan Perlmutter, Oct. 4, 1949, CCR Papers, Box 6, Folder 3; Memo, J. Peter Brunswick to CCR staff, Confidential, re: Lake Junior High School Incident, Oct. 4, 1949, CCR Papers, Box 6, Folder 3.

207 Meeting Minutes, Meeting held concerning “Lake Junior High Incident” reported in the Rocky Mountain News, Oct. 3, 1949, 4, CCR Papers, Box 6, Folder 3. Parents and school officials held this meeting in response to the way the Rocky Mountain News reported on the incident. They felt that sensationalizing the story was dangerous for the community and wanted to map a response. Out of this meeting, the Westside Sub-committee of the MCHR was formed.

208 “Denver Study on Human Relations,” A study conducted by the University of Denver and the Anti- Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith, n.d., 9, CCR Papers, Box 5, Folder 14.

94 socioeconomic mobility.209 Members of the MCHR pointed out that many of the problems that arose between Jewish and Mexican-American westsiders were a response to Jewish upward mobility. Jews had, after all, “been in the majority several years.”210

Many had achieved middle class status. This must have drawn the attention of many

Mexican Americans who, fifteen years earlier, were in basically the same economic circumstances as the Jews living near them. Now Jewish families were moving ahead and they were getting left behind.

During a school dance in October a group of young Mexican American men from the East Side entered the school and clashed with a group of young white men from East

High School. The Mexican Americans claimed they had heard about the discrimination fellow Mexican Americans faced at Lake and had come to straighten out the situation.

Why whites from East High were there is unknown but it is likely they had heard about a possible confrontation at Lake and wanted to be there. What had started out as a series of small clashes between junior high students had grown to include older adolescents from the other side of town. In response, the school’s principal was forced to create a human relations council to try to mediate the conflicts. The Sloan Lake Neighborhood Council

(SLNC) was established specifically to address the tensions between Mexican American and Jewish adolescents.211

209 See Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks; Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; and Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness.

210 Memo, J. Peter Brunswick to CCR staff, Confidential, re: Lake Junior High School Incident, Oct. 4, 1949, CCR Papers, Box 6, Folder 3.

211 Geo. E. Hook, “Principal’s Report and Recommendations to the Lake Human Relations Council,” Mar. 2, 1950, CCR Papers, Box 6, Folder 3.

95

Later that year, the SLNC reported that while tensions had been reduced much work still needed to be done. Social workers on the council suggested solutions that addressed the socioeconomic problems of the majority of Mexican American youth at

Lake. Both the school’s principal and a prominent newspaper columnist for the

Intermountain Jewish News insisted, however, that it was not really a racial problem.

Class differences and matters of faith—Judaism versus Catholicism—were the main culprits. They believed that the race issue was merely being sensationalized by the local media and by people in the neighborhood who feared violence in their community.

Once again, Denver residents refused to see race. Memories of the Great

Depression were still . Class was seen as the great divider. This may have contributed to an atmosphere that easily recognized distinctions in socioeconomic status.

During the postwar period, moreover, more and more Americans began to center their lives on their faith. Church attendance grew enormously throughout the 1940s and by the

1960s, more than half of all Americans were members of houses of worship. Thus, religion was also an important part of the way many people viewed the world. That some school administrators and other commentators saw class and religious differences at Lake, but not race, is not surprising.. Administrators decided that encouraging students to develop warmer feelings towards each other and promoting after-school activities that would occupy students’ time would go a long way towards eradicating mistrust and anger.212 Tensions did quiet down for a while, but Lake had not seen the last of its student clashes.

212 Hook, “Principal’s Report and Recommendations,” CCR Papers, Box 6, Folder 3; Robert S. Gamzey, “Mile High View,” Intermountain Jewish Jews (Denver, CO), n.d., 1950, CCR Papers, Box 6, Folder 3. 96

By the mid-1950s Denver’s African-American and Mexican-American communities had begun to protest and discrimination in the justice system.

The CCR tried to mediate some of these complaints, but it was largely ineffectual, since the Commission did not have the authority to make changes to either the Denver Police

Department or the court system. There was also a faction of the Commission that believed it was outside their jurisdiction to advocate for specific changes.213 This left people with grievances few avenues. They could file a complaint with the Police Internal

Affairs Department or with a variety of other offices, such as the District Attorney’s office.214 But those approaches rarely achieved the desired result.

The most frequent accusation was that the police were especially harsh with black and Mexican American juveniles and young men.215 Finally in January 1959 the CCR agreed to meet with the police chief, police division chiefs, juvenile court judges, the district attorney’s office, and local media to address the problem of Mexican American arrests, alleged police brutality and sensationalized newspaper coverage. According to

Mexican-American leaders, both the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, the two major dailies in the city, had misrepresented the number of arrests. This made it seem

213 Memo to Helen Peterson, CCR Director, from Minoru Yasui, re: Manuel Vigil, Sept. 14, 1962, 2, CCR Papers, Box 1, Folder 24. During one MCHR meeting, the Director of the Commission pointed out that “…the Committee and its office will assist, not force, in matters involving better relations and understanding between people and groups, etc.” [emphasis original], Minutes, MCHR, Aug. 19, 1948, 2, CCR Papers, Box 1, Folder 2.

214 Letter to Helen Lucero from Tom Currigan, Mayor, Apr. 14, 1964, Helen Lucero Papers, Box 1.

215 Mexican Americans experienced police intimidation and discrimination nationwide. On early twentieth- century Los Angeles, see Edward Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department, 1900-1945. On postwar Chicago, see Lilia Fernandez, Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 97 that the Mexican-American community was given to violence, which further incited negative opinions of their group.216

African Americans likewise insisted that their neighborhoods—Five Points in particular—were targeted by police officers, many of whom were young and inexperienced. They complained of rough treatment and rights violations, both of which were the result of race discrimination according to the Denver Urban League.217 In 1964, the Denver chapters of the Friends of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee

(SNCC) and CORE tried to join forces with Los Voluntarios, a Mexican American political action group led by former boxer and radical civil rights leader Rodolfo “Corky”

Gonzales, to form a citizens investigative committee that would look into alleged police brutality. They were unhappy with the slow progress of the Currigan Administration, especially in light of the fact that Mayor Tom Currigan had promised to create such a committee during his campaign, which black and Mexican American leaders had overwhelmingly endorsed.218

Police brutality was one of the issues that brought together black and Mexican-

American leaders and organizations. What was new about the mid to late 1960s, however, was that these people and groups were not from the older, more established sectors of Denver’s civil rights establishment. They were from a host of new, much more

216 Meeting minutes, CCR, Jan. 26, 1959, 1-2, DCCR, Box 1, Folder 20; Meeting Minutes, Meeting with Mayor and Members of the Spanish-speaking Community, Feb. 11, 1959, CCR Papers, Box 1, Folder 20.

217 Goodstein, DIA and Other Scams, 22-23.

218 Letter from Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales to Mayor Thomas Currigan, Jul. 5, 1964, Thomas Currigan Papers, Box 19, Folder 8; Letter from Helen Lucero to Thomas Currigan, Apr. 21, 1964, Helen Lucero Papers, Box 1. Also see Vigil, “Rodolfo Gonzales and the Advent of the Crusade for Social Justice,” 159- 160.

98 militant organizations that targeted young people and tended to voice opposition to a system of racial and class exclusion as opposed to individual acts of intolerance and discrimination. Some activists made connections across racial lines and on the issue of police action and repression. Corky Gonzales, for example, supported African American efforts to end police harassment in their neighborhoods, as well as their protest against the police shooting and killing of a young black man, Eugene Cook, in 1967. On July 23 of that year, 125 Mexican Americans and African Americans marched together in solidarity against discriminatory and violent treatment from local law enforcement.219

Gonzales had started his political career as a dedicated Democratic Party worker.

He campaigned in Denver for John F. Kennedy, heading up Colorado’s ¡Viva Kennedy! movement, as well as for Tom Currigan in the 1963 mayoral election.220 In return for his devotion to the party, he was given multiple posts within successive city administrations as well as on state and national boards. He served as a board member on the Colorado

Parks and Recreation Board, as director of the Denver Neighborhood Youth Corp, as a national board member of the Jobs for Progress, as a community board member for the

Denver Job Opportunity Center, and finally as director of the War on Poverty in Denver.

He was even appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to a federal civil rights advisory commission in 1964.

Yet even as he accepted these positions, Gonzales was distancing himself from what he perceived as a corrupt political machine and he began formulating an

219 Vigil, “Rodolfo Gonzales and the Advent of the Crusade for Justice”; and Vigil, The Crusade for Justice.

220 During Currigan’s campaign, Gonzales organized Amigos for Currigan. Goodstein, DIA and Other Scams, 131.

99 oppositional, Chicano nationalist ideology that centered on the oppression of Mexican

Americans in the southwest. Los Voluntarios, which he organized in 1963, was the first step towards expressing that ideology by focusing on police brutality against Mexican

Americans in the city.221 This group coalesced into the Crusade for Justice, one of the most important activist centers of the emerging Chicano Movement.222

Gonzales and Los Voluntarios were not alone in challenging more established civil rights groups in the city. The Friends of SNCC, CORE and the Black Panthers were all active. By 1967, the Black Panthers had a city headquarters and a significant following among many young black East Siders. The Panthers were never a large group, and the city’s black establishment continued to dominate civil rights efforts, but the

Panthers’ presence nonetheless struck a nerve in the city, galvanizing young militants of all races. When their leader, Lauren R. Watson was married at Panther headquarters in

Five Points in 1968, the police raided the office shortly after the nuptials. The history of targeting African Americans for criminal behavior had led to increased policing of what was seen as a subversive, dangerous organization. Many older black and Mexican

American leaders praised these police actions against the Panthers. Elvin Caldwell and

Bert Gallegos both called for the destruction of left-wing militant groups who, they

221 Marín, “A Spokesman of the Mexican American Movement,” 3; Goodstein, DIA and Other Scams, 130- 131. Gonzales’ ambivalence during this period is noted by historian Phil Goodstein. Even though Los Voluntarios used much more militant rhetoric and Gonzales was already starting to challenge the system, he also worked within the system and actively sought to help other Mexican Americans obtain positions with the city’s various Great Society programs and municipal offices. DIA and Other Scams, 129-132.

222 Marín, “A Spokesman of the Mexican American Movement,” 1-3; and Vigil, The Crusade for Justice.

100 believed, were giving them a bad name.223 The Crusade for Justice was also targeted by local police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).224

Defining the Race Problem

As the postwar period wore on, Denver residents could not help but notice the racial conflicts emerging across the city. Although whites had not perceived such a problem in 1948, the growth of the city’s nonwhite populations, the migration of whites to the suburbs, well publicized confrontations between Denver police and black and

Mexican-American youth, and increasing protests demonstrated what was obvious to growing numbers of black and Mexican-American residents: Denver did have a race problem.

The problem looked different to different groups of people. When the MCHR began its work it was at the urging of black leaders. Thus from the beginning the “race problem” was widely viewed as a black-white problem, which is one reason why its initial report on minorities in Denver concentrated on African Americans.225 The growing visibility of the civil rights movement nationally heightened awareness of the plight of

African Americans in Denver. There was no national Mexican-American movement that

223 Susan Carlson, “Spanish View—Legal Status,” internal report, Latin American Research and Service Agency, c.a. 1964-1965, LARASA Papers, Box 48, Folder 20; Goodstein, DIA and Other Scams, 24-25 and 134-135.

224 Vigil, The Crusade for Justice.

225 It mentions four distinct minority groups: Negroes, Spanish-Americans or Mexicans, Orientals— Chinese and Japanese—and Jews. “A Report of Minorities in Denver,” c.a. 1948, 1813-17, CCR Papers, Box 1, Folder 1.

101 could demonstrate the problems and inequalities facing the growing number of Mexican

Americans in the country. As a consequence, many in Denver easily recognized the growing discontent among the black community in their city.

The issues facing Mexican Americans were somewhat less apparent, as was the mounting dissatisfaction and anger among many in this group. By the mid-1950s, the

“Spanish American problem”—the quick way of referring to the expanding Mexican-

American population and their supposed pathologies—was clearly a crisis, from the perspective of many whites and city leaders.226 Poverty, low levels of education, lack of

English skills, high birth rates, high percentages of single mothers, and the reality of insufficient and unsanitary housing were conceptualized by many whites as unique, almost inherent, problems of Mexican Americans, regardless of the fact that almost all of these problems existed among other groups of people in Denver as well. As a result of this new “problem,” in addition to the proclamations of Mexican-American city leaders that those of their heritage needed attention from local officials, the CCR began to focus more on the concerns and complaints of Mexican Americans.

Yet even Mexican American leaders did not necessarily define the problems faced by their community as a “race problem,” at least not until the late 1960s. Over and over the issue Mexican Americans faced in Denver was defined as cultural, not racial.

Mexican Americans came from a rural folk culture and thus had problems assimilating

226 The Rocky Mountain News published a seven-part series in 1954 that outlined this so-called crisis. One of the articles, “Study of a Critical Denver Problem,” proclaimed, “The hush-hush subject is Denver’s so called ‘Spanish American’ problem.” After outlining the major contours of this crisis, it went on to emphatically conclude, “Denver has a ‘Spanish American problem.’” Robert Perkin, “Study of a Critical Denver Problem,” Rocky Mountain News, Jan. 31, 1954, 11. Richard Gould also discusses this “crisis” in his biography of Richard Castro, a Denver native and prominent Mexican-American leader in the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The Life and Times of Richard Castro, 97-98.

102 into urban life and adopting American social norms. Few described a race problem but rather maintained that class, language, lack of industriousness, lack of basic sanitary practices, and low levels of interest in American education and socioeconomic advancement were to blame for Mexican Americans’ lack of advancement.227 In effect, many Mexican-American leaders during this period, who were middle class and relatively light skinned themselves, accepted the idea of a “Spanish American problem,” but challenged the assumption that this was a race problem, inherent to all Mexican

Americans. Their outlook was mitigated by their class position. One of the ways they combated this generalization was to insist they were white.

So strong was this sentiment, even candidates seeking local and state offices recognized it. During the Colorado gubernatorial race in 1956 Democratic candidate

Stephen McNichols campaigned on the promise that he would recognize the contributions of Hispanos and work to end discrimination against them in the state. “I want you to know,” he wrote, “that I appreciate the fact that the Americans of Spanish descent were the first white settlers in Colorado, and that they have made great contributions—social, economic and cultural to the progress of our state.”228 McNichols understood the strong desire among many Mexican-American voters to be recognized as white citizens. By pointing out that they were the first white settlers in Colorado he was

227 “The Spanish American in Denver,” CCR Papers, Box 6, Folder 1; Arthur Campa, “Mutual Understanding,” speech delivered at the Sixth Annual Cultural Workshop, Denver, CO, Nov. 2, 1961, LARASA Papers, Box 48, Folder 20; Arthur Campa, “Culture Patterns of the Spanish Speaking Community,” n.d., LARASA Papers, Box 48, Folder 20.

228 Letter from Stephen L. R. McNichols, Oct. 3, 1956, reprinted in El Tiempo (Denver, CO), “Promise Made by McNichols in 1956,” Oct. 4, 1962, 3.

103 claiming a spot for them in the state’s founding history, as well as promising them the benefits of whiteness should he become governor.

When Mexican-American leaders came together in the early 1960s to organize the

Latin American Research and Service Agency (LARASA), an umbrella organization that would work for Mexican-American advancement, they explicitly argued that the problems they faced in Denver were not the same as those faced by African Americans.

They resented Denver leaders who told them to use the Urban League as a vehicle of advancement because, quite simply, the Urban League was developed to deal with the race problem. “In contrast,” they argued, “the Spanish-American background is less characterized by racial differences than it is by the ‘rural-folk’ culture of the American southwest.”229 They believed race was not the distinguishing factor between them and other segments of the city population because they believed they were white. They were white because they were not black and in the dichotomous understanding of race in the

United States, it could only be one or the other. LARASA’s insistence on a separate organization to serve the needs of the city’s Mexican American population was well founded. They needed a mechanism for raising awareness about the problems that troubled their community—high drop-out rates, poverty and police brutality in particular—and for fighting for access to city resources, jobs and housing. In situating their justification on such clear racial terms, however, LARASA’s founders placed

Mexican Americans firmly on the white side of the color line.

229 Minutes, Spanish American Advisory Committee Meeting to the Denver Commission on Community Relations, Oct. 23, 1963, 1, CCR Papers, Box 1, Folder 33; Metropolitan Council for Community Service, Inc., “Report on the Latin American Research and Service Agency,” May 1964, 5, LARASA Papers, Box 48, Folder 20.

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Others attempted to position themselves similarly. Take the case of Adolpho

[sic.] Fernandez, who changed his name to Fo Farland, presumably so that his car dealership would read Farland-Buell, rather than Fernandez-Buell. A Commission on

Community Relations internal memo, circulated by a commission consultant critical of

Farland’s participation in the Colorado chapter of the Americans for Effective Law

Enforcement, Inc., noted that he was clearly ashamed of his national heritage. The memo went on: “If the sign on Farland’s automobile dealership read Fernandez-Buell, he might not find it so easy to get in to the Denver Country Club.”230 In this case, class played a significant role in determining how this man self-identified and how he presented himself to his customers. Being a white businessman might win him Anglo buyers, while being a

“Mexican” businessman limited the number of potential white buyers. Since making money was Fernandez’s main objective, it made sense to advertise a white identity.

Other Mexican Americans, too, rejected any identifier that associated them with

Mexican-ness, claiming that “[their] patriotism is insulted when [they] are referred to as a

Mexican.”231

Similarly, some Mexican Americans challenged the city police department for constantly marking them as “Mex,” “Mexican,” or “U.S. Mexican.” In 1966, in response to increasing pressure, the chief of police announced that Mexican Americans would be

230 Farland’s participation in the Colorado chapter of Americans for Effective Law Enforcement, Inc. is described in “Anti-Crime Unit Names Officers,” newspaper clipping, Mar. 20, 1969, McNichols Papers, Box 51, Folder 5. The consultant’s (no name) comments are attached to the newspaper clipping, Dec. 13, 1969, McNichols Papers, Box 51, Folder 5. It also notes that Farland’s brother changed his name as well, although their parents retained the name Fernandez.

231 “The Spanish American in Denver,” CCR Papers, Box 6, Folder 1.

105 marked as “white” or “Caucasian” on arrest reports in the future.232 The Denver School

Board likewise endorsed Mexican-American claims to whiteness. At the urging of

Mexican-American leaders throughout the 1960s, the Denver School Board approved a pamphlet to be used by Denver elementary schools that discussed the presence of

Hispanos in Colorado. It highlighted the history of Spanish colonization in the southwest—New Mexico and Colorado, in particular. Nowhere did the booklet discuss the indigenous heritage of Mexican Americans. Rather, it explicitly maintained that

Hispanos are the descendents of Spanish colonizers from the sixteenth century who came to settle and civilize . It also clearly distinguished between Hispanos and

Mexicans, who are not U.S. citizens and who frequently return to Mexico.233 By pushing this curriculum, Mexican-American leaders chose to align themselves and their history with Anglo Americans. They, too, descended from Europeans.

Although these are only a couple of examples, the practice of claiming whiteness was widespread and even systemic, though certainly not practiced by all. For many

Mexican Americans, it was a survival mechanism. Whiteness offered a certain level of shielding from the harsh realities of racism, which guided not only social interactions, but also political power and economic mobility. Being white was a pathway to success, a dynamic that everyone knew but rarely acknowledged. Instead, success was idealized as the result of individual hard work. It was deserved and celebrated as the outcome of a

232 Viva! The Battle Cry of Truth (Denver, CO), May 20, 1964; Denver Post, Feb. 17, 1966. Also see Vigil, “Rodolfo Gonzales and the Advent of the Crusade for Justice,” particularly 162-163.

233 “The Heritage and Contributions of the Hispanic American,” prepared and produced in the Department of General Curriculum Services, William R. Spears, Administrative Director, Division of Instructional Services, Wymond J. Ehrenkrook and Lloid B. Jones, Executive Directors, Denver Public Schools, 1968, Stock No. 93842, DPL-WHG.

106 social and economic system built upon meritocracy. Yet embedded in that system was the power of white supremacy. Race and class worked in tandem to produce outcomes that legitimized white supremacy and fostered a “possessive investment in whiteness” that made it pragmatic to claim a white identity.234 For individuals on the periphery of whiteness—European ethnics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, light skinned African Americans, Latinas/os of any national origin ancestry and others—being perceived as white offered certain tangible benefits that many could not pass up. It meant more job opportunities, more housing options, more respect and social capital, and certainly more opportunity for quality education.

It was not simply Mexican Americans who self-identified as white. Political candidates like Stephen McNichols courted Mexican American votes by celebrating their

Spanish past. Others did so in what seemed to be an effort to better human relations within the city. In a textbook used in Colorado public schools, students were taught that

Hispanos descended from the Spanish. According to the text, rather than hyphenated terms, which can be confusing, or derogatory terms, which are insulting, the term

“Hispano” was the preferred designation because it accurately conveyed the European background of these people. It reiterated, “[Hispano] identifies with the presently powerful transplanted Europeans, rather than the intelligent and highly imaginative, often non-literate, Indian peoples.”235 Mexican American representatives on the Denver

234 George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).

235 James A. Atkins, Human Relations in Colorado: A Historical Record (Denver: Colorado Department of Education, Division of Elementary and Secondary Education, Office of Instructional Services, 1968).

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Commission on Community Relations constantly talked about their community in non- racial terms. The very designation “Hispano” derives from the desire to claim a Spanish identity. To be sure, the emphasis on European ancestors did not eliminate anti-Hispano sentiment and there is no evidence that it actually did aid human relations in the city. But the efforts to whiten Mexican Americans by identifying them with an imagined Spanish past were so pervasive that they cannot be ignored.

Starting in the mid- to late-1960s, the politicization of young Mexican Americans in the Southwest and around the country began to dramatically alter racial understandings.

The term “Chicano” was reclaimed as a self-identification that denoted brown pride and rejected whiteness. A new, more radical awakening drew thousands of young people into emerging grassroots efforts that collectively became the Chicano Movement.236 In

Denver, the center of this awakening was the Crusade for Justice. Its growth, in addition to the development of a robust nationwide movement, pushed many Mexican Americans to rethink their racial understandings and how they self-identified. Not all Mexican

Americans agreed with the Crusade. And not all wanted to be racially distinct.

Whether the result of a conscious choice or a state-sponsored system of racial classification, some people of Mexican heritage self-identified as white, a fact that sometimes advanced their own interests and increased hostilities between Denver’s black and Mexican American communities.237 Even though Mexican Americans did

236 Haney López, Racism on Trial; Ernesto Chávez, ¡Mi Raza Primero! Nationalism, Identity, and Insurgency in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles, 1966-1978 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

237 This is not unlike racial tensions in other cities. One of the enduring questions among race scholars since the late-1990s is why multiracial alliances have been so difficult to build and maintain. Gordon K. Mantler, Power to Poor: Black-Brown Coalition and the Fight for Economic Justice1960-1974 (Chapel 108 experience much discrimination and they became increasingly more segregated within the city, the ability of some to transcend the color line, to claim whiteness, helped construct an idea of race that emphasized color or shade. The lighter skinned one was, the more superior his or her social position. Such an understanding contributed to uneasy alliances and tensions between black and Mexican American city residents during the postwar period as they competed for economic resources and city space, and came head to head with the white establishment.

Conclusion

Between the end of World War II and the beginning of the 1970s, Denver residents dealt with the problems that went along with urban growth: fierce job competition, housing shortages, poverty, segregation, and strained police-community relations. Race was a significant factor in how these issues played out and how people understood their communities. Although the race problem was understood in black and white terms, the reality of race relations in the city did not break down along black and white lines. Mexican-American leaders thus struggled to define the obstacles they faced in the city. Relations among whites, African Americans and Mexican Americans developed along multiple lines. During the period leading up the call for school

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Jorge Klor de Alva, Earl Shorris, & Cornel West, “Our Next Race Question: The Uneasiness between Blacks and Latinos,” Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror, Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic, eds. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997): 482- 492; Flores Niemann, “Social Ecological Contexts”; Foley, The White Scourge; Foley, The Quest for Equality; Kim, “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans”; and Claire Jean Kim, Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). On alliances that have achieved tangible results, see Scott Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiracial Los Angeles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 109 desegregation in 1968, both Mexican Americans and African Americans felt the sting of prejudice and discrimination in their city, although African Americans felt it more.

Mexican Americans tended to be the poorest of the poor, while many of Denver’s black families were solidly middle class.

Residentially, African Americans remained concentrated in specific areas of northeast Denver, though by the 1960s they had migrated eastward into adjacent Park

Hill. On the other hand, Mexican Americans were much more dispersed throughout the city, although there were neighborhoods that housed almost exclusively Mexican

Americans, such as the West Side barrio and particular blocks of the Capital Hill neighborhood. Public Housing units were highly desired and in short supply, which meant that the poor of all races were constantly competing with each other for these resources. And finally, inter-racial interactions between various groups and the Denver

Police created both tensions and alliances between African Americans and Mexican

Americans as each sought to assert themselves in the newly emerging Civil Rights and

Chicano Movements.

These problems continued to strain relationships into the 1960s, when parents starting demanding that the Denver School Board equalize student education through integration. As the School District considered proposals to build new schools and redraw boundaries in the early- to mid-1960s, the tensions that had defined the previous two decades came to the surface over the future of public education in the city. And the racial geography that had been laid would provide the context for the city’s desegregation struggles.

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Chapter 3

Denver Public Schools, Race, and Segregated Education in the Twentieth Century

On May 16, 1968, the Denver Board of Education passed Resolution 1490, also known as the Noel Resolution, which called for the Superintendent of Denver Public

Schools (DPS) to develop a plan to integrate the school system, to be presented to the

Board of Education and implemented by the end of 1968.238 Although the administration and the school board had passed several resolutions and policies that, in principle, supported integrated education, they had done almost nothing to actually start the desegregation process. Now that would change.

Most officials and board members saw Denver’s segregation as de facto, an unfortunate byproduct of residential segregation over which they had no control. Many board members, in fact, were taken by surprise when board member Rachel Noel introduced her resolution, aware that the black and Mexican-American communities had been complaining for years but sure that DPS was not in violation of the Supreme Court’s

Brown v. Board of Education decision. The resolution was discussed for several hours

238 Resolution 1490, Denver Board of Education, May 16, 1968, Rachel Noel Papers, ARL117, Blair- Caldwell African American Research Library, Denver Public Library (abbreviated hereafter as BCAARL), Denver, CO, Box 1, Folder 6.

111 but those who opposed it managed to get it tabled until the next month’s meeting.239 In the interim, board members, the school administration and community members held numerous meetings. By the time the board came back to vote, Denver was starkly divided between those in favor of integration by any means necessary and those opposed to what came to be called “forced busing” or “social experimentation.”

That divide only deepened over the ensuing several years, when the question went before the courts. Geographically, demographically, economically, and politically, Keyes transformed the Mile High City. Unlike most other cities, however, Denver’s desegregation battles emerged among a tri-racial rather than a bi-racial community. The educational concerns of Mexican Americans highlighted both the complexity of achieving truly equal educational opportunity and the intricacies of race-making in a western multiracial city.

Separate and Unequal: Denver Public Schools before Brown

In the early twentieth century, city leaders promoted their school system as a beacon of educational opportunity. Boosters claimed that a solid public school system attracted the nation’s best and brightest to their emerging metropolis. The Denver

Chamber of Commerce argued that building schools with higher pupil capacities than necessary would trigger population growth as people looked to the city as a model of

239 Jessica Pearson & Jeffrey Pearson, “Keyes v. School District No. 1,” in Howard Kalodner, eds, Limits of Justice: The Role of the Court in School Desegregation (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Publishing Co., 1978); Sharon Ruth Brown-Bailey, “Journey Full Circle: A Historical Analysis of Keyes v. School District No. 1,” (Ph.D. Diss., University of Colorado at Denver, 1998); Watson, “Removing the Barricades,” 95. 11 2 effective public education. As a newer city, Denver had few elite private schools. More often than not, the children of the wealthy attended public schools.240

During the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan heavily promoted Denver Public Schools as a bulwark against the developing Catholic school system. At the peak of the Klan’s popularity in Denver, in 1924, Superintendent Jesse Newlon brought Jim Crow to DPS, requiring schools to provide segregated social functions for black and white students.

Newlon’s dictate came as the result of protest from community members upset over a black girl in an otherwise all-white swimming class at Morey Junior High School and the presence of a couple of young at Manual High School social events.241

In 1927, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that this practice was in violation of the state constitution and ordered DPS to stop enforcing it immediately. Regardless, discrimination continued, practiced in both subtle and overt ways. Although Jim Crow was officially outlawed, recognition of racial difference was very much a part of DPS’ operations. A tracking system promoted college preparatory courses for white middle- and upper-class students while poor whites and most nonwhites were tagged for vocational coursework.

Throughout the early part of the century and especially during the 1920s the district built several new schools that city leaders said were testaments to Denver’s commitment to universal education and democratic ideals. Between 1930 and 1946, however, no new schools were constructed. By the 1950s, consequently, overcrowding was a major problem in parts of the district, requiring DPS to make boundary changes

240 Goodstein, DIA and Other Scams, 49-50. 241 Goodstein, DIA and Other Scams, 50.

113 and implement policies that increased racial segregation.242 As the effects of these policies became clear, the black community in Five Points began to protest.

The first confrontation came over the district’s plans to rebuild Manual High

School, which had been established in 1894 as a vocational school. When they learned the new Manual was to be built in the middle of Five Points, black activists and parents challenged the district on its site selection, arguing that it would become a predominantly black school. DPS insisted that the new school would provide such innovative programs students from all over the city would want to attend.243 Most people associated the school with the black community that surrounded it, however, and white students avoided it. The new Manual opened in 1953. Almost all of its student population was black.

Five Points residents soon discovered why. DPS placed the boundary for Manual at York Street, the eastern boundary of the Five Points neighborhood. The main feeder school for Manual was Cole Junior High School, which was already predominantly black.

An optional zone was established in the Clayton Park neighborhood to the east of York

Street. Any child residing in that area could choose to attend either Manual or East High

School, which was almost exclusively white. This ensured that any white student in

Clayton Park who so wished could escape from a black school. Black parents wanted the boundary moved further east, which would have made Manual an integrated school. But

DPS ignored their demands. Most of the white students in the optional zone chose to enroll at East, which was five hundred students over capacity. Manual, meanwhile, remained a segregated black school, six hundred students under capacity. By

242 Brown-Bailey, “Journey Full Circle,” 69; Goodstein, DIA and Other Scams, 50. 243 Court Transcript, Civil Action C-1499, U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado VI (Feb. 1970): 852-853, Keyes et. al. Collection, Accession 1, Box 8, Folder 16. 114 gerrymandering the school boundary and creating an optional zone, DPS made sure that black and white students stayed largely segregated, demonstrating that even though school segregation was not required by law, the district’s intent was to keep the races as separate as possible.

Still Separate and Unequal: Denver Public Schools in the Post-Brown Era

After the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education

(1954), DPS continued business as usual. As far as the district was concerned, the

Court’s decision had no bearing on the way Denver schools operated, since Colorado had no legal mandate requiring segregation, as did southern states. When the decision came down, members of the Board of Education did discuss the case and its implications, if any, for the district. They even sought an opinion from the Board’s attorney, who informed them that it did not apply to Denver.244 As school systems around the nation struggled to understand the full ramifications of Brown and the Court’s subsequent school desegregation decisions, those outside the South continued to believe they were doing nothing wrong.

Within a few years of opening Manual High School, the district built another junior high school designed to alleviate some of the overcrowding in Northeast Denver.

When Hill Junior High was completed in early 1956, school officials once again re-drew the school boundaries. These new boundaries affected Manual and East High Schools, as well as Cole, Smiley, Grove and Hill Junior High Schools, all schools within the African-

244 Lois Heath Johnson Testimony, Trial on Merits, Feb. 2-20, 1970, in Appendix, vol. 2, Supreme Court of the United States, October term 1971, No. 71-507, Keyes et. al.,899a-900a.

115

American area of the city. According to Superintendent Kenneth Oberholtzer, the re- districting was necessary only because of population changes. Race, he said, was never a factor in the schools’ deliberations.245

The East Denver Citizens Committee disagreed. In January 1956, residents created the organization specifically to oppose the district’s proposed boundary changes.

Composed of African-American city leaders from the NAACP and the Urban League, as well as parents from Northeast Denver, the committee fought DPS for months. If the new boundaries went into effect, the activists said, they would segregate the vast majority of black students in Cole and Manual, which was already heavily segregated. With the addition of Hill and new boundaries, black junior high school students would be confined to Cole. Since students who attended Cole automatically attended Manual, the latter would become even more heavily segregated, while Hill, Smiley, Grove, and East would remain majority white. Black activists proposed an alternative boundary, which moved the dividing line a few blocks east of York Street to Colorado Boulevard. This would ensure that white students went to Cole and Manual and that black students went to Hill and East. The group collected over one hundred signatures on a petition calling on the district to reject the initial proposal and adopt their alternative one.246 Their opposition forced the district to postpone implementing the changes until it could investigate

245 Betty Jean Lee, “Schools Deny Race Segregation in Boundaries, Hiring Policy Hit,” Denver Post, Jan. 15, 1956, newspaper clipping in Keyes et. al. Collection, Accession 1, Box 2, Folder 5.

246 George Brown Testimony, Trial on Merits, Feb. 2-20, 1970, in Appendix, vol. 2, Supreme Court of the United States, October term 1971, No. 71-507, Keyes et. al., 858a-860a.

116 further.247 While they waited for a response, the Denver NAACP, in collaboration with the East Denver Citizen’s Committee, met several times with members of the school board to discuss the proposed boundary changes. Feeling the district was dragging its feet on making a decision so that black activists would lose momentum, NAACP lawyers met with the Denver branch of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to discuss a potential lawsuit against the district should it implement the changes.248 From their perspective, school officials were setting boundaries knowing that those boundaries would perpetuate segregation. Their refusal to consider other boundaries proved their intent to maintain segregated schools in Northeast Denver.249

In the meantime, the executive director of the Denver Urban League, Sebastian

Owns, accused DPS of discrimination in its hiring and placement of teachers. He noted that the number of black teachers in DPS had doubled between 1948 and 1952. But the district had also turned away at least twenty-one black applicants who met or exceeded the qualifications for employment while recruiting white teachers from out of state, claiming a shortage of sufficiently trained local applicants.250 Several times La Jean

247 “2 Civic Groups Probing School Racial Charges,” Denver Post, Jul. 18, 1956, newspaper clipping in Keyes, et. al. Collection, Accession 1, Box 2, Folder 5; Betty Jean Lee, “Manual-Cole Parents Charge School Opportunity Not Equal,” Denver Post, Apr. 5, 1956, newspaper clipping in Keyes, et. al. Collection, Accession 1, Box 2, Folder 5.

248 George Brown Testimony, Trial on Merits, Feb. 2-20, 1970, in Appendix, vol. 2, Supreme Court of the United States, October term 1971, No. 71-507, Keyes et. al., 849a-850a; “2 Civic Groups Probing School Racial Charges,” Jul. 18, 1956, newspaper clipping in Keyes, et. al. Collection, Accession 1, Box 2, Folder 5.

249 George Brown Testimony, Trial on Merits, Feb. 2-20, 1970, in Appendix, vol. 2, Supreme Court of the United States, October term 1971, No. 71-507, Keyes et. al.,860a-871a.

250 According to the Urban League, DPS employed sixty-one African Americans in 1956: fifty-eight teachers, one nurse, one school psychologist, and one elementary school principal. All worked in predominantly black or predominately black and Hispano schools. Betty Jean Lee, “Schools Deny Race 117

Clark, who led educational efforts for the Denver Urban League, pushed Superintendent

Oberholtzler to hire more black teachers on a full time basis as opposed to making them temporary or substitute teachers, a standard DPS practice.251 Another Urban League official, Lorenzo Traylor, later said that during the mid-1950s he had pressured DPS to hire more black teachers, providing the names of about 150 qualified applicants, few of whom were given serious consideration.252

The experience of Robbie Bean, a teacher with a master’s degree in elementary education and two years teaching experience in Omaha, , is representative of the kind of treatment potential and actual black teachers were afforded by DPS. When she applied for a teacher’s position in 1953, Bean was rejected because, according to the district, she did not have enough experience. District officials offered her a substitute teaching position instead, which she did not accept. In 1958 she re-applied and was once again offered a substitute job, which she accepted. During the three years she worked as a substitute she spent one day in a white school. The rest of the time she was assigned to majority black schools. Bean was finally hired full-time by the district in 1961 and was assigned to predominantly black Gilpin Elementary School.253

Segregation in Boundaries, Hiring Policy Hit,” Denver Post, Jan. 15, 1956, newspaper clipping in Keyes, et. al. Collection, Accession 1, Box 2, Folder 5; Watson, “Removing the Barricades,” 27.

251 Letter from La Jean Clark to Kenneth Oberholtzer, Dec. 21, 1955; and Letter from La Jean Clark to Kenneth Oberholtzer, Apr. 19, 1956, Denver Urban League Collection, Archives, University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries, Boulder, CO, Box 1, Folder 5.

252 “Negroes Assigned on Vote of Faculty, Witness Says,” Rocky Mountain News, Feb. 4, 1970, 8, in newspaper clipping file, “Keyes Denver School Desegregation Case,” DPL-WHG.

253 Gordon Greiner, “Pre-trial notes,” Keyes et. al. Collection, Accession 1, Box 1, Folder 21; Watson, “Removing the Barricades,” 27-28.

118

Demographic changes assured that the issue would not go away. As black families continued to move into the Park Hill neighborhood, schools there were quickly overwhelmed by the increasing numbers of children. Park Hill was expanding to the northeast but DPS was not building more schools in the area. Elementary schools fared the worst. In 1959 the school district announced plans to build another school, Barrett

Elementary, to relieve overcrowding in Northeast Denver. Barrett was to be built at

Colorado Boulevard and Twenty-Ninth Street. Its boundary was to be Colorado

Boulevard, also the unofficial dividing line between the black and white communities by that time. The proposed size of the school was also suspect. It was much smaller than other elementary schools in the district, and at a time when student enrollments were growing tremendously, critics suggested that school officials wanted to avoid having to send white students there. By keeping the school small, the district could argue that it was impossible to send white students there because it was at full capacity. Barrett, therefore, would remain a majority black school while schools to the east would be majority white.254

Black parents again challenged DPS to consider alternative boundaries. If the district moved the diving line to the east or west a couple of blocks the schools would be integrated. The district refused to consider that option, arguing that it did not want children crossing the busy Colorado Boulevard on their way to school. When parents said that other areas within the district also crossed major streets, DPS ignored them.255

254 Denver Post, Apr. 9, 1959; Pearson and Pearson, “Keyes v. School District No. 1,” 181; Watson, “Removing the Barricades,” 30; Brown-Bailey, “Journey Full Circle,” 72.

255 Keyes v. School District No. 1, 313 F. Supp. 61, 65 (Denver, Colo., 1970). 119

A similar result occurred when black parents asked the district to bus their children to the schools east of Colorado Boulevard. Nothing they said could convince the school board to change its plans: when Barrett Elementary School opened in 1960, it was ninety-eight percent black.256

Soon thereafter, noticeable differences between the quality of education at Barrett and at elementary schools to the East of Colorado Boulevard began to appear. Future school board member Rachel Noel went to her daughter’s classroom to see for herself how it compared to the class she had attended at Park Hill Elementary. She saw a first year teacher providing lessons to sixth graders on materials her daughter had learned at

Park Hill as a fifth grader. Appalled, she began to give her daughter extra work at home so she would not fall behind.257

One of the reasons black parents were so opposed to segregated schools was because segregation created unequal education, whether schools were segregated by law or not. Black students in majority black schools did not have the same level of instruction, the same quality of materials, or the same quality of teachers, as Rachel Noel noted when her daughter switched from Park Hill to Barrett. Perhaps the most damaging effect of these inequalities was higher than average drop-out rates. Black students in

Northeast Denver were more likely than not to drop-out of school before they graduated.

Though most, almost eighty-five percent, were likely to complete junior high school and

256 Watson, “Removing the Barricades,” 31.

257 Watson, “Removing the Barricades,” 32.

120 move on to high school, almost sixty-five percent of those students left before completing twelfth grade.258

In 1962, the school board announced that it would build another junior high school in Northeast Denver. As with Barrett, the boundary would be Colorado Boulevard, ensuring that this new school would also be majority black. Again the black community expressed its dissatisfaction with the plan. This time the NAACP, the Urban League,

CORE, the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Commission, and several churches serving black neighborhoods joined the parents’ struggle, insisting that DPS abandon plans to build yet another all-black school and begin the process of providing equal educational opportunity for everyone. In short, they demanded integration.259

Many whites in Denver could not understand why all of a sudden the black community was so angry since they had not really noticed the earlier protests. One historian says of this period, “Many Denver residents who believed that their [sic.] blacks were happy and prosperous were surprised at how vehement the protest against the

Denver Public Schools was becoming as the nation moved into the turbulent decade of the 1960s.”260 Now it seemed black Denver was on the verge of a major challenge to the city’s educational system.

258 Court Transcript, Trial on Merits, Feb. 2-20, 1970, 779a-780a.

259 Denver Post, Feb. 14, 1962; Denver Post, Apr. 5, 1962; Pearson and Pearson, “Keyes v. School District No. 1,” 181; Watson, “Removing the Barricades, “ 41.

260 Watson, “Removing the Barricades,” 33. 121

The Other Struggle for Equal Education: Mexican Americans in DPS

As Denver schools maintained segregation between black and white students,

DPS found other methods to segregate Mexican-American students. In many ways, separating Mexican Americans was an easier task than separating blacks. DPS could argue that its policies were color-blind: the district was simply separating Mexican-

American children based on language and cultural differences. School officials made no effort to address the very real problems Mexican-American students experienced; they simply placed them in second-tier classes and watched as their educational achievement fell behind that of white students, discipline problems mounted, truancy rates rose, and drop-out rates skyrocketed.

Because residential segregation was not as stark among Mexican Americans in the 1950s, they were not as clearly segregated as Denver’s black students. That did not mean that segregation did not occur. Rather than identifiable Mexican-American schools—though these did exist by the mid-1960s, particularly at the elementary school level—there were identifiable Mexican-American classrooms. Students were tested for comprehension levels in basic subjects and placed in certain tracks. Those placed in the college preparatory track were mostly white, while those placed in the vocational training track were majority black and Mexican American. Moreover, a disproportionate number of Mexican-American students were placed in special education classrooms, called remedial education, based on the district’s assumption that they were slower learners and/or had no potential or desire to succeed.261

261 This was also done in other parts of Colorado. Donato, Mexicans and Hispanos in Colorado Schools and Communities, 70-81. 122

According to Mexican-American parents and civic leaders, the primary reason for the lack of achievement and high drop-out rate of Mexican-American students was the school district’s lack of cultural sensitivity and inability to reach those students who came from different cultural backgrounds. They argued that neither the majority of DPS teachers nor the administration understood the family and community backgrounds of non-Anglo students and couldn’t effectively communicate with students whose primary language was not English.262

Teachers, they said, were on the front lines of the student educational experience.

When Mexican-American students looked up and saw an Anglo teacher in almost every classroom and at the helms of every school, they often disengaged, particularly when those teachers showed no interest in helping them succeed. They appeared cold, as did the entire school system. The key to motivating students, argued many Mexican-

American parents and activists, was to get them to identify with the school system, to see their schools as an extension of their families and communities. Mexican-American teachers were therefore crucial components of the learning environment for Mexican-

American students.263 The students themselves recognized as much. "Our goal is to get an education,” wrote Baker Junior High students Cindy and Cheri Trujillo in a letter to

262 LARASA, “Recommendations of the Latin American Research and Service Agency to the Denver Board of Education and the Denver Public School System: The Goals and Objectives of the Chicano Community and Their Impact on the Denver Public Schools,” c.a. 1974, Polly Baca Papers, WH1793, DPL-WHG, Unprocessed, Box 21, Folder “LARASA”; Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, “Intervenor’s Memorandum with Respect to Minority Teacher Employment and Bilingual- Multicultural Education,” Wilfred Keyes et. al., Civil Action No. C-1499, U.S. District Court (Colorado), Apr. 4, 1974, 4, Keyes, et. al. Collection, Accession 1, Box 25, Vol. III, No. 14.

263Letter to Don Hefley, President, Denver Classroom Teachers Association, from Manuel Gomez, Chairman, LARASA Education Committee, May 4, 1973, 2, Polly Baca Papers, Box 21, Folder “LARASA.”

123 the editor published in 1969, “but there needs to be a better understanding between teachers and students."264 Lena Garcia, a student at South High School, told the Board of

Education that most teachers were “insensitive” toward Mexican-American students and she pleaded with board members to hire more Mexican-American and black teachers.265

In 1965 there were only fifty-eight Mexican-American teachers in the entire district, out of a total of 3,953—slightly over one percent. The majority of Mexican-

American students never even saw a Mexican-American teacher.266 By 1973, when

Keyes was being considered by the Supreme Court, that number had risen to only 132, about three percent of the total number of teachers. This was at a moment when the district had thirty-eight schools that were over a third Mexican American. Twenty-one of those schools were over fifty percent Mexican American, and seven were over seventy- five percent Mexican American. LARASA estimated that within a decade, as the population of Mexican Americans continued to grow and Anglo families fled to the suburbs, the majority of DPS pupils would be Mexican American.267 Believing these students were in crisis and that the situation was only going to get worse, the group urged

264 Letter to the Editor, Cindy & Cheri Trujillo, West Side Recorder 6, no. 1 (May 1969), 2.

265 “South Pupils Ask Removal of Principal,” Rocky Mountain News, Oct. 30, 1970, 7, newspaper clipping in scrapbook (Sep.-Nov 1970), Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales Papers (hereafter Corky Gonzales Papers), WH1971, DPL-WHG, Box 12, Folder 19.

266 Table, “Elementary Faculty, Racial Composition, 1963-68, Number,” Plaintiffs’ Exhibit 244, p. 2055a- 2056a; Table, “Junior High Faculty, Racial Composition, 1963-68, Number,” Plaintiffs’ Exhibit 304, p. 2082a; Table, “Senior High Faculty, Racial Composition, 1963-68, Number,” Plaintiffs’ Exhibit 275, p. 2075a; all in Keyes, et. al., Appendix, Supreme Court of the United States, October Term 1971, No. 71-507, Vol. 5. Note: the tables for junior high and senior high faculty are mislabeled. The table with the title for junior high faculty is actually for senior high faculty and the table for senior high faculty is actually for junior high faculty.

267 LARASA, “Proposal to the Denver Board of Education to Activate the Hispano Advisory Committee,” 1973, 1, Polly Baca Papers, Box 21, Folder “LARASA.”

124 the school board and the DPS administration to hire more Mexican-American teachers, administrators and counselors.

DPS perceived the problem differently. Its perspective was that Mexican

Americans were the problem; not the district’s curriculum, teaching methods or the learning environment. School officials accepted as a general premise that Mexican-

American culture was inferior and that it fostered students’ lack of motivation and academic success. During the mid-1950s, as the “Spanish-American problem” became more and more apparent to district officials and teachers, DPS implemented a Joint City-

Schools Program meant to encourage better communication between the schools, parents and the larger community.268 One of the first steps this new organization took was an attempt to understand why achievement was so low among Mexican Americans. Its report, “Some Problems Related to the Membership of Spanish Children and Youth in the

Denver Public Schools,” indicted Mexican American culture and families, and took almost no responsibility for the many problems these pupils encountered in Denver schools. The lack of parental involvement among Mexican Americans, for example, was the consequence of their lack of interest in their children’s education rather than a result of their unfamiliarity with the school system, insecurities about being poorly educated themselves, or their inability to converse well in English.269 One teacher at Baker Junior

268 The Joint City-Schools Program was also affiliated with the CCR, and included DPS staff members and representatives from various community organizations. Atkins, Human Relations in Colorado, 163.

269 Joint City-School Project, “Some Problems Related to the Membership of Spanish Children and Youth in the Denver Public Schools,” Feb. 24, 1956, CCR Papers, Box 5, Folder 22. Another, more comprehensive report on minorities in Denver maintained a similar stance in regards to the educational problems of Mexican American students. Denver Commission on Human Relations, “Inventory of Human Relations, 1954-1955: Summaries and Recommendations,” in Cooperation with the Anti-Defamation League of B ’Nai B ’Rith, The Denver Urban League, Japanese American Citizens League, Adult 125

High School on the West Side told the Board of Education: “…the reason [Mexican-

American] children do not want to read is because they are unhappy, frustrated, and unsocial, coming from family backgrounds that lack love for learning.”270 These assumptions only increased the likelihood that DPS would not institute changes that, by the late 1960s, Mexican-American parents were demanding: bilingual and multicultural education programs, and an increase in the number of Mexican-American teachers, counselors, and principals.

The Eurocentrisim of the school district thus fostered an environment that limited the success of many Mexican-American students. This led to unequal educational opportunity. The most visible identifier of these inequalities was the lower test scores of

Mexican-Americans students compared to white students and the high drop-out rate of

Mexican-American students compared to both white and black students. School officials did not maintain statistics based on race until 1962 and they did not release that information to the public until late 1967.271 Nonetheless, teacher observations concluded that nonwhite students in majority nonwhite schools performed at lower levels than white students.272 Two successive DPS superintendents recognized that students in the schools with majority black and/or Mexican-American students scored below expectancy. Dr.

Education Council, Anti-Discrimination Division of the State Industrial Commission, Western District of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, State Employment Service, League of United Latin American Citizens, and the United Packinghouse Workers of America (1955), 164-216.

270 Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, Apr. 23, 1970, 19-20.

271 Martin Moran, “Race Was Never A Factor, Ex-Superintendent Says,” Rocky Mountain News, Feb. 18, 1970, newspaper clipping in Keyes, et. al Collection, Accession 1, Box 2, Folder 6.

272 “Inventory of Human Relations,” 168.

126

Kenneth E. Oberholtzer, superintendent from 1947 to 1967, and Dr. Robert D. Gilberts, superintendent from 1967 to 1970, both acknowledged the lower achievement of minority schools, though both maintained that race was not a factor in this outcome.273

Low achievement scores translated into other inequalities. The use of IQ tests and culturally biased standardized testing resulted in a disproportionate number of Mexican-

American students being placed in special education classes.274 Once in these sections, students had little chance of returning to regular classrooms or of learning the skills and behaviors that were required for life success. Dr. Jose Cardenas, an educational expert who specialized in Mexican-American student needs, maintained that the district’s use of the Proficiency and Review (PAR) test, in particular, unfairly marked Mexican-American students for failure due to both its biased nature and the district’s over reliance on it as a predictor of academic achievement levels.275 By the 1971-1972 school year, when

Mexican Americans comprised about 13.7 percent of total enrollment in the state of

Colorado, they constituted 32 percent of students in special education classes and 30.2

273 Oberholtzer maintained that native ability, home environment, the educational level of the parents, the motivation of students and income level were all contributors, just not race. Martin Moran, “Race Was Never Factor, Ex-Superintendent Says,” Rocky Mountain News, Feb. 19, 1970, newspaper clipping in Keyes et. al Collection, Accession 1, Box 2, Folder 6. Gilberts argued socioeconomic background was the major factor contributing to the lower scores of students in minority schools. Robert D. Gilberts Testimony, Hearing on Preliminary Injunction, Keyes et. al, Jul. 17, 1969, 289.

274 These classes were called Educable Mentally Retarded (EMR). Brief of Appellee-Plaintiff-Intervenor Congress of Hispanic Educators, Wilfred Keyes, et. al, U.S. Court of Appeals, Tenth Circuit, Nos. 74-1349, 74-1350 and 74-1351, Oct. 15, 1974, 21-22, Keyes et. al. Collection, Accession 1, Box 26, Vol. 3. See also Mary Ellen Leary, “Children Who Are Tested in an Alien Language: Mentally Retarded?” New Republic, May 30, 1970, 17-18.

275 Congress of Hispanic Educators, in consultation with Dr. Jose. A. Cardenas, “Addendum to the Intervenor’s Education Plan for the Denver Public Schools,” Feb. 5, 1974, 23-24, Keyes et. al. Collection, Accession 1, Box 25, Vol. 2, No. 55.

127 percent of students held back to repeat a grade level. In Denver, with a higher percentage of Mexican American students, the situation was similar.276

With little incentive and even less encouragement, many Mexican-American students went through DPS with low expectations. They encountered hostile teachers and administrators, an educational system that did not value their culture or values, and in some cases, a language they barely understood. Others could speak English effectively, but had a difficult time reading and writing in English, a problem that school officials never recognized until it was pointed out to them by the Congress of Hispanic Educators in court proceedings. As a result, the drop-out rate of Mexican American students was highest among any group in Denver.277 LARASA estimated that by the early 1970s, one third to one half of all Mexican Americans in the Denver school system dropped out on an annual basis.278 Moreover, their research concluded that Mexican-American students who dropped out had already determined to do so by about the third grade. After that, it

276 Brief of Appellee-Plaintiff-Intervenor Congress of Hispanic Educators, Wilfred Keyes et. al., U.S. Court of Appeals, Tenth Circuit, Nos. 74-1349, 74-1350, 74-1351, Oct. 15, 1974, 17, Keyes et. al. Collection, Accession 1, Box 26, Vol. 3.

277 Appendix III: Pupil Dropout Rates, Keyes v. School District No. 1, 313 F. Supp. 61, 89 (Denver, Colo., 1970); Tentative Draft, “A Proposal for Community Involvement in a Desegregated School System, Denver, Colorado,” prepared by the Commission on Community Relations for the Emergency School Assistance Program, Dec. 1, 1970, 12, Keyes, et. al, Accession 1, Box 2, Folder 2; “Table 4: Estimated Student Dropouts for Anglo and Chicano Student Populations in the Denver Public Schools,” attached to letter to Don Hefley, President, Denver Classroom Teachers Association, from Manuel Gomez, Chairman, LARASA Education Committee, Apr. 16, 1973, Polly Baca Papers , Box 21, Folder “LARASA.”

278 LARASA, “Recommendations of the Latin American Research and Service Agency to the Denver Board of Education and the Denver Public School System: The Goals and Objectives of the Chicano Community and Their Impact on the Denver Public Schools,” c.a. 1974, Polly Baca Papers, Box 21, Folder “LARASA.”

128 was merely a matter of how long they were willing to hold out before they formally exited the schools.279

Protests Mount: DPS in the 1960s and the Push for Integration

By 1962, dissatisfaction with the public school system had reached a boiling point.

Members of the black community had been pushing DPS on its racial practices for over a decade, while Mexican Americans were starting to mobilize around educational issues as well. Although they faced many of the same dilemmas—racial isolation, few black or

Mexican teachers, inexperienced teachers, lower achievement levels and high dropout rates—they perceived their circumstances in different ways. Among black parents and activists, the goal was to stop DPS from building more minority schools and from re- drawing school boundaries that would increase segregation. Mexican-American parents and activists increasingly sought to develop and nurture stronger Mexican-American schools, where multicultural education could be emphasized and valued, and bilingual education could be realized. Thus, the very meaning of “equal educational opportunity” was somewhat different.

That year DPS announced its intention to build another junior high school in northeast Denver. Like Cole and Barrett before it, it would be a majority black school.

The community responded to this plan with outrage. Parents and civil rights groups protested the school district’s plan with more force than their earlier efforts. At school board meetings they filled the room to capacity and demanded that the board abandon

279 Letter to Don Hefley, Denver Classroom Teachers Association, from Manuel Gomez, Chairman, LARASA Education Committee, May 4, 1973, Polly Baca Papers, Box 21, Folder “LARASA.” 129 plans for another black school. The Urban League, meanwhile, threatened a boycott of the schools and a lawsuit.280 Other community groups started getting involved, including middle-class black and white residents in Park Hill, who joined forces to argue against the further concentration of black students. Park Hill Elementary School already had both black and white students and the group worked hard to maintain harmonious relations between the two groups. The members of the Park Hill Action Committee

(PHAC) accepted integration as inevitable and beneficial. Most of all, they wanted to stabilize their community. The further concentration of black students in northeast

Denver would only perpetuate inequalities and divide Park Hill along racial lines. For an organization that was trying to bring people together for the betterment of their neighborhood, this was unacceptable.281

On top of the controversy over the proposed new school, DPS also announced new boundary changes that would affect students at Morey, Cole and Byers Junior High

Schools. The district decided to alleviate the overcrowding at Cole by eliminating the optional area between Cole and Morey, a majority white school. The area was transitioning from a white neighborhood to a substantially black one, but there were still some white families there. Historically, those few white families had chosen to send their children to Morey, yet it remained substantially under capacity. Under the new boundary lines, those who resided within the optional area were sent to Morey. The optional area

280 Watson, “Removing the Barricades,” 43.

281 Greater Park Hill Community, Inc., “Summary History of Denver School Desegregation from a Park Hill Perspective,” n.d., ca. 1988, 1, Rachel Noel Papers, Box 2, Folder 5; Cooper Thompson, Emmett Robert Schaefer & Harry Brod, White Men Challenging Racism: 35 Stories (Duke University Press, 2003), 37-43 on Branscombe.

130 between Morey and Byers, a majority white school, was also eliminated and the students there sent to Byers. As a result more white students were shifted to Byers and more black students were shifted to Morey, effectively turning Morey into an integrated school.

White parents who lived between Sixth and Eighth Avenues mounted a protest against these changes because they were left in the Morey attendance area. They did not have to press their demands too hard; with little provocation, the Board of Education quietly transferred those students between Sixth and Eighth Avenues to Byers.282 White student enrollment at Morey fell by about forty-nine percent.283

In response to the proposed boundary changes, the announcement of a new junior high school, and the School Board’s decision to accommodate angry white parents while completely ignoring their own pleas, black parents and activists showed their force at successive school board meetings. There they challenged DPS on its discriminatory practices. At the center of their argument was the claim that the district had purposefully kept black students isolated in certain schools. Cole Junior High School had a capacity of

1,725, yet 2000 students— a majority of them black—were enrolled. Black parents had been calling for the district to bus their children to majority white schools in Southeast and Southwest Denver, which were under capacity. Instead, DPS placed mobile

282 Report…a Study of Pupil Population, School Boundaries, Pupil Transportation and School Buildings (Denver, Denver Public Schools, 1962); Court Transcripts, Trial on Merits, Feb. 2-20, 1970, in Appendix, vol. 2, Supreme Court of the United States, October term 1971, No. 71-507, Keyes et. al.; Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, Mar. 14, 1962, Mar. 21, 1962, & Apr. 4, 1962.

283 Watson, “Removing the Barricades,” 50.

131 classroom units at the black schools.284 At a March 1962 school board meeting, shortly after the new construction plans had been announced, black parents and activists filled the room. They pressed the board to justify its practices and demanded to know what the racial composition of the new school would be. “`We don’t keep track by race,’” one board member responded. “`We put schools where the children are.…If we have ghetto schools it’s because we have . The basic answer to this problem is the dispersion of the Negro population…the School Board is not responsible for neighborhood housing patterns, you are.’”285 Black parents and civil rights leaders, however, refused to accept such colorblind proclamations. The school system had an obligation, they said, to ensure that students received an integrated education.286

Their mobilization forced the school board to halt its plans for the new school so it could further explore the issues raised by integration proponents. To avoid a major clash with the black community, the board created a new study committee, which would investigate the claims of community members and parents and report back to the board with facts and recommendations. The Special Study Committee on Equal Educational

Opportunity in the Denver Public Schools was composed of board members, DPS staff, and Denver citizens. It was charged with investigating a number of factors that could influence educational opportunity, including race and ethnicity, curriculum, instruction

284 Court Transcript, Wilfred Keyes et. al., U.S. District Court, Denver, Colorado, Feb. 18, 1970, 1,849; Report…A Study of Pupil Population, School Boundaries, Pupil Transportation and School Buildings (Denver: Denver Public Schools, 1962), 31.

285 Unknown School Board member, from Denver Board of Education Minutes, Mar. 21, 1962, 4-7, as cited in Watson, “Removing the Barricades,” 42-43.

286 Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, Mar. 21, 1962 and Apr. 4, 1962. 132 and guidance, buildings, equipment, supplies, teaching staff, administration and organization, and school-community relations.287

After nearly two years of study, the committee released its report in 1964, confirming what black parents and community leaders had long been arguing. The district’s unwritten school boundary policies had led to the racial isolation of students; facilities and equipment were generally inferior at minority schools; and minority teachers were overwhelmingly placed in minority schools. The committee offered 155 recommendations meant to address these concerns and work towards real equality. The focal point of these recommendations was that DPS should consider race and ethnicity when setting school boundaries. That way, the district could promote integrated schools by drawing boundaries so as to include as diverse a student population as possible. The report stated, “It is the opinion of the Committee that perhaps the Board and the administration have pursued this policy [colorblindness] to a point beyond that required by constitutional and statutory prohibitions against ‘distinction or classification of pupils on account of race or color.’” It then pointed out that when the Supreme Court ruled in

Brown, it had been concerned with segregation that was caused by law, but the members of the Committee were of the opinion that de facto segregation caused the same harms.

The report concluded, “The Committee feels that in adhering without obvious deviation to the principle of establishing school boundaries without regard to racial or ethnic background, the Board and the administration have concurred…in the perpetuation of

287 Special Study Committee on Equality of Educational Opportunity in the Denver Public Schools, Report and Recommendations to the Board of Education, School District No. 1(Denver: Denver Public Schools, 1964), 9.

133 existing de facto segregation and its resultant inequalities in the educational opportunity offered.”288 While the Committee confirmed both the benefits of integration and the necessity of color-conscious policies, Committee members were also unwavering in their support of the neighborhood school concept. And they denounced busing as impractical.289

Based on the recommendations of the Special Study Committee, the school board passed Policy 5100 in May 1964, which affirmed the desirability of racially heterogeneous schools and the educational benefits of integration. It called not for the dismantling of the neighborhood schools policy, but for changes and adaptations to achieve racial integration.290 Putting Policy 5100 into action, the school board instituted a “Limited Open Enrollment” plan that opened twenty-six elementary schools, nine junior high schools and four senior high schools with available space to any student who wanted to go there.291 In some of these schools, only certain grades—those with the space—were opened. In total, only about 1,800 spaces, or around 2 percent of total DPS student enrollment, were made available.292 Critics of the program insisted that as a stand-alone policy, open enrollment would not solve the problems the Special Study

288 Special Study Committee, Report and Recommendations, 1964, quote on 5.

289 Special Study Committee, Report and Recommendations, 1964.

290 Denver Public Schools, Policy 5100, Equality of Educational Opportunity, May 6, 1964, Rachel Noel Papers, Box 1, Folder 6.

291 “Two Years After: A Progress Report to the Board of Education, by the Superintendent and Staff of Denver Public Schools on the Recommendations of the Special Study Committee on Equality of Educational Opportunity,” May 1964-May 1966, 2, Rachel Noel Papers, Box 1, Folder 9.

292 Minoru Yasui, “Role of the City and County of Denver in the Desegregation of Denver Public Schools,” Dec. 12, 1977, 9, William McNichols Papers, Box 93, Folder 19.

134

Committee had detailed. Racial concentration would continue, ensuring that equality of educational opportunity would not be achieved. They were right. Only 593 students took part in the program during its first year.293 Moreover, although the program was open to all DPS students, it did little to address the concerns of the city’s largest minority group.

The school district, in conjunction with the recommendations of the Special Study

Committee, also slowly began to add reading materials that discussed the contributions of

African Americans and Mexican Americans in the nation’s history, particularly in

Colorado’s history. They also promoted a more vigorous human relations approach that encouraged intercultural communication and engagement.294

These were not significant departures from previous DPS policy. Throughout the

1950s and early 1960s, the Denver school system had employed a model of education that promoted intercultural exchange as a means of resolving the many tensions that existed between varying groups of students. This “cultural pluralist” approach became the district’s method of handling youth conflict in an increasingly hostile city. The perceived “gang violence” that broke out between Mexican-American and Jewish students at Lake Junior High School in the late 1940s and early 1950s was a prime example. Through exposure to others’ histories and traditions, experts believed, students would come to understand each other and free themselves of prejudices. This was a similar approach to that taken by the CCR. Not only were these programs, as stand-alone

293 There were 230 elementary school students, 169 junior high school students and 194 high school students who participated. Ten percent of those who volunteered for the first semester of the 1964-1965 school year elected not to continue with the program for the second semester. “Two Years After: A Progress Report to the Board of Education, by the Superintendent and Staff of Denver Public Schools on the Recommendations of the Special Study Committee on Equality of Educational Opportunity,” May 1964-May 1966, 2, Rachel Noel Papers, Box 1, Folder 9.

294 “Two Years After: A Progress Report,” 4-5 and 11-13, Rachel Noel Papers, Box 1, Folder 9. 135 efforts, not effective at improving intergroup relations or the quality of education, they were also implemented in a manner that led to increased prejudices. Teachers increasingly discussed Mexican Americans as persons whose culture needed improvement and assimilation, rather than celebration and nurturance. One teacher remarked that the focus of the Joint City-Schools Project, a collaborative effort between

DPS and the CCR to address the high rate of Mexican-American drop-outs and behavioral problems in the schools, was “how to help these people learn to handle Anglo life and culture effectively.”295 The Special Committee’s report explicitly referred to

Mexican Americans and other non-Anglo groups as “culturally disadvantaged.”296

Focusing so much attention on the problems Mexican Americans faced and the need for cultural integration meant that many students came to view them as subjects of pity and scorn.

By the mid-1960s it was clear to many Mexican-American students, parents and community members that their concerns were not a priority. The district’s preferred approach to addressing the educational problems faced by their community, moreover, had actually caused more damage than good. They were not making the same well- publicized demands that African Americans were making and DPS officials paid them little attention. In his opening statements to a Colorado State Department of Education summer staff workshop in 1968, Denver West sider Vincent Garza remarked, “Too often

295 Letter from Travis Taylor to Helen Burke, Mar. 29, 1955, CCR Papers, Box 2, as cited in Tom I. Romero II, “From Brown to Grutter: Racial Integration and the Law: Our Selma is Here: The Political and Legal Struggle for Educational Opportunity in Denver, Colorado, and Multiracial Conundrums in American Jurisprudence,” Seattle Journal for Social Justice 3, no. 73 (Fall/Winter 2004).

296 Special Study Committee, Report and Recommendations, 1964.

136 this ethnic group [Mexican Americans] has been considered the invisible minority, in that society refuses to become aware of the multiple problems of the Mexican-American.”297

When LARASA held a conference in the fall of 1965 to discuss the plight of Mexican

Americans in the city, not many Denverites paid attention. Yet according to Bernard

Valdez, president of the group, this was a watershed moment for their community:

LARASA created an education committee to focus specifically on improving the educational opportunity of Mexican-American students in DPS.298

As the Mexican-American population grew in the 1960s, the isolation of its children became more and more apparent. When the Commission on Civil Rights issued its report, “Racial Isolation in the Public Schools” in 1967, it merely confirmed what many Mexican Americans in Denver already knew. Although Denver was home to twenty-six percent of the state’s Mexican-American population, it contained forty-eight percent of those Mexican-American students in racially imbalanced schools.299 That is,

Mexican-American students in Denver had a high likelihood of attending a segregated school. Of all the Mexican-American students in segregated educational environments in the state, almost half of them were enrolled in DPS schools. In public schools on the

West Side, in particular, Mexican Americans constituted significant proportions of the

297 “`Education Has Failed the Mexican-American’…Garza,” c.a. 1968, newspaper clipping, scrapbook, Jan. 1968-Dec. 1968, Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 12, Folder 10.

298 Richard Tucker, “`Handle for Understanding’ Provided: Valdez,” Rocky Mountain News, May 7, 1966, 42. This was the fourth in a series of articles published by the Rocky Mountain News called “Our Spanish- American Leaders Speak Out”, newspaper clipping in Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 12, Folder 9; LARASA, Meeting Minutes, Polly Baca Papers, Box 24, Folder “LARASA.”

299 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “Racial Isolation in the Public Schools” Vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1967). See also Dan Bell, “Hispano Students Isolated in Survey,” Rocky Mountain News, Aug. 22, 1970, newspaper clipping in Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 12, Folder 18.

137 student enrollments. In 1970 there were eight schools in Denver with majority Mexican-

American students. Seven were elementary schools, including Greenlee (seventy-three percent), Fairview (eighty-three percent), Fairmont (eighty percent), Elmwood (ninety- two percent), Bryant-Webster (seventy-six percent), Smedley (seventy-seven percent), and Elyria (seventy-three percent). The final school was Baker Junior High School, which was eighty-one percent Mexican American.300 By the middle of 1971, there were approximately 10,000 Mexican-American students in Denver who attended schools that were racially imbalanced.301

In these schools dilapidated conditions were the norm, as was overcrowding.

Elmwood, the school with the highest proportion of Mexican-American students, had no lunchroom. Meals were served from a table set up under a stairwell in the basement.

And there were not enough tables for all 400 students. Thus, pupils were rushed through their meals so they could make room for the other students still waiting in line. The line went out a propped open door, even in the cold Mountain West winters. There was no gymnasium or dedicated music room. DPS had converted a small classroom into a gym where students had limited space to play games. Another class doubled as a music room and a speech therapy room. There was only one restroom in the entire school, also located in the basement.302

300 “Desegregation Plan Will Wait until Fall,” Denver Post, May 22, 1970, 1, newspaper clipping in Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 2, Folder 6. 301 These 10,000 students attended schools that “were 15 percent or more above the ethnic concentration in the surrounding community.” Richard Tucker, “Civil Rights Unit Member Backs Hispano Integration,” Rocky Mountain News, May 8, 1971, newspaper clipping in Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 11, Folder 26.

302 “Elmwood: A West Side Tragedy,” Westside Recorder Vol. 6, no. 9 (Jan. 1970), 3.

138

These were conditions found by the Westside Recorder, whose expose,

“Elmwood: A West Side Tragedy,” helped mobilize grassroots support for a new

Elmwood building. “We do not want West Side elementary schools to be sardine cans where children do not know their teachers or principal and where they cannot get personal attention,” argued Waldo Benavidez, chair of the Westside Coalition, which worked to improve its neighborhoods and promote Mexican-American interests.303 This sentiment was widespread among Mexican Americans in the late 1960s. They wanted up-to-date facilities and equipment, a lower pupil-teacher ratio, more Mexican-American teachers, and bilingual and multicultural education. Very few Mexican Americans made the argument that racially balanced schools would solve their problems, at least publically. In their experience, neighborhood schools were not necessarily the problem, though many recognized that racial concentrations could lead to inequities. “[T]he district’s emphasis should be on community schools,” argued David Sandoval, a future

Board of Education candidate. Rather than focusing on racial balance, he insisted, school officials should be putting their time and money into ensuring schools were “more responsive to the special needs of the immediate area.”304 Without such intervention, the school system would continue to cast them aside, devalue their language and culture, and ignore the drastically high numbers of Mexican-American student drop-outs.

303 “Elmwood: A West Side Tragedy,” Westside Recorder Vol. 6, no. 9 (Jan. 1970), 3. On the establishment of the West Side Coalition, see George Rivera, Jr., et. al. “Internal Colonialism in Colorado.”

304 “Raza Candidates Oppose Forced Busing,” Rocky Mountain News, Apr. 23, 1971, 16.

139

Increased Public Attention to School Desegregation

As parents and community members tried to make their claims to the Board of

Education, the local press gave them increasing attention. In the mid-1960s, the newspapers began to run stories that highlighted the increasing demands of black parents and the changing demographics of the city’s schools, both of which served to heighten the fears of white residents who believed school integration would lead to and a school system. A December 1965 piece argued that the black population in northeast Denver would continue to climb, which would force the school board to make a decision on the integration question. Black parents had been demanding busing to achieve racial balance, while white parents had promised to pack up and head for the suburbs if busing were implemented. Not wanting to rock the boat too much in either direction, board members chose to delay. Yet, as the piece noted, delaying was no longer an option.305 A year later, the Denver Post published “Park Hill’s Racial Schools

Problem Stymies Officials,” which outlined the positions of both integrationists and anti- integrationists. According to the author, both sides were putting so much pressure on the district “there is a fear that it will crack under the strain.”306 Both articles indicated that by mid-decade the school district had become the center of the city’s racial conflicts. Yet the papers presented the debate surrounding equal educational as having only two sides: those in favor of integration and those opposed. In public discourse, this came down to black versus white understandings of public education.

305Jack Gaskie, “Denver Schools Face Acid Test,” Rocky Mountain News, Dec. 21, 1965.

306 Greg Phinney, “Park Hill’s Racial Schools Problem Stymies Officials,” Denver Post, Jan. 16, 1966.

140

Mexican Americans appeared in these articles as well, but only as statistics.

Responding to the increasing attention being paid to the city’s changing demographics, the Rocky Mountain News ran a series entitled, “Who’s in School,” which provided detailed student population data over the previous five years. In 1960 the number of black and Mexican-American students in DPS was approximately 13,000. By 1966 that number had risen to around 29,000. During that same time, the number of white students had dropped from 72,000 to 67,000. At the elementary school level, black and Mexican-

Americans pupils constituted a third of all students and twenty-seven of the district’s ninety elementary schools had student enrollments that were more than half black and

Mexican American.307 While the overarching objective of the series was to provide information, the author also did his part to fuel the tensions brewing over the fate of

Denver schools. He argued the city would soon go the way of other major metropolises that experienced similar increases in minority students and decreases in white students, citing Washington D.C. schools, which were already ninety percent black, to make his point. “Some sociologists and city planners are now predicting,” he concluded, “that by the end of this century the major cities of the nation will be inhabited almost solely by minority groups.”308

Metropolitan residents read these stories with some amount of trepidation, many believing that any move towards school integration would tip the precarious balance they

307 Jack Gaskie, “Minority, Majority Ratio Growing Narrower,” appeared in “Who’s in School” 1st of a Seires, Rocky Mountain News, Mar. 14, 1966.

308 Jack Gaskie, “Minority, Majority Ratio Growing Narrower,” appeared in “Who’s in School” 1st in a Series, Rocky Mountain News, Mar. 14, 1966.

141 had in place. The 1965 school board elections only deepened their concerns. Not only did voters elect Rachel Noel, the first black board member in the history of the district, but they also elected James Voorhees and John Amesse, both of whom had more liberal tendencies. Voorhees and Noel had served on the Special Study Committee and their commitment to integration was firm. Including longtime Board member Edgar Benton, the board now had a 4-3 pro-integration majority.309

Instead of tackling the racial issue, though, the board decided to create another study committee. Established in February 1966, the Advisory Council on Equality of

Educational Opportunity was to examine the district’s neighborhood school policy in

Northeast Denver. William Berge, a conservative white attorney, was appointed the

Council’s chairman and Bernard Valdez, a Mexican-American community leader and head of the Denver Welfare Department, its co-chairman.310 Interest in the new committee was great: more than five hundred names were submitted to the district as potential Council members. In the end, thirty-one members were appointed, including five representatives from local civil rights organizations. The NAACP, the Congress on

Racial Equality (CORE), the PHAC, the Anti-Defamation League, and LARASA each had one representative. The rest of the Council was comprised of parents, business

309 The election of Noel, Voorhees and Amesse was the result of widespread community mobilization in the 1965 school board election. Brown-Bailey, “Journey Full Circle,” 78. See also Pearson and Pearson, “Keyes v. School District No. 1,” Limits of Justice, 183.

310 The Advisory Council was also sometimes referred to as the Berge Study Committee. Brown-Bailey, “Journey Full Circle,” 79; Pearson and Pearson, “Keyes v. School District No. 1,” Limits of Justice, 183.

142 leaders, teachers, and school administrators.311 From the beginning, the multitude of interests and identities on the Council complicated the study process and highlighted the difficulties in trying to ensure equal educational opportunities.312

When the Council considered its charge, it noted that the tasks it had been given were limited in scope. Council members were asked to consider the impact of the district’s neighborhood school policy and to recommend policy changes or adaptations for the district’s operations in Northeast Denver only; no other areas of the city were mentioned to the Board. In its report, the Council stated“…[I]n view of the restricted charge, the Council felt inhibited in its considerations” of other problems, including the concentration of Mexican-American students in particular schools.313 In fact, in its official “Statement of the Problem,” the Council only mentioned black students.314 The

Council’s biggest mistake was not recognizing the interconnectedness of the problems it was supposed to address: segregation in one area of the city influenced the educational outcomes in other areas, so any plan to address these concentrations would invariably influence the entire district. When the Council pointed out the limitations of its study and suggested that other problems, including the segregation of Mexican-American students, might be addressed at a later date, it put off the concerns of Mexican-American parents and community members, making them secondary to the concerns of the black community. It also highlighted the central paradox of Denver’s desegregation dilemma.

311 Advisory Council on Equality of Educational Opportunity, Final Report and Recommendations to the Board of Education School District Number One, Denver, Colorado (Denver: Denver Public Schools, 1967), 17. See also Watson, “Removing the Barricades,” 76. 312 Romero, “From Brown to Grutter,” 87.

313 Advisory Council, Final Report and Recommendations, 16.

314 Advisory Council, Final Report and Recommendations, 27-29. 143

The district was not split along black and white lines, yet from the beginning its approach to the problem had been guided by the assumption that segregation was a black and white problem. Although many people pointed out the inequalities faced by Mexican

Americans in the schools, the problem was seen as separate from the desegregation question. The Advisory Council’s attempt to compartmentalize the myriad problems confronting the district merely compounded an already deeply embedded system of racial inequality in the Denver school system. As a consequence, Mexican Americans were once again pushed to the margins.

The February 1967 Advisory Council report recommended that no new schools be built in northeast Denver, where schools were almost exclusively black, and that the district promote programs and policies that increased heterogeneity, recommendations that simply reaffirmed Policy 5100. While the Council recognized that Denver schools were segregated, it was reluctant to recommend any sort of race-conscious policy, citing the Colorado constitution’s prohibition against such policies.315 Because of these constraints, the Council felt it imprudent to advocate for anything other than neighborhood schools. Its recommendations to the Board of Education included voluntary busing, compensatory education programs for minority schools, an educational complex that would be located between a white and black neighborhood, and a Cultural

Arts Center where students would go to learn about “the cultural contributions by various ethnic components of our region, including European, Negro, Hispanic, American Indian

315 Advisory Council, Final Report and Recommendations, 35.

144 of the Southwest and Plains region, [and] other ethnic groups.”316 In essence, Council members promoted voluntary integration and a return to the cultural pluralist curriculum model, which had already failed DPS.

Even though the proposals put forth by the Advisory Council were moderate, many white residents were still uneasy at the possibility that integration would become a reality. The Board had been contemplating a school bond issue for the last five years, but had delayed putting it on the ballot to avoid having to stake a position in the increasingly polarized debate over race, school boundaries, and integration. Finally, in June 1967, board members voted to stop all construction of new schools in that part of the city. They also developed an intermediate school plan that called for the construction of a large, centrally located intermediate school in Northeast Denver that would draw students from a much larger boundary area than normal. The plan, which sought to foster racial heterogeneity, estimated that about 4,700 students would have to be bused there per year.

The board felt this was a practical plan of action that would respond to the demands of the black community and appease neighborhood school proponents.317 Denver residents rejected the plan by a seven-to-three margin when they voted down a school bond issue that fall, the first time they had done so since 1938.318 A survey of voters later revealed

316 Advisory Council, Final Report and Recommendations, 39.

317 Pearson and Pearson, “Keyes v. School District No. 1,” Limits of Justice, 184.

318 Pearson and Pearson, “Keyes v. School District No. 1,” Limits of Justice, 184; Frederick Watson states that the bond issue was defeated by a three-to-one margin. “Removing the Barricades,” 82.

145 that people believed the money would be spent on integration and “forced busing.”319 The

Intermediate School plan was never implemented.

In 1968, the district released comparative test scores for all schools, revealing for the first time the stark differences in student achievement at majority white schools as compared to majority black and Mexican-American schools. Forty-five schools performed below the 45th percentile nationwide. All were in minority or transitioning areas. Those schools included eighty-seven percent of the district’s black population, seventy-eight percent of its Mexican-American population, and only twenty-six percent of its white population.320 Thirty of those schools were actually in the thirtieth percentile, meaning that seventy percent of students nationwide performed better. Of the twenty- two schools that were in the sixtieth percentile, all were in white neighborhoods. Forty- two percent of the district’s white students attended these schools. Only four percent of black students and four percent of Mexican-American students could say the same. The evidence clearly suggested that majority nonwhite schools were academically inferior to majority white schools, an argument that black parents, the Denver NAACP and the

Denver Urban League had been making for two decades.

Despite this new data and the recommendations of the Special Study Committee and the Advisory Council, the School Board voted to continue the Limited Open

Enrollment Plan, now called Voluntary Open Enrollment. They pointed to the rejection

319 Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, Jan. 18, 1968, 6; Denver Post, Jan. 19, 1968.

320 Transcript, Trial on Merits, Feb. 2-21, 1970, 553a-554a.

146 of the school bond issue as proof that most Denver citizens were against efforts to create racial balance in the schools and they refused to go against the wishes of the majority.321

The racial conflict that had defined the previous two decades came to a head in the spring of 1968 when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. His murder led to the formation of Citizens for One Community, a group dedicated to pushing the school district to develop a desegregation plan for the city’s schools. The group organized protests in front of the homes of Board of Education members, rallied public support and spoke frequently at school board meetings. Members also helped build support behind

Rachel Noel, who planned on submitting a resolution to the board that called for integration.322 On April 25, 1968, Noel introduced Resolution 1490, which ordered the

Superintendent of Denver Public Schools to develop a comprehensive integration plan by

September 30, 1968.323

Debate at the meeting was heated. While most of those who spoke supported the resolution, there were dissenters, including future Board of Education member and State

Senator James Perrill, who proclaimed that the “white Protestant majority is not going to go away.”324 In the end the Board voted to postpone its vote on the resolution, arguing that the proposal did not clearly define “integration” and “racial balance.” Some Board members questioned whether they were talking about all minorities or just black students.

321 Watson, “Removing the Barricades,” 82.

322 Pearson and Pearson, “Keyes v. School District No. 1, Limits of Justice, 184-185; Brown-Bailey, “Journey Full Circle,” 82-83; Watson, “Removing the Barricades,” 94.

323 Resolution 1490, Denver Board of Education, Apr. 25, 1968, Rachel Noel Papers, Box 1, Folder 6.

324 Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, Apr. 25, 1968, 9.

147

They also wondered if the resolution was referring to all of the city schools or only some.

Board member Edgar Benton said he could not believe they were having this conversation, insisting that “if people responsible for education in the United States have to ask for a meaning of the term 'integrated education' it indicates a condition of mind that is both formidable and potentially disastrous for this country.”325 Though Benton was responding to the boards’ delaying tactics, he also missed a significant aspect of the debate. Integration had clearly been cast as a black and white issue. Rachel Noel intended for the integration plan to remedy the concentration of black students in

Northeast Denver, as evidenced by the subsequent resolutions she offered.326 What would integration look like if racial balance meant balance among all races? This was a question the board was not prepared to answer and integration proponents did not seem to consider at all.

Before the May 16 meeting, when the board voted on the resolution, the city became bitterly divided over the question of school integration. The newspapers talked about it every day, editorials appeared, people wrote letters to Board members and city officials, and protestors took to the streets to make their demands heard. Citizens for One

Community, the PHAC, the NAACP, the Urban League, CORE, various churches, and a new group, Speak Out for Integration, all actively supported the Noel Resolution. A newly-formed teachers’ group, Black Educators United (BEU) organized a boycott of the

325 Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, Apr. 25, 1968, 13.

326 Resolutions 1520, 1524, and 1531 (subsequently referred to as the integration resolutions) dealt with the problem of racial concentration in Northeast Denver schools. 1520 addressed boundary changes for the area’s high schools (Jan. 30, 1969). 1524 addressed boundary changes for the area’s junior high schools (Mar. 20, 1969). Both in Rachel Noel Papers, B1, Folder 11. 1531 proposed an elementary school complex (Date Apr. 17, 1969). In Don & Carolyn Etter Papers, WH1974, DPL-WHG. 148 schools, to be observed by both black teachers and students, if the Board did not vote in favor of integration.327

Hundreds of people showed up to the Board’s May 16 meeting. The Board’s two more conservative members, William Berge and Stephen Knight, refused to be persuaded.

Berge resented that the city had been plunged into a state of upheaval since Noel had introduced the resolution. He claimed to have received 1,173 letters from Denver citizens, fifty-seven percent of whom supported integration. A full ninety-eight percent of them, however, were against “forced busing.”328 The Noel Resolution did not mention the word “busing” nor the word “transportation.” A few days before the vote, she addressed the issue of busing in an interview with the Rocky Mountain News, saying:

...I feel that with understanding of the objectives and the realization that equality of educational opportunity must be real for all children--with this understanding, we can look at transportation for what it is--the ride. People who are focusing on busing only are prejudging the plan. They are prejudging that the plan will only involve transportation. I wonder if they have actually considered there are many things that go into a comprehensive plan.329

The Board voted five to two in favor of the resolution. Four months later, in

September, 1968 Superintendent Gilberts unveiled his plan, Planning Quality Education:

A Proposal for Integrating the Denver Public Schools. The Gilberts Plan, as it came to be called, proposed creating school clusters, a strategy that maintained neighborhood schools but grouped them around a large central facility that would provide supplies,

327 Watson, “Removing the Barricades, 95-99; Pearson and Pearson, “Keyes v. School District No. 1, Limits of Justice, 185; Brown-Bailey, “Journey Full Circle,” 83.

328 Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, May 16, 1968, 16.

329 Martin Moran, “Mrs. Noel Explains Resolution,” Rocky Mountain News, newspaper clipping in DPL newspaper clipping file, "Denver, Education, Schools, Public, Integration, 1969."

149 activity space and other support services. It also promoted voluntary busing to achieve racial balance. Supporters of integration were disappointed. Voluntary measures had failed DPS in the past and they believed such a plan would continue to fail. In public hearings over the next several months, the board heard from many parties and did extensive study. Throughout the early months of 1969, board members passed

Resolutions 1520, 1524, and 1531, which went further than Gilberts was willing to go to promote integration in Northeast Denver. Resolution 1520 changed school boundaries to break down the concentration of black students at East High School. Resolution 1524 did the same for Smiley Junior High School. Resolution 1531 addressed elementary school boundaries and established school complexes as outlined in the Gilberts Plan.330

Collectively, these resolutions would have created an integrated educational experience for 33, 151 students.331

Before the plan could be implemented, however, the board’s integrationists were thrown out of office. Following a highly politicized campaign, in May 1969 Edgar

Benton, longtime liberal board member, and Monte Pascoe, a liberal attorney, were defeated by a margin of more than two-to-one by conservatives Frank Southworth and

James Perrill, both of whom ran on anti-busing platforms.332 One observer noted:

In the public appearances, Perrill and Southworth managed to elaborate on that limited theme with a kind of creative redundancy. Mandatory busing and forced busing combined to become mandatory forced busing. They also mentioned crosstown busing, massive busing, and massive crosstown

330 Watson, “Removing the Barricades,” 106-108; Pearson and Pearson, “Keyes v. School District No. 1, Limits of Justice, 185-186.

331 Martin Moran, “Gilberts Plan an Extensive Document,” Rocky Mountain News, May 11, 1969, 14.

332 Martin Moran, “Perrill and Southworth Elected,” Rocky Mountain News, May 1969.

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busing. By the end of the campaign, Southworth was talking about “forced mandatory crosstown busing on a massive scale.”333

Their scare tactics worked. Voter turnout was significant, an unusual occurrence for a school board election. Over half of registered voters voted in the election. With their victory, the board now had a four-to-three anti-busing majority. Their first action was to rescind the integration resolutions.334

The board’s rescission set into motion a series of events that had long-term implications for the city, its schools and the students who attended them. Within a matter of months activists and attorneys filed a suit against the Denver school district, accusing it of maintaining a segregated school system. Black activists took the lead. Their experiences with DPS over the previous decade and a half had convinced them that school officials were unwilling to meet their demands. Unless a court compelled it, they believed the district would continue to operate a dual system. Though they had made progress with the passage of the Noel Resolution, the newly elected board members had helped them take a giant step backwards.

During the 1960s, two DPS study committees demonstrated that the district’s neighborhood school policy had helped create racial concentrations in certain schools throughout the district. Their reports also showed the educational consequences of these concentrations, which included less academically rigorous curriculums, lower test scores, and higher drop-out rates in majority nonwhite schools. Although both committees included data on black and Mexican-American students, neither attempted to seriously

333 Calvin Trillin, “Doing the Right Thing in Denver,” New Yorker, May 31, 1969, 87, as quoted in Watson, “Removing the Barricades,” 110.

334 Brown-Bailey, “Journey Full Circle,” 85-86; Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, Jun. 9, 1969 151 analyze the distinct problems that Mexican Americans faced in the city’s schools. DPS’ cultural pluralist model not only failed to improve the quality of education for Mexican

Americans, it had actually further alienated them. Although both black and Mexican-

American students shared similar experiences in the schools, they also encountered different problems, based on their very different experiences of racialization. As the case was heard in U.S. District Court, these differences were largely overlooked. Race, however, was a central aspect of the trial. In the courtroom contest over school desegregation in Denver, the debate over Mexican-American racial identity emerged as a driving force.

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Chapter 4

“A Wholly Different Origin”: Mexican Americans, African Americans and the Formation of Minority Students

On June 19, 1969, eight parents of Denver school children filed civil lawsuit C-

1499 in U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado. The plaintiffs charged that the

Denver Public Schools (DPS) were guilty of violating the Fourteenth Amendment rights of African-American and Mexican-American students.335 They also asked the Court to issue a preliminary injunction to stop the rescission of Resolutions 1520, 1524 and 1531, the integration resolutions passed by the Board of Education earlier that spring, and the implementation of Resolution 1533, calling for integration on a voluntary basis only. By so doing, the plaintiffs asked the Court to halt the district’s efforts to re-segregate the

Denver Public Schools, which they claimed was a violation of the mandate set in Brown v.

Board of Education.336

Litigation was the last step in a long and difficult process that had begun over a decade earlier. Parents and community members had been working to end segregation in the Denver Public Schools, particularly in the core city area, through organizational

335 The defendants named in the lawsuit were School District No. 1 (Denver, CO), the Superintendent of Public Schools, and the Denver Board of Education. Complaint for Permanent Injunction and Declaratory Judgment, U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, Civil Action C-1499, Jun. 19, 1969.

336 Motion for Preliminary Injunction, U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, Civil Action C-1499, Jun. 19, 1969; Court Transcripts, Preliminary Injunction Hearing, Jul. 16-22, 1969. 153

campaigns and protests against school actions meant to maintain majority Anglo and majority minority schools. Although integration’s proponents had gotten the Board to create two separate study committees on the issue of equal educational opportunities, little had been accomplished. Now the new school board had actually reversed progress in favor of a voluntary desegregation program that had no possibility of achieving integration.

During the school board elections that spring, pro-integration groups had come together to elect Monte Pascoe and Edgar Benton. When the new school board voted to rescind the three integration resolutions, a coalition of parents, community leaders and other pro-integration forces turned to litigation. The Park Hill Action Committee

(PHAC) took the lead in organizing these efforts. The head of that group, black Park Hill resident Fred Thomas, went to the Denver chapter of the NAACP to seek its assistance in determining whether the PHAC had a case against DPS. After reviewing school board minutes and newspaper articles, as well as recent Supreme Court rulings on school desegregation, NAACP attorneys determined that the Denver schools were intentionally maintaining segregation. Thomas also recruited Denver attorney Gordon Greiner, who agreed to serve as lead counsel, with the assistance of Robert Connery and Craig Barnes.

Denver law firm Holland and Hart, one of the city’s largest firms, agreed to support the challenge, as did the NAACP Legal Defense Fund of New York.337

Greiner was an interesting choice to lead the legal team. He was white, a registered Republican, and prior to taking the case considered himself fairly conservative, choosing to raise his family in affluent, majority white Jefferson County to the west of

337 Brown-Bailey, “Journey Full Circle,” 87; Watson, “Removing the Barricades,” 112. 154

the city. Unlike most of the other major figures in the case, he had not grown up in

Denver. Born and raised in a Chicago , he attended law school at Northwestern

University and did not move to the Mile High City until he began his career. In an interview with historian Frederick Watson, Greiner revealed that until he was approached by Fred Thomas he had never given much thought to racial matters. After hearing the experiences of Thomas, Keyes, and Rachel Noel, however, he was convinced that DPS was providing a second class education to black children. Taking on the case, Watson writes, “transformed him from a conservative to a liberal almost overnight. In race relations, he became sensitized to things he had always overlooked.” Before long, he moved to Park Hill and enrolled his son at Smiley Junior High.338

As the coalition of lawyers and community activists prepared their case, they relied heavily on the research of two Park Hill residents: Paul Klite, a Denver physician, and George Bardwell, a University of Denver mathematics professor. Bardwell gathered statistical data and historical information on the district that demonstrated the school board’s intent to maintain segregation over the previous two decades. The PHAC also recruited eight Denver residents with school-aged children to be named plaintiffs. Their goal was to find students who had been or would be affected by the rescissions of 1520,

1524 and 1531. The suit was named after Wilfred Keyes, a black podiatrist and resident

338 Watson, “Removing the Barricades,” 127-128, quote on 128.

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of Park Hill, whose two children attended Hallett Elementary School. The children represented in the suit were black, white and Mexican-American.339

Although Mexican-American students were represented in the case from the beginning, neither the students’ needs nor the desires of the Mexican-American community were taken into account as the plaintiffs researched their case and shaped their litigation strategy. One of the reasons for this is that from the beginning, the people pushing the case were mostly residents of Northeast Denver. In fact, the original complaint involved only those schools included in the rescinded resolutions, those in and around Park Hill, where the expanding black population had been moving farther and farther east since the late 1940s. Thus, when the PHAC decided to pursue litigation, its members were inclined to address the problems that were most apparent to them.

Moreover, it was simple legal strategy to seek an injunction against a specific state action—the rescission of resolutions 1520, 1524 and 1531—because they believed that immediate relief was necessary. The legal team thus decided that it would not introduce evidence that demonstrated segregation in other areas of the district until the case went to court.340

Yet the lawyers also knew that the school board was taking similar actions in other parts of the city. They also seemed to be aware that, like African-American students, Mexican-American students did not receive equal educational opportunity and were isolated in certain schools. Finally, pursuing a desegregation lawsuit in Denver did

339 Complaint for Permanent Injunction and Declaratory Judgment, U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, Civil Action C-1499, Jun. 19, 1969; Brown-Bailey, “Journey Full Circle,” 87-88; Pearson and Pearson, “Keyes v. School District No. 1,” 186-188, 189. 340 Pearson and Pearson, “Keyes v. School District No. 1,” 188.

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not make sense if the city’s largest minority group was left out. It would be difficult for the plaintiffs to make their case when only fifteen percent of all DPS students were

African American; including Mexican Americans meant that the plaintiff class included over a third of the students enrolled in Denver schools.341 Including Mexican Americans thus increased the strength of the plaintiffs’ case because they could demonstrate that the district had instituted policies and practices that maintained majority Anglo and majority minority schools throughout the entire district.

The precedents available to the plaintiffs did not provide a solid pathway towards winning a school desegregation case in a city with a tri-racial student population.

Although the courts had been hearing cases on Mexican-American school segregation for decades, none of these cases claimed violations under Brown. Mexican-American civil rights attorneys, in fact, were only beginning to see the benefits of abandoning the “other- white” argument in school segregation lawsuits. Now, for the first time, these lawyers were looking to Brown to lay the foundation for their claims. Discussing the desegregation case brought against the Corpus Christi (Texas) Independent School

District (CCISD) in 1970, Steven Wilson points out, “Before Mexican American civil rights advocates could attack the segregation created by ‘neighborhood’ schools…they had to overcome Mexican Americans’ equivocal minority status.”342 In Denver, Greiner and his legal team seemed to have arrived at the same conclusion.

341 CCR, “Tentative Draft, A Proposal for Community Involvement in a Desegregated School System, Denver, Colorado,” Application for the Emergency School Assistance Program, Dec. 1, 1970, 34, Keyes et. al. Collection, Accession 1, Box 2, Folder 2. 342 Wilson, “Brown Over ‘Other White,’” 17.

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Before they could delve into that argument, however, the plaintiffs had to convince Judge William Doyle to issue an injunction against the district’s rescission of the three integration resolutions and the implementation of a voluntary open enrollment plan. As a result, throughout the preliminary injunction hearing Judge Doyle focused on the district’s deliberate segregation of black students in Park Hill, defining “students of color” as “negro” or “black.” When he issued his order granting an injunction against the district, Judge Doyle did not even address Hispano students; his only reference was to

Hispano teachers.343 The omission was significant: though the plaintiff class included black and Mexican-American students, he defined the aggrieved class as monolithic.

“There is no dispute about their identity or their interest in the case,” Judge Doyle wrote,

“nor is there any question raised as to the propriety of a class action on behalf of all persons similarly situated.”344

On July 31, 1969, Judge Doyle granted the injunction against DPS and the Board of Education, which meant that the district had to go forward with the three integration resolutions meant to desegregate Park Hill schools. He ruled that, based on what he had heard so far, there was sufficient evidence that the district had indeed purposefully segregated students based on race, color or ethnicity, and that it was likely that the plaintiffs would succeed at trial on the merits of the case.345 The defendants immediately filed a motion with the Court of Appeals for a stay of the injunction, which was granted.

343 Transcript, Court’s Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law, Keyes et. al., U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado (Denver, CO), C-1499, Jul. 23, 1969, Keyes et. al. Collection, Accession 1, Box 10, Folder 2; 303 F. Supp. 279 (D.C. Colo. 1969).

344 303 F. Supp. 279 (D.C. Colo. 1969), 281. 345 Memorandum Opinion and Order of District Court, Keyes et. al., 303 F. Supp. 279, Jul. 31, 1969. 158

Stating that the District Court had erred in its order, the Appeals Court sent the matter back for further proceedings. Judge Doyle again decided that DPS was likely guilty of de jure segregation and reinstituted the injunction.

Determined to move forward with voluntary integration only, the school board and administration again turned to the Court of Appeals. Finding that the District court had conducting “painstaking analysis” on the issue and that there was clear racial imbalance in certain Denver schools, the Appeals Court nonetheless concluded that the questions involved in the case were too complex to answer in the time permitted and that it was not legally sound to issue an injunction based on only “piece-meal” consideration of the issues, especially because the plaintiffs presented only a small portion of their case at the preliminary injunction hearing. The Appeals Court also maintained that desegregation should be pursued with all “convenient speed.” If the majority of the public did not support integration, a desegregation plan should not rock the boat. Thus,

DPS would be allowed to operate as it had been, without judicial intervention, until a full trial on the merits of the case could be heard. Moreover, the Court doubted whether the plaintiffs would succeed, basing its opinion on a more conservative legal reading of school desegregation cases. “In a metropolitan area like Denver,” the Court stated, “the attainment of the objective [the elimination of racial segregation] is closely allied to sociological and economic problems which do not lend themselves to judicial solution.

Any plan of desegregation or integration which is devised either by a court or by an administrative agency must depend for its success on the understanding cooperation of the people of the area.” In northern schools, school segregation was never the law: racial

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imbalance was simply the result of class dynamics and cultural pathologies that prevented the underclass from achieving upward mobility and thus securing a residence in a middle class neighborhood, irrespective of race. Under those circumstances the court had little power, perhaps none at all, to require racial balance in the schools.346

The plaintiffs appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking it to vacate the Appeals

Court’s stay. Justice William Brennan granted their motion and ordered that the preliminary injunction be reinstated. According to the Court’s opinion, the Appeals

Court was incorrect when it argued for “all convenient speed.” Schools had an obligation, under the law, to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.” What’s more, the Appeals

Court decision was flawed because the Supreme Court had already ruled that when de jure segregation could be proven the school district was constitutionally required to desegregate, regardless of public opinion or level of support.347 This was a central point, one of the reasons that made Keyes so important. Was it possible to prove de jure segregation in a city where state and local laws said nothing about it? If so, then Brown could move north. If it was not possible, then Brown was limited to the districts that explicitly required segregation. DPS was ordered to re-implement Resolutions 1520,

1524, and 1531. When schools opened that September, they would open on an integrated basis.

The plaintiffs and the school district began preparing their cases for the trial on merits, scheduled for February 1970. The news coming out of Denver schools, now at

346 Opinion of Court of Appeals, Keyes, et. al., Aug. 27, 1969.

347 Opinion by Brennan, J. on Application for Vacation of Stay, Supreme Court of the United States, Keyes et. al., Aug. 29, 1969. 160

least partially integrated, and the impending trial occupied city residents throughout the fall and winter. Resolution 1520 changed the boundaries between East and South High

School, and between East and George Washington High (GW) Schools, sending white students from South and GW to East and majority black students from East into predominately white South and GW. Resolution 1524 dealt with boundary changes between several Junior High Schools in Northeast and South Denver, with the goal of breaking up the concentration of black students at Smiley and Cole. Resolution 1531 was to do the same thing for elementary schools in Park Hill.348 Schools with heavy

Mexican-American concentrations were not impacted.

When the semester began, heightened tensions led to a number of incidences in the schools and fueled the rumor mill. White girls were told by their parents not to use the restrooms in certain schools, as they were sure to be attacked or even raped. At

Thomas Jefferson High School, which was receiving black students in the ninth grade, students and parents of both races, but white parents especially, started to worry when they heard the principal had requested police protection, including a police escort home.

In the re-telling, pin-pricking at several schools became knifings and at one school, it was reported that “blood was all over the restroom.” A teacher at Merrill Junior High School broke up a fight and in the process suffered a slight cut to the wrist. The story that made the rounds said that this teacher was cut in the throat by a knife-toting black student.349

One parent of a white student who was transferred to Smiley reported that she tuned in to

348 Denver Board of Education, Resolution 1520, Jan. 30, 1969; Resolution 1524, Mar. 20, 1969; and Resolution 1531, Apr. 24, 1969, Rachel Noel Papers, Box 1, Folder 11.

349 Charles Carter, “Rumors Feed Schools’ Strife, Tension,” Denver Post Dec. 15, 1969, 60. 161

her police radio every day, sure that a riot would break out; she wanted to be prepared to rush to the school to save her daughter.350 The Denver Post printed a seven-part series on the first semester of integration and found that most of the stories circulating had some basis in truth but were blown out of proportion.

There was also controversy in the courtroom. During the fall, Judge Doyle held several pre-conference hearings in preparation for the full trial. At issue were two important questions: what was the definition of a segregated school and why were

Mexican Americans included in the lawsuit? The defendants wanted Judge Doyle to issue a definition of a segregated school because the two parties were operating under two very different understandings of what constituted segregation. The plaintiffs embraced a definition that strongly linked segregation with racial imbalance. To determine which schools were racially imbalanced, they used a mathematical construct that calculated the probability that a school’s racial makeup would have arisen by chance.

The plaintiffs argued that Park Hill schools were segregated in the traditional sense, meaning these schools were almost entirely all-black or all-white, and that led to unequal educational opportunity. Schools that were at least ninety percent one race fit this definition. Other core city schools were not segregated in the same sense. But they were still purposefully racially imbalanced, the result of the same district practices that created segregated Park Hill schools. Schools with at least 70 percent black and Mexican-

350 Charles Carter, “School Busing’s Reality,” Denver Post, Dec. 14, 1969, 33.

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American students were included under this definition. Both of these instances, therefore, represented violations of Brown.351

According to the defendants this was a wholly “remarkable definition” that seemed so out of line with precedent that they wanted it cleared up by Judge Doyle.

School districts had never been held accountable for the residential patterns of residents, nor had they ever been held to the standard that racial imbalance equaled segregation.

Doyle responded, “Well, this is their definition of de jure segregated schools, I guess.”352

He was willing to let the plaintiffs present their case, and then would rule based on what he heard, a willingness that did not sit well with the defense. At the preliminary injunction hearing a few months earlier, Victor Quinn, one of the defendant’s co-counsels, argued, “Racial imbalance…is not equivalent to segregation.”353 Attorneys for the district seemed bewildered as to how to defend against an allegation that did not seem to be unconstitutional. Thomas Creighton, lead counsel for DPS, noted that several of the schools the plaintiffs claimed were segregated were substantially white, so that he believed they were now getting into “a novel definition of segregation.” Not only did

351 The plaintiffs determined the probability that a school’s racial composition would have arisen by chance by comparing the percentage of Anglo students district-wide in 1968 to the percentage of Anglo students in each school for that same year. According to George Bardwell, who did the calculations, each minority school the plaintiffs listed had a one in one billion chance of having the racial make-up it did. This calculation assumed that students were evenly distributed throughout the district and did not take into consideration the residential patterns of the city. Reporter’s Transcript, Pre-Trial Conference, Nov. 25, 1969, 34-35, Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 10, Folder 5; League of Women Voters of Denver, “Composite View of Denver’s School Desegregation,” Apr. 1974, Revised Sept. 1976, 2, Rachel Noel Papers, Box 1, Folder 12.

352 Reporter’s Transcript, Pre-Trial Conference, Nov. 25, 1969, 34-35, Keyes, et. al. Collection, Box 10, Folder 5.

353 Martin Moran, “Court Order Restrains School Unit,” Rocky Mountain News, Aug. 8, 1969, 6, newspaper clipping in DPL newspaper clipping file: “Denver, Education, Schools, Public, Integration.”

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they have to prove Denver schools never operated under a system of de jure segregation like those in the South, but now they also had to do so while defending the district against the notion that racially imbalanced schools legally constituted segregation.354

The second issue under consideration during the pre-trial conferences was the inclusion of Mexican Americans in the plaintiff class. Although a Mexican-American woman and her three children, all DPS students, were listed on the lawsuit, the defendants suggested that Mexican Americans should not be included. The argument could be made, they said, that Mexican Americans did not want to be included. Charles

Brega represented one set of intervenors, Citizens Association for Neighborhood Schools

(CANS), who joined the case on the side of the defendants that fall. He, too, took issue with the inclusion of Mexican Americans, although one of the attorneys for the district,

Kenneth Wormwood, later told the court that they were the parties responsible for bringing the issue to Brega’s attention.

We did discuss it [Rule 23 re: notification of a class action suit] by putting it in our pre-trial memorandum and we expect the intervenors would—and we didn’t—we thought it might be better for the intervenors to raise it. There is the class that I’m concerned about and that is the Hispano class. I don’t think they really know what’s going on here, and I think some way there ought to be notice to them because might want to come in because of some of these—some of these Hispano members I think are quite happy to be where they are.355

Wormwood’s comments make clear that the defense believed it had something to gain from excluding Mexican Americans. He implied that most Mexican Americans

354 Reporter’s Transcript, Pre-Trial Conference, Nov. 25, 1969, 35, Keyes, et. al. Collection, Box 10, Folder 5.

355 Reporter’s Transcript, Pre-Trial Conference, Nov. 25, 1969, 58, Keyes, et. al. Collection, Box 10, Folder 5.

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were satisfied with the school system and if properly informed, would ask to be removed from the plaintiff class. By revealing that they wanted CANS to raise the question, it is likely that they believed a good number of Mexican Americans would join the opposition, weakening the argument the plaintiffs were going to present at trial. And they had good reason to believe this was the case. Just a month earlier, Corky Gonzales and the Crusade for Justice had told school board members that they did not want busing; that it would not advance the education of Mexican-American students. Recent public meetings had demonstrated that the Mexican-American community was not unified in its viewpoints.356

Judge Doyle suggested that a piece be placed in the local papers announcing the formation of the plaintiff class, which included Mexican Americans. All parties agreed this was satisfactory for the time being. Even before the full trial began, then, the place of Mexican Americans within DPS and their role in Denver’s saga of racial struggle had been cemented as a major factor in the case.

The trial on merits began on February 2, 1970 in U.S. District Court. The plaintiffs now expanded their demands to the entire school system, asking Judge Doyle to rule DPS a segregated district in its entirety. Here the plaintiffs asked that the temporary injunction be made permanent. Judge Doyle also had to determine whether segregation existed in Denver schools outside of Park Hill. If he ruled that it did exist, then he had to decide whether the segregation was intentional or a product of forces outside the control

356 At meetings and public hearings held by the Board of Education throughout 1969, speakers were split on the question of integration and busing, with some supporting the Gilberts Plan and wanting it to go further and others rejecting any kind of transportation program for the purpose of racial balancing. Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, Jan. 16, 1969, Jan. 30, 1969, and Mar. 11, 1969. At community meetings, there was also dissent among Mexican Americans. Alan Cunningham, “Hispano Push for Unity to Effect School Change,” Rocky Mountain News, Mar. 24, 1969, newspaper clipping in Scrapbook (Jan.- Jun. 1969), Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 12, Folder 11. 165

of the school district. Was DPS’ “neighborhood school policy” merely a clever way of maintaining segregation? Finally, did racially imbalanced schools create and/or increase inequalities in the educational opportunities available to Denver public school children?

Once again, Greiner and his legal team focused most of their attention on the isolation of black students within DPS. To be sure, they tried to make the argument that both black and Mexican-American students were concentrated in certain schools and did not have equal educational opportunities. To emphasize this argument, they used the term “minority” to designate both black and Mexican American students and they brought in statistics that demonstrated these inequalities for both sets of students.

The defendants immediately challenged this grouping, pressing the plaintiffs’ witnesses to define their categories and demonstrate the racial thinking of the Board of

Education and the school system. If they could not show the ways DPS had racially categorized students and that “minority” was a conscious grouping, utilized by the district to maintain “Anglo” schools and “minority” schools, then the plaintiffs’ argument was irrelevant. From the perspective of the defense, racial understanding dictated that the categories black and Hispano were not the same thing. Combining these two groups of students defied the logics of race.

When the grouping was introduced for the first time in trial, co-counsel for the defense Michael Jackson asked the witness, George Bardwell, to explain why he had created a table depicting “Anglo schools” and “minority schools.” When the witness responded that it was based on whether the school was over 50% Anglo or over 50% minority, Jackson pressed, seemingly at a loss to understand the witness; no distinction

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between black students and Hispano students had been made in the creation of these tables? Having confirmed the point, Jackson objected to the tables and the line of questioning, saying that “the classification admittedly utilized by the witness [has] no other foundation.”357

If the court allowed this argument to proceed, the defendants would be burdened in two ways. First, the category “minority” included many more students, which created a wider range of implications for Judge Doyle to consider. Not only would the district then have to defend against the argument that it operated a dual system in northeast

Denver, it also would have to show that race was never a factor in its citywide operations.

If the plaintiffs could demonstrate a specific DPS policy or set of policies that either created or purposefully maintained segregation, they would have answered the central legal question of the case. The court would have no choice but to rule in the plaintiff’s favor. If Judge Doyle did rule against DPS, the constitutional remedy required of the district could potentially be much more comprehensive, requiring more sustained attention and resources from the Board of Education, school administrators, and teachers.

Yet categorizing both groups as minorities and demonstrating the concentration of

Mexican-American and black students did not translate into an effective argument for why segregation looked different for these two groups of students or how an unequal educational system that valued white-only schools and Eurocentric curriculum had disparately affected Mexican-American pupils. There was not a legal language for understanding or articulating the unique circumstances that informed the racialization of

357 Paul Klite Testimony, Trial on Merits, Feb. 2-20, 1970, in Appendix, vol. 2, Supreme Court of the United States, October term 1971, No. 71-507, Keyes et. al.,536a-537a, quote on 537a. 167

Mexican Americans, especially in relation to other nonwhite groups, nor their distinct educational experiences and learning needs. By the end of this case, there would be such a language, contested as it was. Until then, the plaintiffs were left fumbling for a way to discuss and demonstrate discrimination against Mexican Americans in a city that did not conceive of a race problem in anything other than black and white terms.

The plaintiffs’ first witness was Paul Klite, the Denver physician who helped conduct research for the case. He helped explain a number of charts, graphs and maps that depicted the racial segregation of Denver schools, the gerrymandered school boundary lines, and a number of indicators of unequal education. These exhibits were meant to demonstrate that DPS had followed a program of systemic segregation, which school officials then tried to cover up through actions and omissions that painted a picture of neutrality when it came to race, as well as a picture of high levels of academic improvement for all DPS students. In his questioning, Greiner focused on the 1956 controversy surrounding the new Manual High School, several examples of school boundary changes that were made in the 1950s and 1960s, optional zones that were created during that same period, and the Limited Open Enrollment program.

The plaintiffs also introduced new evidence showing discriminatory practices outside of the northeast corridor. Using the “minority” grouping, the plaintiff’s next witness, George Bardwell, presented to the court a series of tables and charts that depicted the educational achievement levels, drop-out rates, teacher experience, and course offerings of schools with majority minority students and compared these numbers to schools with majority Anglo students. To construct these comparisons, Bardwell

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defined “minority” as any school with at least fifty-one percent minority students and

“Anglo” as any school with at least fifty-one percent Anglo students. Under this definition, the DPS school system included twenty-seven minority schools (twenty elementary schools, four junior high schools and three high schools), and twenty-eight

Anglo schools (twenty-one elementary schools, four junior high schools and three high schools).358 This was in a district with 116 total schools.

The point of these comparisons was to illustrate the differences in educational opportunity and outcomes for students in minority schools versus those in Anglo schools.

The plaintiffs next presented into evidence a map with a series of and red dots marked throughout the city. The blue dots represented the minority schools that were at least ten percent under capacity in 1968, while the red dots represented the Anglo schools that were at least ten percent under capacity in 1968. Greiner wanted to use the map to demonstrate how the district had bused Anglo students in overcrowded schools to schools—majority Anglo—that were actually farther away than minority schools with available space. DPS thus violated its own neighborhood school policy to perpetuate segregation. Moreover, the argument that busing was expensive and detrimental to students did not make sense when the district was already busing students at taxpayers’ expense to schools that were farther away than necessary.

While the defense waited to challenge this interpretation with its own witnesses, its immediate concern regarding these exhibits and Bardwell’s testimony again centered on the definitions being used to describe the racial makeup of various schools.

358 George Bardwell Testimony, Trial on Merits, Feb. 2-20, 1970, in Appendix, vol. 2, Supreme Court of the United States, October Term 1971, No. 71-507, Keyes et. al., 703a-706a. 169

Defendants’ co-counsel William Ris interjected, wanting to know why Bardwell was using the fifty-one percent definition of minority and Anglo when earlier in his testimony he had defined a segregated elementary school as any school with ninety percent or higher Anglo student enrollment. Responding to Ris’ questioning, Bardwell stated that in this instance he was not talking about segregated schools, merely the racial character of the school: was it majority minority or minority Anglo? Here was the plaintiffs’ two- pronged approach in action. There were segregated schools (those with students that were over ninety percent of one race), and there were racially imbalanced schools

(schools with racial make-ups that in all likelihood could never have arisen by chance).

Both environments led to inequalities in educational opportunities and achievement and higher drop-out rates. Continuing to question the racial logic of the plaintiffs, the defense clearly hoped to pick away at their use of racial categories. Every time the lawyers objected to a racial term or its definition, the defense reminded Judge Doyle that the plaintiffs could not definitively prove malicious intent on the part of the school district.

Race operated as a double-edged sword; while the very real consequences of racialized thinking were evident, the fact that racial categories could not be easily defined or utilized to collect data demonstrating those consequences meant that the plaintiffs had to work that much harder to prove their case.

This became more evident later in Bardwell’s testimony, when he described the

1962 school boundary changes that affected Morey, Byers and Cole Junior High Schools.

The plaintiffs tried to make the point that in drawing the boundaries the way it did, the district intended to keep minority and Anglo students in separate schools as much as

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possible while still maintaining the posture of colorblindness. Bardwell used boundary maps and census data to describe the racial characteristics of the areas surrounding the three schools. Greiner wanted to demonstrate how the movement of black families into these areas had led the district to gerrymander boundaries to maintain the concentration of black students at Cole, even though parents and community members had pointed out to DPS other, seemingly more pragmatic, boundary options that would break down these concentrations. There were Mexican-American students at all three schools, but not in significant concentrations. Nonetheless, the plaintiffs continued to use the term

“minority” and “Anglo” to describe the students involved in this boundary change.

Because “minority” and “Hispano” were not Census Bureau categories, however, it was impossible to present data on the numbers of Mexican Americans living in each enumeration district.359 The exhibit, therefore, depicted the percentage of nonwhite individuals in the areas north and south of Morey that were involved in the 1962 boundary change.

The defense asked Bardwell to explain who was included in the “nonwhite” category. “Did you attempt to determine to what extent the non-white were Hispano?”

Bardwell began to explain that the enumeration district data do not break down any further than “white” and “nonwhite” but that an estimate can be derived from other data.

Ris interrupted to press his question further: “So, you have no figures then as to what these minorities consisted of or the non-whites consisted of?” “Oh, yes, what they consisted of—Negro and Oriental. Non-white does not include Hispano.” Yet the

359 The 1960 Census reported Mexican Americans and other Latinas/os as racially white, although there was a separate section that asked the census taker to mark “persons of Spanish surname.” Rodríguez, Changing Race. 171

plaintiffs had very carefully built their argument around the “minority” category. How could Hispanos not be included in the nonwhite classification when they were also included in the minority classification utilized by the plaintiffs? Realizing it had an opening to challenge their minority grouping—and thus create a significant doubt as to the validity of their case—the defense pressed Bardwell to admit the flimsy basis of the grouping. “Well, in many of your figures here today you have used Hispano as being equivalent to non-white, have you not, minority?” Bardwell replied, “No, sir, this is the first time the term non-white has ever been used in any of our exhibits, and the reason that one is forced to use that is that this is the only information from the enumeration district data from the Bureau of the Census which pertains to a particular minority.”360

Bardwell thus attempted to make a distinction between “nonwhite” and “minority,” implying that they were two very different things. This was significant, as the legal precedent that guided their efforts, the decision in Brown, rested on the constitutional requirement to eliminate racial segregation. For a violation to have occurred, the plaintiffs had to demonstrate that a system of racial classification was utilized to keep white students in white schools and all other students—African Americans and Mexican

Americans in particular—in minority schools. Because racial definitions were so ambiguous, however, it became increasingly difficult to present a solid case against DPS when the issues were not black and white.

Ris picked up on the implications of Bardwell’s revelation and moved to strike the evidence as unsubstantiated. “Just so we have our terms correct, Dr. Bardwell, in some of your figures this morning, when you were talking about Anglo and minority, did

360 George Bardwell Testimony, Trial on Merits, 788a. 172

minority in those instances include Hispano?” “Minority includes Hispano, that’s correct,” Bardwell emphasized. “So,” Ris asked, “for some purposes Hispanos are minorities and other purposes they are Anglo?” Here was the critical question. Were

Mexican Americans white or nonwhite? Or were they other-white, as many civil rights leaders had maintained for decades? On the one hand the plaintiffs were trying to argue a school segregation case based on a clear-cut racial division: Anglo versus minority. On the other hand, there was no legal definition for “minority.” Did minority mean the same thing as nonwhite? The defense had apparently been operating under that assumption.

Yet Bardwell’s point that they had been using minority, not nonwhite, indicates that this was perhaps a conscious decision made by the plaintiffs in determining how best to present their evidence and that, furthermore, they understood Mexican Americans to be other-white.361

This possibility is supported by the next exchange. Greiner objected to Ris’ line of questioning, arguing that the defense was “mischaracterizing what the witness’ testimony has been” and insisting that Bardwell was merely reporting Census terminology, not the terminology used in all other plaintiff exhibits. Judge Doyle allowed Ris to continue his questioning and Bardwell answered that the Census Bureau included Hispanos in the white category. Not satisfied, Ris asked him to relate his personal understanding of where Mexican Americans were racially located. “I am talking about your testimony generally from when you started testifying this morning.”

361 George Bardwell Testimony, Trial on Merits, 788a.

173

Bardwell responded, “The testimony this morning includes in the minority category, not nonwhite minority. Hispanos.” Bardwell thus seemed to suggest that

Mexican Americans were a minority group but were also white. Because school desegregation litigation in the United States since Brown relied on a fixed understanding of race, civil rights lawyers had to make a solid case that racial discrimination was at the center of pupil educational experiences to prove that school districts deliberately segregated students. If Mexican Americans were white, then those Denver schools with high percentages of black and Mexican-American students—minority schools, in the plaintiffs’ argument—were not segregated because there was no racial difference between Mexican Americans and Anglos. Both were white.362

In fact, school districts in Texas had been using the argument that Mexican

Americans were white for several years, effectively turning the “other-white” argument on its head to delay desegregation in their schools. The 1964 Civil Rights Act included provisions that withheld federal funds from states that continued to racially discriminate and directed the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) to issue guidelines for school desegregation. Although the Civil Rights Act included “national origin” minorities in its language, HEW took a more limited approach in its interpretation of “racial discrimination,” investigating and publishing statistics within the black and white categories only. When Texas schools began placing black and Mexican-American students in schools together, arguing that Mexican Americans were white in order to delay desegregation, HEW did not protest. In 1967 it began publishing statistics on black, white and “other” groups, which included “any racial or national origin group for which

362 George Bardwell Testimony, Trial on Merits, 788a-789a. 174

separate schools have in the past been maintained or which are recognized as significant

‘minority groups’ in the community.”363 Yet it was not until later that HEW began collecting statistics on “Spanish Surnamed Americans,” and not until 1970 when it began publishing its series of “Mexican American Studies,” that it began to actively investigate allegations of school discrimination against Mexican-American students.364 Keyes, therefore, was brought before district court at the very moment when federal officials were transitioning into a new period of racial categorization. What this transition meant for legal and common sense understandings of race, however, was not clear.

It certainly was not clear in Judge Doyle’s court. Upon Bardwell’s statement that

Mexican Americans were simultaneously white and minority, Ris began to question the racial division the plaintiffs had created. If minority did not mean nonwhite, then what did white mean?

“But, now,” Ris asked, “is there any distinction between Anglo and white?”

“Well,” Bardwell began, “the Bureau of—“

Greiner cut in, “Pardon me, Your Honor, in what respect?”

“His mind.”

“In his mind,” Ris said, “or in your testimony at any time?”

“Yes,” Bardwell replied. “The white category in the Bureau of the Census does include Hispano and—of course, if that information were available separately, it would

363 Wilson, “Brown Over ‘Other White,’” 16, quoted from “Comment: The Courts, HEW, and Southern School Desegregation,” Yale Law Journal 77 (1967), 321.

364 This was in large part because of the appointment of Hector Garcia to the U.S Civil Rights Commission in 1968. Garcia protested the Office of Civil Rights for disregarding the complaints of Mexican Americans who claimed they had been discriminated against. Wilson, “Brown Over ‘Other White,’” 16. 175

have been broken down. It is impossible to do here. In the case of the school district data, that information is much more detailed and it is possible then to go ahead and talk about Anglo students as not including Hispano.365

Feeling he had laid a basis for rejecting the testimony, Ris objected to the exhibit on the ground that it lacked specificity. The plaintiffs could not define their racial categories. Perhaps recognizing the complexities involved in racial processes, or through sheer curiosity and a desire to get to the bottom of the district’s practices, Judge Doyle allowed Bardwell to continue. This was the pattern of legal maneuvering that framed the duration of the trial. As the plaintiffs moved to solidify their case that DPS had purposefully discriminated against minority students—both African American and

Mexican-American—the defense continued to challenge the validity of their argument.

Although the case inherently dealt with race (it was, after all, a school desegregation case), no one guessed that racial understandings would become such a prominent feature of the litigation. Race was supposed to be common sense.

When the plaintiffs rested their case, they had tried to prove two things: that Park

Hill schools were deliberately segregated and that other, core city schools were racially imbalanced. Both constituted de jure segregation and provided for unequal educational opportunities and thus, both were violations of Brown. They demonstrated that the district had re-drawn school boundaries knowing that these boundaries would perpetuate segregation. DPS also created optional zones on the outskirts of minority neighborhoods so that white students there could choose to attend Anglo schools. School officials instituted mobile classroom units to relieve overcrowding at minority schools, rather than

365 George Bardwell Testimony, Trial on Merits, 789a. 176

bus those students to Anglo schools. At the same time, the district bused white students to Anglo schools that were farther away than minority schools with available space. The quality of education at Anglo schools was substantially better, the result of more experienced teachers, more updated and modern facilities, more advanced curriculum, and a focus on college preparation. At minority schools, the academic performance of students lagged behind. Not only were students segregated, but the plaintiffs showed that

DPS had a sustained practice of placing minority teachers in minority schools and white teachers in Anglo schools. Finally, Greiner brought in educational experts and psychologists to explain to the court how segregation was harmful to children’s educational, social and psychological development. The defendants, possibly believing

Judge Doyle would never rule in favor of the plaintiffs with no evidence of an actual state policy of segregation, limited their defense to the argument that all actions taken by the

Board of Education and the school administration were race-neutral. They tried to show that their decisions were devoid of racial discussions, even when the evidence demonstrated they were aware of racial implications; it was never their intent to operate a race-based system.366 That, in and of itself, should have been enough, they assumed.

They were wrong.

On March 21, 1970, Judge Doyle issued his opinion declaring that Denver schools were guilty of both de jure and de facto segregation. He ordered the preliminary injunction be made permanent. The evidence presented by the plaintiffs proved that DPS had taken state action to segregate Park Hill schools and that many of these actions had occurred after 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown. Citing Barrett School as

366 Transcript, Trial on Merits, Feb. 2-21, 1970. 177

the most egregious example, Judge Doyle condemned DPS for trying to claim it built

Barrett and drew its boundaries without a thought to the racial consequences of its decisions. Not only did the district own other sites on which it could have built a new school, but the Northeast Denver community’s opposition to the chosen site and its boundaries showed that school officials were well aware of the racial consequences of their actions. Furthermore, the argument that the boundaries were drawn so as to eliminate the need for children to cross busy Colorado Boulevard on their way to school was nonsensical; children in other parts of the district crossed busy streets every day.367

On the plaintiffs’ second claim for relief, however, Judge Doyle was unconvinced.

Without a demonstration of state action to prove the district was segregating the core city schools—minority schools, in the plaintiffs’ argument—the court could not find a violation of Brown. Under current constitutional and legal constraints, he was unable to grant the relief sought by the plaintiffs. The neighborhood school concept remained firmly intact, although Judge Doyle did imply it was on rocky ground; the question of the constitutionality of de facto schools, however, would have to wait until it was taken up by the Supreme Court. Remarkably, although the court did not find purposeful segregation, it did find that the quality of educational opportunities at some of the minority schools was so inferior as to even constitute “separate but equal.” DPS therefore had a constitutional responsibility to correct these inequalities.

Yet the district did not have an obligation to remedy the situation at all of the minority schools. Skeptical that grouping Mexican Americans and African Americans into a single minority category was a justified practice for the purposes of declaring a

367 Judge William Doyle, Memorandum Opinion and Order, 313 F. Supp. 61 (1970). 178

school segregated, Judge Doyle refused to grant relief to those schools that were not identifiably black or Mexican-American. Schools with high concentrations of African

Americans and Mexican Americans, that is, were not racially isolated.368 Morey Junior

High School, for example, had a student population that was over eighty percent minority

(52.4 percent black, 18.6 percent Mexican American, and 26.8 percent white) marking it as a racially imbalanced school, according to the plaintiffs. Judge Doyle, now revealing his acceptance of the defendant’s earlier objections, questioned the permissibility of this grouping, indicating that to do so challenged accepted legal definitions of racial and ethnic minority groups.

Even so, Judge Doyle had difficulty making sense of Mexican Americans’ racial positioning. Noting that the plaintiffs used the term “Anglo” to describe whites—perhaps in order to differentiate between whites and Mexican Americans—he took notice of the

“other-white” argument and dismissed it. Mexican Americans, he argued, “have a wholly different origin [than Anglos], and the problems applicable to them are often quite different.”369 Having rejected the notion that Mexican Americans are white, he then commented on the argument that they were minority—the opposite of Anglo. In making this determination, the opposite of Anglo equated to blackness and the question became: could blackness be associated with Mexican Americans?

One of the things the Hispano has in common with the Negro is economic and cultural deprivation and discrimination. However, whether it is permissible to add the numbers of the two groups together and lump them

368 Judge Doyle specified that “a concentration of either Negro or Hispano students in the general area of 70 to 75 percent is a concentrated school likely to produce the kind of inferiority which we are here concerned with.” Memorandum Opinion and Order, 313 F. Supp. 61 (1970), 77.

369 Judge William Doyle, Memorandum Opinion and Order, 313 F. Supp. 61 (1970), 69. 179

into a single minority category for purposes of classification as a segregated school remains a problem and a question.370

Mexican Americans were not white, but they were not black either. The court’s challenge then, was to determine how the color line applied to Denver. For the time being, Judge Doyle left the question unanswered, but suggested that because both

Mexican Americans and African Americans had comparable experiences of poverty, prejudice and discrimination, their racial identities were more similar than different.

What this meant for Denver’s school system was yet to be decided. If they were definitively nonwhite, then DPS was legally obligated to bring schools like Morey up to par with majority Anglo schools. If they were white, the district was under no such obligation. Although Judge Doyle ruled that the district was guilty of de jure segregation in Park Hill and de facto segregation in some of the core city schools, he was unable— based on Mexican Americans’ racial classification—to find a violation in other schools, even though the levels of academic achievement were similarly low and the drop-out rates were similarly high.

A hearing on relief was held May 10-20, 1970, where the plaintiffs and defendants presented their respective proposals. The implications of Mexican American involvement in the case were still paramount on Judge Doyle’s mind. When the hearing began, he jumped right into the question of whether the plaintiffs actually represented the

Mexican-American people of Denver.

“Now,” Judge Doyle asked, “you undertake to represent the Hispano community too?”

370 Judge William Doyle, Memorandum Opinion and Order, 313 F. Supp. 61 (1970), 69. 180

“That’s correct, Your Honor,” Greiner said.

“And are you certain that they wish to be bused, integrated? Every word I get, every piece of evidence I get is that there is a difference of viewpoint here, a very major difference. That they would resist any effort to integrate.”

“Your Honor, the only answer that I can give the Court based on the record in this case is that we had no intervention in this case after notice of publication and quite a bit of publicity. We had no intervention from—in behalf of the Hispano community that would indicate that divergent view. I think one of the questions—”

“Well,” Judge Doyle said, “I think we ought to keep this in mind in presenting the evidence, this inquiry in mind, and consider whether it’s proper for a Court and counsel to determine what’s good for them and order them to do it whether it is of their consent or not, you know. I don’t see that that is saving their constitutional rights, if this be true.”

Greiner replied, “Well, I think, Your Honor, it’s going to be what it—what it boils down to is a question of, is there another reasonable, realistic alternative? That’s what this hearing is all about. And the question of the consent of the people who are to be affected by the plan of relief is really a secondary question. The question is, how do you remedy the inequality? A lot of children in the school district wouldn’t go to school at all—”

“I’m not talking about the children. I’m talking about the people, you know. No,

I’m merely saying that our basic legal problem is remedying the invasion of the constitutional rights. And, if it’s true that there is a segment that says their rights are not violated, why, I don’t see that it is any of our business to say, ‘Well, they are. And

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you’re going to get them remedied whether you like it or not.’ I just don’t—Not a single

Spanish-origin person has appeared here demanding relief or even suggesting that any should be granted to them.”

“Well,” said Greiner, “I think the only basis upon which we can proceed, Your

Honor, is the status of the record—in the record, there is no dissenting Hispano intervenors.”

“Okay.”371

This exchange nicely illustrates the complexities involved in Keyes. First, Judge

Doyle again focused on the role of Mexican Americans in the litigation, pointing out that as a community, Mexican Americans did not seem to agree over the question of racial integration. Could they be considered a class if their viewpoints were not monolithic?

Second, while the court recognized the divergence in opinion among Mexican Americans, it focused only on the dissenting voices—voices like Bert Gallegos, who challenged any attempt to classify Mexican Americans as nonwhite minorities, but also those of Corky

Gonzales and the students who walked out of West High School, who argued DPS was not providing quality education to the city’s Mexican-American students but who, nonetheless, believed integration alone would not solve the problems they faced. These were the voices that got headlines. There were plenty of people, however, working in grassroots organizations and community organizing, as well as plenty of Mexican-

American parents who believed in the educational benefits of integration. Why was

Judge Doyle not concerned about the possibility of plaintiff intervenors? And finally, the court was reluctant to include Mexican Americans in any remedy plan when it was not

371 Transcript, Hearing on Relief, May 11-14, 1970. 182

clear that they wanted to be included, suggesting that an aggrieved party must recognize a constitutional violation and express a desire for relief in order to be granted such relief.

Yet Judge Doyle was well acquainted with the realities of anti-Mexican-American sentiment in his hometown and he seemed convinced of the second class treatment they received in Denver schools, even if he was unconvinced this constituted a violation of

Brown.372

The purpose of the hearing was twofold: Judge Doyle had to determine whether the remedy for de jure and de facto segregated schools was the same, and he had to decide what that remedy or remedies looked like. The plaintiffs insisted that only a program of desegregation and racially balanced schools could provide quality, equal education. The defendants countered with a program of voluntary open enrollment and compensatory education programs designed to equalize educational achievement at minority schools. From the district’s perspective, integration was not a requirement of high quality education nor of equal educational opportunities.

On the first question, the court resolved that the remedies required in cases of de jure and de facto segregated schools were not the same. In answer to the second question,

Judge Doyle declared that only through desegregation could equality of educational opportunity be established. Desegregation alone would not create the desired educational outcomes, however; compensatory education programs were critical in those minority schools where educational achievement was far below Anglo schools. The Final Decree

372 Tom Romero notes that Judge Doyle grew up in Denver and had worked in the city for years, a fact that probably influenced his ideas about race, particularly his notions of the color line, in the Mile High City. “La Raza Latina?: Multiracial Ambivalence, Color Denial, and the Emergence of a Tri-Ethnic Jurisprudence at the End of the Twentieth-Century,” New Mexico Law Review 37 (Spring 2007), 245-306, quote on 256. 183

and Judgment, issued on May 1, 1970, applied only to Park Hill schools and seventeen court-designated minority schools. Schools with concentrations of both Mexican-

American and African-American students were not included. Resolutions 1520, 1524 and 1531 were to be implemented in September 1970 and amended so as to include East

High School and Cole Junior High School. Between September 1970 and September

1971, DPS was to continue its voluntary open enrollment program, except that it would be required to allow black and Mexican-American students at any of the seventeen minority schools to attend any majority Anglo school of their choosing. Beginning in

January 1971, the district was to provide guaranteed transportation for these students.

Those pupils impacted by Resolutions 1520, 1524 and 1531—those in Park Hill—were ineligible for voluntary open enrollment.373

Beginning with the 1971-1972 school year, the district was to desegregate seven of the fourteen court-designated minority elementary schools. The other seven were to be desegregated by the beginning of the following year. The court defined “desegregated” as a school with a student population that was over fifty percent Anglo. “Substantial progress” towards desegregating both Baker and Cole Junior High Schools was to be achieved by fall 1971, with full desegregation to be in place by fall 1972.374 Manual

High School was also to become an open school with an emphasis on vocational and pre- professional training. Those students residing within Manual’s sub-district boundaries

373 Judge William Doyle, Final Decree and Judgment, Jun. 11, 1970.

374 The court also gave DPS the option of turning Cole into an open school that would provide special education or other special programs, in which case students residing in the Cole sub-district—as drawn during the 1969-1970 school year—could choose to attend any other junior high school on a space- guaranteed basis without regard to the resulting racial makeup of Cole. Judge William Doyle, Final Decree and Judgment, Jun. 11, 1970.

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could choose to attend that school or any other high school on a space-guaranteed basis without regard to the resulting racial makeup of Manual.375

Judge Doyle further ordered that compensatory programs be expanded or implemented and that the district, commencing in September, 1970, begin to do the following: integrate teachers throughout the district, promote incentives for more experienced teachers to transfer to or remain in the core city schools, hire teachers’ aides and paraprofessionals, mandate human relations training for all DPS employees, institute in-service training, extend the length of some teachers’ careers on a voluntary basis,376 promote programs under Colorado Senate Bill 174, create early childhood education programs like Head Start, provide African-American and Mexican-American history and culture courses, and implement Spanish language training. Finally, the court ordered that the district instruct teachers about minority cultures and ways to relate to minority students in an integrated setting. The district was also to begin a public relations campaign meant to educate DPS employees and the Denver community about the benefits of an integrated education.377

So, the plan included some novel aspects. Yet in taking a middle-of-the-road approach to the question of de jure segregation and by refusing to accept the minority grouping put forward by the plaintiffs, Judge Doyle satisfied neither party. Within days, the defendants filed an appeal with the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.378 Eight

375 Judge William Doyle, Final Decree and Judgment, Jun. 11, 1970. 376 Presumably, the court meant those teachers with a demonstrated ability to work with minority children or those with special skills and/or experience teaching certain subjects.

377 Judge William Doyle, Final Decree and Judgment, Jun. 11, 1970.

378 Defendant’s Notice of Appeal, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, Jun. 16, 1970. 185

days later the plaintiffs cross-appealed, citing four aspects of the District Court’s final judgment they hoped to overturn: 1) the court’s failure to grant relief to those schools whose combined black and Mexican-American enrollment was at least seventy percent,

2) the court’s failure to recognize intent in the district’s gerrymandering practices as they applied to the core city schools and thus, its failure to find de jure segregation in those schools, 3) the court’s failure to find neighborhood schools unconstitutional where they produced segregation, regardless of the intent of the school district, and 4) the court’s failure to require all desegregation and integration by September 1971.379

For Denver residents, this was just the beginning of a long period of transformation that embroiled the city in controversy and conflict. Keyes was at the center of it all, bringing to the surface the racial animosities, and the social and political strife of the previous two decades. The case had illuminated some of the primary debates over educational opportunity, public school administration and the role of the federal judiciary in American life, while also revealing the racial meanings at the heart of school desegregation litigation in the United States. Throughout the trial, the legal wrangling over the racial positioning of Mexican Americans demonstrated the malleability of race and the negotiations that always accompany racial construction. These debates remained central as the case made its way to the Supreme Court, yet their implications and the court’s ultimate decision extended beyond the courtroom and into the homes, streets, community centers, and classrooms of the city. As it did it became highly politicized,

379 Plaintiffs’ Notice of Appeal (Cross-Appeal), U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, Jun. 24, 1970. 186

polarizing the city even further along racial lines and intensifying the divisions among

Mexican Americans over racial identity.

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Chapter 5

Community Response in Black, White and Brown: En Route to the U.S. Supreme Court

If white Denverites considered their city immune from the racial tensions, social upheavals and violence of urban America in the postwar period, the Keyes case exposed the hypocrisy and naiveté of such sentiment. City leaders continued to boast of their metropolis as the shining city of the west, but recognized the turmoil on the horizon.

During the winter of 1969, as the school district contemplated possible desegregation plans in compliance with the Noel Resolution, city residents started petitions, wrote steaming editorials to the local newspapers, strengthened neighborhood associations and other community organizations, and formed new coalitions that drew hard lines on the questions of integration and busing. By early 1969, the city was at a tipping point. The

Denver Chamber of Commerce, surely concerned about the national attention and reputation Denver was now getting, worked with the school board to persuade the local population that it was in their best interests to accept the inevitable change that was coming, and to do so in a manner that protected Denver’s reputation and, perhaps more importantly, its bottom line. Together, they released a memo to the city’s business community that boldly asserted, “Here could lie a potentially great city!” An image of a cemetery appeared, with gravestones representing Detroit, Newark, Watts, Chicago and

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New York City. The center gravestone read: “DENVER: BORN-1859, DIED-1969.

CAUSE OF DEATH, SEGREGATED EDUCATION.”380

The memo was exaggerated, but there was a real fear permeating the city that the recent demands for integrated education would lead to widespread rioting, inter-racial violence, and white flight. The city that resulted would bear little resemblance to the great city that so many loved, admired and touted. Of course, this city was an illusion, a fantasy that persisted only as long as white Denverites could pretend that the whiteness of their city was a guard against the rising calls for social justice across America. The city had been simmering, ready to boil over for decades. Now, in 1969, the problems of postwar America—debates over racial segregation and integration foremost among them—were readily apparent throughout the city. Keyes not only represented the frustration and dissatisfaction of Mexican-American and African-American residents, but the heightened tensions and conflicts born out of the Chicano Movement, the Civil Rights

Movement, the War on Poverty, and national debates over school desegregation and busing. This chapter discusses the Denver community’s response to Keyes and the questions the case revealed about educational equity, the merits of racial balancing, and the significance of race itself. Although Denver was distinct for its multiracial population and location in both the North and the West, the response of city residents to calls for school desegregation and the ensuing firestorm demonstrate that, like other major cities in the nation, Denver was undergoing an urban crisis.

380 Denver School Board and Denver Chamber of Commerce, “Here could Lie a Potentially Great City!” (1969), Don & Carolyn Etter Papers, Box 2. 189

Yet the crisis took a distinctive form. Situated as one of the major centers of the emerging Chicano Movement, Denver witnessed civil rights upheavals unlike many cities in the nation. At the same time that black activists were striving to make their needs and demands heard, so were Mexican-American activists struggling for equal attention when nationally, the Black Freedom Struggle was front and center. The story of race and civil rights in the West was a multiracial drama, filled with successful and unsuccessful coalitions, bittersweet victories, and contests for recognition and resources that hindered meaningful cooperation between various groups of people. Yet although the histories of major cities in California and Texas are well-known, the struggles for racial equality in the Mile High City are fairly unknown.381 To be sure, the debates and tensions that accompanied school desegregation in the city were the most intense and received the most national attention, but residents were used to fits of violence, public demonstrations and vocal civil rights activists by the mid- to late-1960s. At the height of the Keyes case, as it made its way to the Supreme Court in 1973, battles between different West Side factions striving for community control led to a mini-Civil War. Street fighting, gun battles, and bombings became common occurrences. The ways that people viewed Keyes and their responses to it were highly influenced by these experiences. Divisions that had already been created were easily exacerbated by the drama now unfolding. As Keyes made its way through the courts, it became highly politicized, polarizing the city even

381 One very good exception is Romero, Jr., “Of Race and Rights.” For excellent histories of multiracial civil rights struggles in California, see Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left; and Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race. On similar work in Texas, see Foley, The Quest for Equality; and Behnken, Fighting Their Own Battles. On intra-racial civil rights organizing, see Fernandez, Brown in the Windy City.

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further along racial lines and intensifying the divisions among Mexican Americans over racial identity.

The case set off heated debates, social and political backlash, and violence in the city. This backlash, just like the case itself, was framed within the black/white binary.

Although people were aware of the rising demands of various groups within the Mexican

American community, they were relatively less informed about the viewpoints that this community held about school desegregation. Moreover, because the case was primarily about black and white students in Northeast Denver, people understood the backlash in black and white terms. The media’s portrayal of integration and the problems it unleashed was especially problematic because it perpetuated the notion that Mexican-

American students were not being affected by the school board’s actions and that

Mexican Americans in the city did not have a stake in the unfolding drama. They were effectively erased from the public discourse about school integration, which made it easy for people to assume Mexican Americans did not care about the issues involved or that they simply rejected integration outright when they became a central part of the case a few years later.

During the District Court trial, a series of bombings unleashed a wave of fear among city residents that highlighted the extreme levels of violence and destruction people were willing to perpetuate in order to make a statement against racial integration.

On February 3, 1970 someone broke into the school district’s bus holding area and planted a bomb that destroyed twenty-three buses and damaged fifteen more.382 Officials

382 Rykken Johnson, “Five Suspects Sought in Bombing of Buses,” Rocky Mountain News, Feb. 7, 1970, 5, newspaper clipping in scrapbook (Jan.-Jun. 1970), Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 12, Folder 13. 191

estimated that the bomb had caused over five million dollars in damages. Fortunately, no one was injured. But the perpetrators had made their point: no busing in Denver.

Just two weeks later, the family home of Wilfred Keyes was targeted as well. On the last day of the trial, as the family was enjoying their evening, someone threw a bomb onto their front porch. Christi, Keyes’ nine-year-old daughter, heard something hit the front door and called to her mother. A quick glance out the front window was all Lylaus

Keyes needed to see the homemade pipe bomb, wrapped in newspaper and smoking. The family ran to the back yard as Wilfred tried to find a way to diffuse it. Moments later the bomb exploded. It was packed with metal fragments that sprayed everywhere and shattered a window. When the police arrived they noted that the bomb was not merely a scare tactic; it was meant to inflict serious bodily harm.383 Others were also targeted, including school board members who opposed desegregation efforts but who were seen as complicit with it once Judge Doyle issued his plan in 1970. James Perrill’s home was targeted when a bomb was placed in his mailbox, and Rachel Noel recalled that verbal and written threats came at her day and night. Friends were constantly on the lookout, never letting her walk home by herself. Some even followed her home after school board meetings to ensure her safety. Several other people who were heavily involved in the litigation were harassed by threatening phone calls and bomb threats on a regular basis.384

On June 9, 1974, just a couple of months after Judge Doyle had issued his final judgment and decree, a bomb scare alerted officials to the possibility of another violent

383 “Explosive Rips Denver Home,” Denver Post, Feb. 25, 1970, 3F.

384 Brown-Bailey, “Journey Full Circle,” 94; and Pearson and Pearson, “Keyes v. School District No. 1.

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attack on school property. That morning, a fake bomb was found under the hood of one of the buses parked at the school bus storage lot. It consisted of four flares taped together to look like a bomb, a realistic enough decoy that it demanded a thorough search by bomb squad experts. This was the same site as the 1970 blast that had destroyed forty-six

DPS school buses. Authorities were not going to take any chances.385

The case led to heightened tensions and increased violence inside the schools as well. When the plaintiffs were granted an injunction against the rescission of resolutions

1520, 1524 and 1531 in the summer of 1969, the school district was required to implement the Gilberts Plan, even though the case had not gone to trial yet. Although people expected major problems and possibly violence, there was relatively little disruption when the schools opened on September 2. A school boycott, organized by white parents who did not want their children transferred to schools outside their neighborhoods, had little effect. The Superintendent reported that all but about 175 to

200 students were in class. At Hill Junior High School, more than fifty parents from the

Montclair area of the city appeared to register their children for classes, even though they were under court order to report to Smiley Junior High, a predominantly black school.

The same thing happened at Fallis Elementary School, where parents tried to ignore the order to send their kids to Philips. 386 In all, 2,700 elementary and junior high school students were transferred that fall.387

385 Pearson and Pearson, “Keyes v. School District No. 1,” 208.

386 Martin Moran, “Denver School Opening Smooth; Boycott Fizzles,” Rocky Mountain News, Sept. 3, 1969.

387 Charles Carter, “School Busing’s Reality,” Denver Post, Dec. 14, 1969.

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For the most part, the problems that developed out of the integration plan had to do with hostile attitudes, unprepared teachers and administrators, and logistical problems associated with transportation. At the elementary school level, students were relatively happy with their new schools and the few problems that developed were related to transportation. Problems at the city’s junior high schools were more frequent and generally revolved around student and teacher attitudes. Rumors contributed to the uneasiness that plagued the school hallways, but there were real issues that the district was largely unprepared to handle. Student fighting was the most common. Schools became internally segregated, with students choosing to spend their time in-between classes among those of their own racial group. At George Washington High School, white students reported that they stayed away from the “black ghetto,” a hallway where black students chose to congregate.388

George Washington presented the most problems for the district. During the first year of integration (school year 1969-1970), the high schools were not a part of the plan.

But under Judge Doyle’s May 1970 order, DPS was required to break up the concentration of black students at East High School by transferring some of them to

South High and George Washington High (GW). The year prior to this there were only

126 black students enrolled at GW, most of them there under the district’s voluntary enrollment policy. In the fall of 1970, that number increased to 383, out of a total of

3,100 students. While accounting for only about twelve percent of the student body,

388 Charles Carter, “School Busing’s Reality,” The Denver Post, Dec. 14, 1969; Buel C. Robinson, “Confrontation at Washington High: WHY?” Empire Magazine, a supplement to the Denver Post, Jan. 3, 1971.

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these bused-in black students were seen as a major threat to the school. GW was one of the most highly decorated schools in the district. Students there performed significantly higher in nearly all academic indicators and most chose to attend college. Many whites feared that the new black students would not be able to keep up and that they might actually bring down the quality of education there.389 Black students felt isolated from the start. They knew they were not wanted, and the fact that the district was not providing them transportation to the school—they were forced to ride city buses that they had to pay for—increased their hostility to the entire situation. “You don’t want us at

Washington,” reported one black student. “I know because the Board of Education keeps fighting in the courts to keep us out.”390

By late September 1970 tensions had come to a boiling point. Accounts differ as to how the day’s events began, but most say that it started in a rap session in the auditorium. Several of the secondary schools had begun to have rap sessions where students shared their grievances, openly discussing racial issues and trying to develop mutually beneficial solutions. On the morning of September 24 a racially mixed group of students was holding one of these gatherings when a white student accused a black student of forming the “black ghetto” in a hallway on the north side of the school. That accusation turned into name-calling on both sides, which escalated in fighting within a matter of minutes. The violence poured out into the hallway and soon enveloped the entire school. A GW Physics teacher, Buel Robinson, wrote a piece for the Denver Post

389 Goodstein, DIA and Other Scams, 86-87; Watson, “Removing the Barricades,” 167.

390 Buel C. Robinson, “Confrontation at Washington High: WHY?” Empire Magazine, a supplement to the Denver Post, Jan. 3, 1971.

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that recalled the day. “My emotions make it impossible to for me to look clearly and objectively at that first day, but I still can see and hear the fearful swirling melee of students, teachers and police, the uncontrolled hate and violence that seemingly erupted instantly.”391 The police managed to restore order. Two black students were arrested and sixteen students, both black and white, were injured. By the next day tensions were still high and students again took to fighting. Five more students, both black and white, were hurt. When things calmed down, armed police officers became a permanent addition to the school. “George Washington is not a school anymore,” Robinson wrote. “It’s a prison. Doors are locked. Supervisor squads patrol the halls, ready to apprehend any unauthorized student found there. I spent a year in a World War II German prison, and the feeling is about the same.”392 The worst was yet to come.393

Less than a month later, on October 20, school-wide violence again ripped through the building. This time, forty-five black and white students were treated for injuries, while eight students—seven black and one white—were arrested. The building remained closed for six days.394 Integration opponents blamed black students for the violence. Anti-busing school board members had refused to provide transportation for the black students being bused into GW, even though advocates had been calling for such

391 Buel C. Robinson, “Confrontation at Washington High: WHY?” Empire Magazine, a supplement to the Denver Post, Jan. 3, 1971.

392 Buel C. Robinson, “Confrontation at Washington High: WHY?” Empire Magazine, a supplement to the Denver Post, Jan. 3, 1971.

393 Buel C. Robinson, “Confrontation at Washington High: WHY?” Empire Magazine, a supplement to the Denver Post, Jan. 3, 1971.

394 Buel C. Robinson, “Confrontation at Washington High: WHY?” Empire Magazine, a supplement to the Denver Post, Jan. 3, 1971; Goodstein, DIA and Other Scams, 88-89.

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transportation since the school year began. After the initial violence in September some community members suggested transportation might alleviate some of the hard feelings among black students, who had to wait for at least an hour after school for a city bus to stop near GW and take them back to Northeast Denver. Both Frank Southworth and

James Perrill argued against the idea, saying that to provide them with a bus would be rewarding them for violence. Perrill even suggested that if they provided this bus, students at other high schools would turn to violence to secure district transportation as well.395 Clearly, black students were to blame.

Integration proponents countered that the district’s refusal to help implement the plan was the root cause of black dissatisfaction at GW. Before the year began a group of teachers, with the support of Principal Jack Beardshear, asked permission to create a series of human relations courses and other mechanisms for easing the transition for black and white students. The Board of Education refused.396 Many people accused GW teachers of treating black students differently, which only reinforced the notion that they were not wanted. Although the district provided money to supply the school library with books on black history and culture, the atmosphere after the September violence made it unlikely students would actually benefit from them. Under the new regime, students could only use the library if they got permits in advance, and permits were only issued in study hall sessions. New split-session course scheduling had eliminated study halls for many students and they were forbidden from entering the school early or staying late.

395 Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, October 15, 1970, 18-19.

396 Buel C. Robinson, “Confrontation at Washington High: WHY?” Empire Magazine, a supplement to the Denver Post, Jan. 3, 1971.

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The books sat un-opened, a testament to the ironies that plagued the implementation of court-ordered desegregation.

The Denver media focused much of its energy on reporting these problems, particularly the most sensational stories like those coming out of George Washington. It focused almost no attention on Mexican-American students, at least in regard to Judge

Doyle’s desegregation order. Of course, this was mostly because the plan was focused on eradicating segregation in Northeast Denver. Thus, the initial student transfers involved mostly black and white students. But it was also clear that the city continued to perceive the problems in Denver schools as a black and white issue. The demands of Mexican-

American students and their advocates in the community were reported. But these demands and the larger culture of neglect that defined the educational experiences of

Mexican Americans were disconnected from the debates over desegregation. At the end of Buel Robinson’s piece on GW, he noted that the schools had an important role to play in developing more harmonious race relations. He used the front façade of GW to illustrate his point: “Perhaps it is significant that the attractive exterior of Washington

High School is constructed of white columns joined and supported by panels of black bricks.” A photograph of the building accompanies the piece, the caption describing the beautiful black bricks and white columns that together form the school and “demonstrate that a house divided cannot stand.”397 As the city awaited the outcome of the litigation, school integration was understood and articulated in strictly black and white terms.

397 Buel C. Robinson, “Confrontation at Washington High: WHY?” Empire Magazine, a supplement to the Denver Post, Jan. 3, 1971. 198

Debating Race, Creating Space: Mexican Americans and the Chicano Movement in Denver

When Judge Doyle issued his plan for desegregation in May 1970, the plaintiffs were not happy. The defendants certainly were not happy. Mexican Americans, whose racial identity had played so central a role in the trial, felt as if their concerns had hardly been considered. Many were justifiably upset that litigation they had had little part in developing was now determining the educational fate of their children. Now that the trial was over, the appeal pending, the role of Mexican Americans in the city’s desegregation drama became a point of interest. The newspapers ran major pieces with titles like

“Hispano View of Busing Eyed,” and “School Board Told Hispanos Oppose Integration

Plan.”398

That the city newspapers did not connect Mexican Americans’ role in desegregation to the protests of Mexican-American youth and community activists over their experiences in Denver schools reflects the ways in which the debates over school desegregation were understood. Many Mexican Americans tried to challenge this understanding by bringing their complaints and demands to school officials and the wider public. These activists pointed out that the district’s desegregation plan would not result in equal educational opportunity for Mexican-American students. As the school board debated the integration plan it would adopt in the fall of 1968, Corky Gonzales and several Crusade for Justice members interrupted the board’s meeting to protest the proposed plan’s failure to address the educational needs of the Mexican-American community. On live television being broadcasted on Denver’s public station, Gonzales

398 Cindy Parmenter, “Hispano View of Busing Eyed,” Denver Post, May 11, 1970, 12; and Martin Moran, “School Board Told Hispanos Oppose Integration Plan,” Denver Post, Mar. 18, 1971, 6. 199

insisted that the solutions being offered, busing in particular, would not solve the inequalities that existed in Denver Public Schools.399 He argued “that integration was a misleading proposition in regards to solving the problems imposed upon the children of the Mexican American segment of this society.”400

Several black beret-wearing Crusade members joined him on stage, while others filled the room singing “We Shall Overcome” in Spanish. Although Gonzales had been scheduled to speak later in the meeting, his refusal to follow the rules angered several board members, who demanded that the microphones and cameras be turned off.

Undeterred, Gonzales pulled out a bullhorn and proclaimed, “We can no longer remain silent in the face of this devastating monster that perpetuates the myth that European whites or Anglos are the only symbols of success and power in this society.”401 Unable to restore order, school board members Stephen Knight and William Berge left the stage, disgusted at the display before them. Gonzales continued, listing a series of demands that included free education for all Mexican Americans from pre-school through college, bilingual education from pre-school through college, DPS recognition and protection of the cultural rights embodied in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and a requirement that all teachers must reside in the neighborhoods in which they teach. He also addressed

Superintendent Gilbert’s desegregation plan specifically, demanding that each neighborhood school complex—a central component of the plan—have its own school

399 Charles Carter, “Integration Plan Talks Disrupted,” Denver Post, Oct. 27, 1968, 1.

400 Quoted from “Chicano ‘Socks It’ to the School Board,” El Gallo (Denver, CO), vol. 2, no 2 (Dec. 1968), 3. Also see Marín, “A Spokesman of the Mexican American Movement,” 9-10.

401 Martin Moran, “Corky, Commandos Take Podium at School Parley,” Rocky Mountain News, Nov. 2, 1968, newspaper clipping in Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 1, Folder 47. 200

board composed of people from the community with no at-large members.402 As a whole, these demands revolved around three central aspects of radical Chicano philosophy: recognition of the poverty affecting a large segment of the Chicano community, bilingual and multicultural education, and community control. In a reversal of the educational goals of earlier Mexican-American civil rights advocates, these activists rejected assimilation and integration as a means of educating and preparing Chicano students.

Such a viewpoint did not easily co-exist alongside efforts to integrate the Denver schools.

The Crusade’s militant tactics did not sit well with many Mexican Americans.

The years between the passage of the Noel Resolution and the hearing before the

Supreme Court nurtured major changes in the city. One of these was the emergence of

Denver as a center of the Chicano Movement. Yet Mexican-American activists had many different goals and embraced many different tactics. The Crusade’s leader,

Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, was a local boxing hero turned politico who had once helped organize the city’s Mexican-American residents behind Democratic Party candidates for local, state and national elections. By the late 1960s he had abandoned mainstream

Democratic politics and put all of his energy into more radical efforts. “I’m an agitator and a trouble-maker,” he stated, “That’s my reputation, and that’s what I’m going to be.

They didn’t buy me when they put me in this job,” referring to his appointment as the head of Denver’s War on Poverty.403 While this kind of anti-establishment language was

402 Martin Moran, “Corky, Commandos Take Podium at School Parley,” Rocky Mountain News, Nov. 2, 1968, newspaper clipping in Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 1, Folder 47.

403 Jack Gaskie, “Gonzales Views His Poverty Role,” Rocky Mountain News, Sept. 29, 1965, 5.

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popular with Crusade members and sympathizers, others in the city—including other

Mexican-American leaders—viewed Gonzales and his organization with distaste.

In one of several editorials concerning Gonzales in the city’s two major newspapers Alex Johnson wrote to criticize the Crusade’s popular leader and the hundreds of followers who showed up at demonstrations. In language that was becoming increasingly popular, Johnson lamented the Great Society and urged his fellow “Spanish-

Americans” to work hard and take responsibility for their own lives. He expressed clear disdain for the emerging Chicano Movement and its leadership in Denver, noting that he and others like him did not need a spokesman—especially one like Gonzales—to speak for him. As a responsible, hardworking American, he did not need welfare and he resented that some big shot thought it was up to him to save “Spanish-Americans” when he already saved himself.404

For his part, Gonzales did not attempt to smooth over these fears. He recognized he was a contentious figure and embraced that characterization, confident in his ability to garner the support of poor city residents, Mexican Americans in particular. When he was announced as chairperson of the Denver War on Poverty program, he chastised more established Mexican-American leaders who had been trying to work within the system.

Calling them “generals of the banquet table,” he pointed out that these so-called Spanish- surnamed leaders were only interested in their own prosperity and knew nothing about living in the trenches, in the projects of the West Side. Without reservation and with intense pride, he called himself the leader of the people, citing a study conducted by the

404 Alex Johnson claimed a Spanish-American identity in his letter. “Who Shall Speak for Spanish-Descent Minority?” Denver Post, n.d., newspaper clipping in Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 12, Folder 210 202

University of Denver that found he was the most recognized leader among Mexican

Americans in the city, especially those who lived in poor areas.405

His may have been the most widely recognized name, but he was certainly not the only Mexican-American leader in the city. By the end of the decade, another major force came together to challenge the Crusade for control of the local Chicano Movement. The

Westside Coalition was an umbrella organization representing several different community groups that had been operating throughout the decade. They came together in late 1969 to challenge the construction of a higher education complex in the Auraria neighborhood, just west of downtown. The Auraria complex would house Metropolitan

State College (Metro), the Community College of Denver (CCD), and the University of

Colorado at Denver (UC-Denver). When the site was proposed, the area had one hundred low-income housing units, home to approximately three hundred families that would be displaced when their units were demolished and the new campus built.406 Additionally, the new complex would bring an influx of students and business to the area, causing the cost of rent and home ownership to skyrocket.407 To combat these developments and to ensure that the West Side remained a family-oriented residential area, residents formed the Westside Coalition. Community centers, Parent Teacher Associations, churches, local neighborhood associations, two chapters of the GI Forum, and the United Mexican

American Students (UMAS) from Metro and UC-Denver came together under the

405 Jack Gaskie, "Gonzales Views His Poverty Role,” Rocky Mountain News, Sept. 29, 1965, 5.

406 Rivera, Jr., et. al., “Internal Colonialism.”

407 In 1970, Mexican Americans made up approximately 62.1 percent of the West Side community. African Americans were 1.9 percent and whites made up the remaining 36 percent. Rivera, Jr., et. al., “Internal Colonialism.” 203

leadership of Waldo Benavidez. Although the Coalition did not stop the development of the Auraria complex, the group continued to work towards protecting their neighborhood against further urban renewal.

An acolyte of Benavidez, twenty-three year old Rich Castro, became the executive director of the Coalition and proudly supported its goal of community control.

Nurtured at the very moment the Chicano Movement was building steam nationwide and black civil rights activists were starting to move beyond calls for legal rights to more radical demands for black self-determination, the idea of community control held a lot of appeal to many West Siders. For others, the goals of the Coalition—influencing zoning regulations, stopping the creation of one-way streets, establishing more residential- friendly environmental regulations, and gaining control over local electoral politics and community organizations—were helpful only to the extent that they provided small victories for local residents. Castro recognized that the Coalition’s limited approach held little potential for altering the power structure that limited opportunities for poor Mexican

Americans. But because they remained a demographic minority, their only hope was to work through the system for changes that might offer a chance at a comfortable life.408

That viewpoint did not sit easily alongside the radical rhetoric and tactics of the

Crusade for Justice. When Corky Gonzales complained of “generals at the banquet table” or, more frequently, vendidos, tio tacos or malinches, he was talking about people like

408 Rivera, Jr., et. al., “Internal Colonialism.” Castro’s biographer, Richard Gould, maintains that Castro well understood the limitations of the Coalition but was dedicated to the democratic process as the only pragmatic means of achieving neighborhood cohesion and local control over the fate of their homes and families. The Life and Times of Richard Castro.

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Waldo Benavidez and Rich Castro.409 In his view, the leaders of the Westside Coalition were sell-outs. If you were not with the revolution then you were against it, and

Benavidez and Castro were certainly not with it. Before long, these tensions flared into open warfare on the Westside. During the early 1970s, pipe bombs, firebombings, and

Molotov cocktails were used over and over, placed on porches and in building entrances, or thrown through windows. Sniper attacks and drive-by shootings were frequent middle-of-the-night disturbances. Less dangerous but just as frequent were shouting matches and fistfights that grew into giant brawls in bars and meeting halls, spilling out onto the streets for all to see. The local press ate it up, reporting on each incident no matter how big or small. For many West Siders, events during those years caused fear, loathing, and embarrassment, furthering the divide between different segments of the

Mexican-American community.410

These tensions informed how some Mexican Americans viewed the increasing demands of the Crusade and others for DPS reforms and provided the backdrop to

Mexican-American student action in 1969. Although the Crusade’s interruption of the

Board of Education meeting was dramatic, students and parents on the West Side were not silent on the issue either. As the district continued to consider the Superintendent’s proposed plan for integration in the fall of 1968 and winter of 1969, Mexican-American

409 Vendidos translates to “sell-outs.” Tio Tacos translates to “Uncle Tacos”, which is akin to “Uncle Tom.” Malinches refers to Malinche, the indigenous mistress of Hernán Cortés, who helped the Spanish conquer the Aztecs. In popular cultural memory, she is viewed as a traitor to her people. Many in the Chicano Movement used the term “Malinche” to refer to people of Mexican descent, women especially, whom they believed had gone against the Movement for various reasons.

410 See newspaper clipping files between 1969 and 1974, Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 12, Folders 11-20. Also see Vigil, The Crusade for Justice; Gould, The Life and Times of Richard Castro; and Goodstein, DIA and Other Scams. 205

parents attended school board meetings and open forums in large numbers. They expressed support for bilingual education, classes on Mexican-American history and culture, and more Mexican-American teachers, counselors and administrators. Many favored integration but did not seem to support the argument that racial balance alone would achieve the desired results for their children.411 One parent told the school board that he supported integration but believed that the district’s plan did not go far enough in addressing the educational needs of Mexican-American students. Noting the high drop- out rate of these students, he suggested that different approaches were needed to keep these kids in school and provide them with quality education. The school board, he said, should be concerned with the ways teachers were trained in college.412 This viewpoint was widely shared among Mexican Americans, who believed that many Anglo teachers had no interest in seeing them succeed.

Some Mexican Americans expressed multiple perspectives, demonstrating the complexity of trying to achieve quality education for multiracial student populations.

Germaine Aragon wrote two letters to the editor of the West Side Recorder; one after the school board elections in the spring of 1969 and the other two years later, in the spring of

1971. In her first letter she lamented the results of the election, which went to James

Perrill and Frank Southworth, and regretted that these “foes” of integration would now be joining two other “foes” to ensure the end of integration efforts in Denver schools. “We

411 “Educational Needs of Hispano Students,” Editorial by Marcella Trujillo, Denver Post, Apr. 13, 1969; “School Board Meets at W.H.S. May 6,” West Side Recorder, 5, 10 (Apr. 1969), 1; “Improvement Assn. Asks for Changes,” West Side Recorder 5, no. 10 (Apr. 1969), 4; Letter to the Editor, Germaine Aragon, West Side Recorder 6, no. 2 (Jun. 1969), 2.

412 The parent was Eutemio Duran. Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, Jan. 12, 1969, 16.

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residents of the West Side are unhappy about the results of the school board elections,” she wrote. “For the sake of the children and every community in Denver we hope and pray that something constructive is set up for this next semester.”413

Just two years later, however, her view of integration had seemingly been transformed. “Now we are asking you, the Denver Board of Education, ‘Don’t you ever hear us, or choose to hear us?’” she demanded to know. “In the last school board election, every precinct in the Hispano community voted to maintain the neighborhood school concept. Does it mean nothing to you? To us it does. We do not want to be bussed anywhere.”414 On the surface, Aragon’s anti-busing stance seems at odds with her public expression of dissatisfaction towards the victory of anti-integrationists Perrill and

Southworth. But this would be a misinterpretation of her perspective, one that stems from trying to understand her motives within the dichotomous history of school desegregation in the U.S. School desegregation is frequently explained in terms of busing versus anti-busing, integration versus segregation, and—most importantly—black versus white. Once free of these frameworks, Aragon’s multiple expressions of support for equal educational opportunity are more revealing. One possibility is that she supported the efforts of black parents and activists to achieve integration in Northeast

Denver, the focus of desegregation leading up to the 1969 elections, but she opposed efforts to use schools with high proportions of Mexican Americans to achieve racial balance. Moreover, her strident rejection of busing can be best understood as an expression of her belief that Mexican-American community schools were best equipped

413 Germaine Aragon, Letter to the Editor, West Side Recorder 6, no. 2 (Jun. 1969), 2.

414 Germaine Aragon, Letter to the Editor, West Side Recorder 7, no. 11 (Apr. 1971), 3. 207

to provide quality education for Mexican-American students. Closing those schools, as several of the proposed plans recommended, and busing West Side students to other areas of the city where they could lose the benefit of bilingual education, breakfast programs, and curriculum in Mexican-American history and culture seemed to be counterintuitive to many Mexican American students, parents, and activists.415 Aragon’s sentiment provides support for Tom Romero’s contention that many Mexican Americans in the city who opposed the break-up of West Side community schools “appropriated the ‘neighborhood school’ philosophy held by many ‘Whites’ who opposed busing” as a way of making their viewpoints heard.416

But as the district grappled with the integration debate, Mexican Americans were notably absent from school officials’ conversations. To protest the schools’ refusal to meet the demands outlined by Corky Gonzales the previous fall, Mexican-American students took direct action. In late February 1969, Mexican-American students at West

High School walked out to protest the district’s failure to meet their educational needs.

This was in some ways an act of solidarity with students across the southwest, but it was also a very clear reaction to the conditions the students faced in Denver schools.417 An incident at West High sparked the action. When a white social studies teacher, Harry

415 Several schools on the West Side had at least one of these programs, thanks to federal funding under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Under rules operating Title I, HEW granted federal money to schools based on the number of students whose family incomes fell below a certain income level. If those students were bused to other schools, federal funding for certain programs would be lost because it depended on a concentration of poor students.

416 Romero, “Of Race and Rights,” 411-412.

417 School walkouts, also called blowouts, happened in schools in California, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, as well as in Chicago, . See Haney Lopez, Racism on Trial; Chávez, ¡Mi Raza Primero!; Carlos Muñoz, Jr., Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement (London: Verso, 1989); and Garcia, et. al., Blowout!

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Schafer, suggested in his Social Problems class that Mexican-American students were not as smart as other students, Crusade members encouraged Mexican-American students to protest, insisting that he be fired.418 Students reported that he said, “If you eat Mexican food you’ll look like a Mexican,” and “All Mexicans are stupid because their parents were stupid and their parents’ parents were stupid.”419 The teacher was also widely known for intentionally mispronouncing the names of Mexican Americans in class and declining requests made by Mexican-American parents to bring in more culturally relevant material.420 Students at West walked out on February 27, bringing city-wide attention to their demands. DPS officials investigated the matter but Schafer was not fired, even though he admitted to the comments. He insisted that he was merely being provocative and trying to encourage discussion.421

This incident was a catalyst for many Mexican Americans at West High. These students were well acquainted with the biases of their teachers and they understood that

418 Prelude to Disturbance: Complaint Against Teacher,” Denver Post, Mar. 20, 1969; Marín, “A Spokesman of the Mexican American Movement,” 10-11; Larry Castro, “Letters from West Siders,” West Side Recorder, 5, no. 10 (Apr. 1969), 2.

419 “Racist West High Teacher Must Go,” Crusada Para La Justica: Solo No Palabras. Pero Acciones (Denver: Joaquin Publications, 1977), in Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 2, Folder 6; Martin Moran, “Charges Against Teacher,” Rocky Mountain News.

*Note on the source Crusada Para La Justica: Solo No Palabras. Pero Acciones: This is a booklet compiled by the Crusade for Justice that contains newspaper articles and other items from its newspaper, El Gallo, which had been printed over the previous several years. The Crusade published the booklet in 1977, but the articles within in were published prior to 1977.

420 Vigil, The Crusade for Justice, 80-81.

421 In response to the investigation of Mr. Schafer, several Wet High School teachers filed a complaint with the Denver Classroom Teacher’s Association, which then filed a grievance with the school district, asking that they apologize to West High faculty. From their perspective, this was an unfair attack on a teacher. See “Method Used to Accuse Teacher Leads to W.H.S. Faculty Protest,” West Side Recorder, 5, no. 9 (Mar. 1969), 1.

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DPS had little concern for them. On Thursday, March 20 students again marched out of

West High. This time they were met with police in riot gear and a violent confrontation ensued. Students reported being sprayed with mace and clubbed by the police, even though they were peacefully assembling. On Friday, the clashes continued as students remained out of school, protesting in and around the area. The Denver Blade, one of two

African-American newspapers in the city, compared the incident to the nationwide urban rebellions that sprung up in American cities every summer between 1965 and 1968, its front page headline boldly proclaiming, “Summer in March.” The article cited the witness account of members of the Westside Action Ministry and the Core City Team

Ministry, who blamed the Denver police force for the violence, pointing out that the demonstrators were following the orders of legal authorities and student leaders when they were pushed and shoved by the police. The “obvious over-reaction” of the police sparked student backlash the next day, when demonstrators reconvened. 422 Twenty-five people were arrested during the confrontations, including Corky Gonzales and ten West

High students. All were eventually acquitted of the charges against them.423

The following day several students met with the school board and city officials in the mayor’s office, where they presented a list of nine demands. In addition to firing Mr.

Schafer, they also asked that no student who took part in the walk-out be punished, that bilingual and bicultural education be implemented in all schools, that teachers be more sensitive to students’ cultural and economic backgrounds, that teachers and counselors

422 “Summer in March: Denver Student [sic.] Become Restless in March,” Denver Blade vol. 9, no. 24 (Mar. 25, 1969, 1.

423 Marín, “A Spokesman of the Mexican American Movement,” 10-11.

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stop advising Mexican-American students to join the military, and that class size be reduced so as to facilitate better teacher-student communication.424 It is clear that the students perceived their racial positioning in contrast to whites: their continued use of the term “Chicano” indicates that they had fully committed to the notion of themselves as brown, as different people with a history of exploitation and oppression. Their demands rested not on the notion of “other whiteness” but on the idea that they deserved inclusion as Chicanos.

As Ian Haney Lopez points out, the shift to a Chicano identity reflected the distinct experiences of protest, police repression, and violence that accompanied the

Chicano Movement. As young Chicanos watched the civil rights struggles unfolding around them, they developed an idea of race and protest that explained the often violent response of whites to the demands of people of color. When African Americans marched in Selma, for example, they were met with extreme violence. When young Chicanos walked out of high schools in protest of their schools, police in riot gear greeted them.

As the same narrative played over and over throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, they began to see themselves as people of color, in stark contrast to the whites intent on beating them down through police repression and violence.425

Many Mexican Americans supported the students at West, as did many Mexican-

American organizations in the city. On March 23, a group of around 150 people met at a

West Side cultural center to discuss what had prompted the students to protest, share

424 Westside Action Ministry, “Supplement to the West Side Recorder, March 1969,” West Side Recorder, 5, no. 9 (Mar. 1969), insert.

425 Haney Lopez, Racism on Trial.

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ideas and formulate a strategy moving forward in their efforts to improve the educational experiences of Mexican-American youth. A central part of their discussion was whether or not they should support Edgar Benton and Monte Pascoe, two pro-integration candidates, for the Denver school board. Several parents were unconvinced that the two men would represent their interests on the board. Whereas African Americans in

Northeast Denver overwhelmingly supported them, the candidates’ pro-integration stance was not enough to persuade Mexican Americans they would work toward implementing the changes they wanted in the schools. Many at the meeting argued that what they needed was “immediate improvement in the schools as they are now constituted, rather than promises of integration or improved later.” Others insisted that they did not support integration because they said “it would Anglicize them and destroy cultural identity.”426

By the end of the meeting, attendees agreed on three resolutions that they sent to school officials. Each endorsed measures that were currently being considered by the

Colorado legislature. The first bill would repeal a state law banning public school instruction in any language other than English. The second encouraged the implementation of courses in black and Chicano history. The third expanded the Denver

Board of Education to nine members, each elected from districts, which would enable

Mexican American representation on the board. Students passed their own resolution at

426 Alan Cunningham, “Hispanos Push for Unity to Effect School Change,” Rocky Mountain News, Mar. 24, 1969, newspaper clipping in Scrapbook (Jan.-Jun. 1969), Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 12, Folder 11.

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the meeting, demanding a Mexican-American principal at West High School and more

Mexican-American teachers.427

In April Mexican-American parents, students, and other community members took their concerns to the school board and Superintendent Gilberts. After the boisterous tactics of the Crusade for Justice and the walk-outs at West High School, these citizens took their grievances directly to those with the power to affect change in the district, probably believing school officials would be more willing to deal with them.

Representatives from the G.I. Forum, LARASA, the Congress of Hispanic Educators, the

Crusade for Justice, various West Side Parent Teacher Associations, and other organizations joined the parents and students in making their pleas once again. Though the board promised they would consider the attendees’ suggestions, one parent remarked,

“Frankly, not much was accomplished. The meeting had been planned to have the board explain how they were going to carry out the demands made during the walk-out at West

High School. Dr. Gilberts did not do this.”428 Another meeting in May yielded similar results.429

Meanwhile, the Congress of Hispanic Educators (CHE) was working to provide the district with statistics and recommendations for improving the educational experiences of DPS students. In March, in the middle of the confrontations at West High

School, the organization submitted a position paper to the Board of Education, outlining

427 Alan Cunningham, “Hispanos Push for Unity to Effect School Change,” Rocky Mountain News, Mar. 24, 1969, newspaper clipping in Scrapbook (Jan.-Jun. 1969), Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 12, Folder 11. 428 “School Board Meets at W.H.S. May 6,” West Side Recorder 5, no. 10 (Apr. 1069), 1.

429 Martin Moran, “Board Told It Can Solve Hispano School Problems,” Rocky Mountain News, May 7, 1969, newspaper clipping in Scrapbook (Jan.-Jun. 1969), Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 12, Folder 11.

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its suggestions for quality education in both primary and secondary schools.430 Once again, the district ignored the demands. In an open letter to the Denver Post, CHE

President Gallegos challenged the public perception that no one was doing anything to address the problems of Mexican-American education in the Denver schools. “It would be a revelation to many people to know that each day Hispano educators work for quality education,” he explained, “but their efforts go unnoticed because their approach to the problem is apparently not as newsworthy as a demonstration or a riot.”431

Gallegos’ sentiment points to two important aspects of the city’s struggle to achieve equal educational opportunity for a multiracial student population. First,

Mexican-American efforts to improve education for their community were not monolithic.

Community members had different perspectives on education; even when they agreed on the solutions, they often differed in their tactics. The CHE preferred to work through established channels of communication while the Crusade for Justice preferred more radical tactics. Second, integration efforts consumed the Board of Education and the wider public. With so much attention focused on Northeast Denver, the battle lines being drawn between black and white residents, and the approaching school board elections,

Mexican-American demands fell by the wayside. Unable and/or unwilling to articulate their demands within the framework of black-white integration, Mexican Americans were usually overlooked by school officials busy defending their actions against charges of segregation.

430 Gene Gallegos, “Educational Needs of Hispano Students,” Open Forum, Denver Post, Apr. 13, 1969, 2G.

431 Gene Gallegos, “Educational Needs of Hispano Students,” Open Forum, Denver Post, Apr. 13, 1969, 2G. 214

By the end of 1969, Mexican Americans had reason to hope that the situation might change. The Board of Education established the Hispano Lay Advisory

Committee. The committee was to serve in an advisory capacity, acting as mediator between school officials and the Mexican-American community.432 “…[P]roviding high quality and relevant education for the Hispano children of Denver is a paramount objective of the school district,” the board stated in its announcement. The committee

“can be a significant element in assisting the Board of Education and school administration in improving the educational opportunities for Hispano children in the

Denver Public Schools.”433 Publically, at least, the board was willing to support the interests of Mexican-American students.

The new group focused its efforts on curriculum development to ensure that

Mexican-American history and culture were built-in to Denver classrooms, bilingual education was provided, the number of Mexican-American teachers in the district increased, and facilities improvement.434 According to Bert Gallegos (no relation to

Gene Gallegos), the chairman of the Hispano Lay Advisory Committee, the group’s primary objective, as well as the most pressing concern of the West Side community, was the construction of a new Elmwood School.435 Like many other more established leaders

432 “Hispano School Advisory Unit Okd by Board,” Rocky Mountain News, Dec. 20, 1969, newspaper clipping in Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 12, Folder 16.

433 “Hispano School Advisory Unit Okd by Board,” Rocky Mountain News, Dec. 20, 1969, newspaper clipping in Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 12, Folder 16.

434 “Committee’s School Recommendations,” West Side Recorder 6, no. 11 (Mar. 1970), 4.

435 Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, Feb. 26, 1970, 18. For a detailed description of the conditions at Elmwood, see chapter three.

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in the Mexican-American community, Gallegos’ tactics were similar to those of many whites opposed to desegregation and his rhetoric was almost identical to white anti- integrationists. Shortly after the walkouts at West High School in February 1969, he appeared before the school board to report on the Hispano Lay Advisory Committee. In his remarks he emphasized the committee’s willingness to work with the board very clearly juxtaposed the work it was doing to more radical tactics of West students and their allies. Telling board members that the committee was dedicated to cooperating with them, he noted that he did not speak for all Mexican Americans in the city; only those of

“good will.”436 Reiterating this point several times, he clearly hoped to demonstrate to school officials that his committee would work through the proper channels to enact change.

After the District Court ruled in Keyes, Gallegos’ support for Mexican-American education took on a fervent anti-integration tone. Speaking to the school board in March

1971 about the district’s plans for desegregation, he noted that there were over 100,000

Hispanos in the city and they would not be pushed around by “judicial fiat.” He argued that Hispano districts had voted convincingly for anti-busing candidates in the 1969 school board elections and that it was unconstitutional for a single judge to over-rule the will of the majority. He pointed out that he had always had progressive views on civil rights but he also believed in the separation of powers. When the majority of people vote for a particular viewpoint, he insisted, their will must be followed.437 From the sidelines,

436 Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, Feb. 26, 1970, 18.

437 Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, Mar. 17, 1971, 9.

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Gallegos’ appeal must have sounded like those coming from anti-integrationists nationwide. During an exchange with school board member James Perrill, Gallegos was asked to elaborate on the Mexican-American position regarding their concentration in certain schools. He argued that Mexican Americans could live where ever they wanted; there was no discrimination. The reason they were concentrating in certain neighborhoods and thus certain schools was because of the lower economic standing of those families.438 They had not experienced housing discrimination. The argument flew in the face of the experiences of countless families who had faced hostile landlords and realtors and who were now being pushed out of their homes in the name of urban renewal.

His analysis also failed to recognize the centrality of race to class standing in the city.

Job discrimination and a lack of education meant that many Mexican Americans were only qualified for working-class jobs. Gallegos’ relatively privileged position prohibited him from understanding the role that race played in creating high levels of

Mexican-American poverty and contributed to his belief that Hispanos were in the majority, not the minority.

A month after he appeared in front of the school board, Gallegos’ views were front and center when he ran for one of two open posts on the same board. He ran on a fiercely anti-busing campaign and claimed to represent the views of the majority of

Hispanos in the city. “[Hispanos] are incensed because Judge Doyle’s order singles them out from the mainstream of American society,” he said, an order that “apparently is based on certain findings that Denver schools attended by Hispanos are achieving below the

438 Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, Mar. 17, 1971, 9-10.

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national norm.”439 This was an interesting argument, first because Gallegos revealed his displeasure at being separated from “the mainstream of American society,” and second because he appeared completely out of touch with the realities of Mexican-American educational experiences in the city. He resented the fact that Judge Doyle’s plan marked him as different. Gallegos represented the exception, not the rule, when it came to

Mexican-American upward mobility. He was firmly middle-class, having earned his bachelor’s and law degrees in Colorado and working for years as a successful lawyer and public legislator. By the early 1970s, he had served on several different community organizations and volunteered his time on various civic councils. In short, he was a practitioner of barrio Americanism. He epitomized the moderate, middle-class professional that controlled groups like the G.I. Forum and the League of United Latin

American Citizens. The Keyes case and its racial implications challenged the life he had built within the American (white) mainstream.

Dr. Daniel Valdez shared Gallegos’ viewpoint. He was a faculty member at the

University of Denver who often discussed the differences between Hispanos and Anglos in both written pieces and speeches. During the spring of 1969, when Denver was debating the question of school integration, he published a piece in the Denver Post that claimed to address integration from a Hispano perspective. He insisted that both black and Hispano students experienced segregation within the Denver school system, and that both groups did not have access to the same level of educational quality that many Anglo students enjoyed. Yet his approach to the problem was firmly grounded in notions of white superiority. First, he claimed that Hispanos in Denver did not suffer ethnic or

439 “Gallegos Candidate for Board,” Denver Post, Apr. 12, 1971, 4. 218

racial segregation but economic segregation. Although he was clearly trying to form some kind of solidarity with African Americans, he very explicitly maintained that segregation is harmful to both “the Hispano poor and the black children,”440 thus distinguishing between the economic condition of Hispanos and the racial positioning of

African Americans in general. In the process he aligned Hispanos with poor whites, who also suffered from economic but not racial discrimination. At the heart of this analysis was the understanding that Hispanos did experience hardships and inequities but the source of their problems was not racial because they were white.

In another piece he wrote for Denver Post, Valdez tried to sum up the racial positioning of Hispanos by pointing out the social, cultural, biological, and political foundations of Hipsano racialization. Though he recognized, to an extent, the social construction of race, he emphatically stated: “But the great bulk [of Hispanos] are anthropologically and biologically white Caucasians and all are so recognized by the U.S.

Census Bureau, other government agencies and by physical anthropologists. One could say that ‘officially’ and ‘scientifically’ all of these three million persons are white.”441

Valdez would have been shocked to discover that less than a decade later, the Supreme

Court ruled Mexican Americans were nonwhite.

Bernard Valdez, head of the Welfare Department and the highest ranking

Mexican American in city employment, had a more nuanced perspective. He consistently focused on ethnic and cultural—rather than racial—factors to describe the problems his

440 Dr. Daniel T. Valdes, A Denver Post Special Report, “Denver Schools and the Hispanos,” Denver Post, Apr. 3, 1969, 35.

441 Daniel T. Valdez, “Spanish-Origin Citizens: People without A Name,” Denver Post, Sept. 5, 1965, 19.

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community faced. On the questions of integration and busing he was split. When he joined the Board of Education in 1971, he sometimes voted with the pro-integration board members while on other occasions he voted with the anti-busing members. His viewpoint on the issues surrounding integration and busing was very much influenced by his understanding of Mexican-American identity.

You see as a group have never been very much pro-busing, pro- integration, forced integration. They believe in integration, but they believe in it taking place more naturally. And the reason for this is that Hispanics haven’t had the degree of discrimination that Blacks have had. And there is a different psyche about Hispanics’ feelings about themselves and what Blacks feel about themselves. It is difficult to explain that unless you’re one, very difficult…They feel their segregation is voluntary. And that has something to do with a cultural pattern and their family strains and all of those things go way back…centuries. So that gives a different psychological evaluation of where you are…Then comes busing, which catches them in the middle.442

Valdez struggled with articulating the Mexican-American perspective on school integration, but it seems clear that he believed the difference in opinion was related to the

Mexican-American “psyche,” which he described in terms of culture and history. In stressing the different ways in which Mexican Americans and African Americans thought about themselves—their racial/ethnic identities—he was also pointing to the differing histories of cultural eradication, appropriation and assimilation. As such, he was insistent that Mexican-American students were best served in a school environment that nurtured the unique cultural background of Mexican Americans. From his view, busing these students out of their neighborhood schools would decimate that environment.

442 Bernard Valdez interview, in Fishman and Strauss, “Endless Journey,” 634.

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Prior to this, however, Valdez challenged the idea that Mexican Americans would benefit from a curriculum that fostered interest in Mexican American history and culture.

At a day-long seminar in the late 1960s that focused on identifying the cultural gap between whites and Mexican Americans, he and Corky Gonzales disagreed over the issue.

Gonzales promoted the idea that Mexican-American students needed teachers who were sensitive to their particular learning needs, a perspective that the CHE would take when it intervened in Keyes. Valdez challenged Gonzales by insisting that “Most of them

[Mexican Americans] want to be like the crazy Anglo.”443 In the end, he concluded, they just want to be like the Anglos. Not only did he seem to be downplaying the historical and cultural learning that was taking place in these clubs, but he was also explicitly promoting assimilation as the way to succeed in DPS. Just a few years later he opposed integration precisely because it idealized assimilation with white students. In many ways,

Valdez’s change in perspective mirrored the changes taking place in the larger Mexican-

American community. As people began to question the logic of assimilation when it was getting most of them nowhere, a new philosophy built on Chicano power was taking shape, influencing the ways people viewed the Denver schools.

Although many different objectives and tactics emerged within the Mexican-

American community, the school district did little to acknowledge their concerns or meet their demands. Whether they were established leaders or student activists, the board of education generally refused to accept the argument that it had any obligation to provide the kinds of programs and policies that the Mexican-American community wanted. But

443 “Spanish-Anglo Cultural Gap is Discussed,” ca. late 1960s, newspaper clipping in Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 1, Folder 47. 221

the ways in which Mexican Americans articulated their needs provide important insights into their racial knowledge and demonstrates the multiple and conflicting racial subjectivites that informed people’s perspectives on educational activism.

The Supreme Court Rules on Keyes: The Birth of the White/Nonwhite Binary

On June 11, 1971, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit issued its opinion regarding the appeal and cross-appeal from the final decree and judgment of the

District Court. The Court of Appeals affirmed the decision of the District Court in part and reversed and remanded in part to the District Court. It affirmed the Court’s decision regarding the deliberate segregation of Park Hill schools, but rejected its ruling on de facto segregation in the core city schools. Regarding the schools in and around Park Hill, the Court agreed with the Judge Doyle that gerrymandering school attendance zones, school building site selection, and the use of mobile classroom units constituted deliberate state action to perpetuate racial segregation. Judge Delmas Hill, writing for the

Court, agreed with Judge Doyle that Barrett Elementary School was a prime example of the kind of de jure segregation that Brown v. Board had meant to eradicate.

Acknowledging that the Denver school system, like any large urban school district, faced many challenges in providing equal education to its large student population, the Court affirmed that school districts were still beholden to the Constitution, and school officials could not use those challenges to justify segregation.444

In examining the evidence on the older core city schools, however, the Appeals

Court rejected Judge Doyle’s determination that the district was obligated to correct

444 Opinion, United States Court of Appeals, Tenth Circuit, Keyes et. al., Jun. 11, 1971, 445 F.2d 990. 222

educational deficiencies in those schools because there was no finding of intentional racial segregation. Although the District Court had accepted the plaintiffs’ argument that these schools were racially imbalanced, it did not find an intent to segregate; the district’s neighborhood school policy was not to blame for the concentration of black and

Mexican-American students in these schools. Even so, Judge Doyle had found the educational inequities to be so apparent that he ordered DPS to correct them immediately, citing the decision in Plessy v. Ferguson that separate schools must be equal. According to the Appeals Court, this was a judicial overstep. In short, only when the state was found guilty of de jure racial segregation could a court order a change in the way school districts ran their schools.445 From the perspective of the Appeals Court then, the students in Denver’s core-city schools—many of them Mexican-American— had no legal recourse for righting the educational inequalities they faced because they could not prove the district had willfully segregated them according to race. The debate over defining a segregated school, and thus the debate over Mexican-American racial identity, was irrelevant because segregation was only unconstitutional so long as there was a motivation to segregate.

In the fall of 1971, the plaintiffs petitioned the Supreme Court for a writ of

Certiorari to review the decision of the Court of Appeals. Their petition was granted on

January 17, 1972, yet the case was not heard before the Court until October 12, 1972.

Being the first northern school desegregation case to reach the Supreme Court, Keyes immediately garnered national attention. With such high stakes, Gordon Greiner was joined by James M. Nabrit III of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. If the Court ruled in

445 Opinion, United States Court of Appeals, Tenth Circuit, Keyes et. al., Jun. 11, 1971, 445 F.2d 990. 223

favor of the plaintiffs, it would set a national precedent that even school districts with no history of state sanctioned segregation policy could be found in violation of the

Constitution. For districts everywhere outside the South, the outcome of this litigation could not be more important.

At issue were two major aspects of the lower courts’ rulings. The plaintiffs argued that the lower courts had required too great a burden of proof for determining that the district’s core city schools were segregated. Both courts had decided that they had to prove segregatory intent for each school, a nearly impossible requirement. Their second argument dealt with the method of defining a segregated school. Judge Doyle had ordered that any school with seventy percent or more black students or seventy percent or more Mexican-American students was a segregated school. Fifteen of the core city schools fell under this definition, leaving out twelve schools with large populations of combined black and Mexican-American students. The Plaintiffs reiterated the argument they had made before the District Court, that a school was segregated if it had a combined black and Mexican-American student population in excess of fifty percent.

These minority schools were vastly inferior to the city’s Anglo schools. Thus, the racial identity of Mexican-Americans was once again a primary issue, this time before the nation’s highest court.

On June 21, 1973 the Court issued its decision. In a 7-1 ruling, the justices agreed with the lower courts that Park Hill schools were segregated and that the segregation was de jure.446 This was a major blow to school districts outside the South; school officials

446 Justice William Rehnquist dissented and Justice Byron White did not participate in the decision. Justice William Brennan wrote the majority opinion. 224

could no longer rely on the argument that they were not constitutionally required to eradicate segregation that was not caused by explicit state law. The Court then remanded the case back to Judge Doyle to determine whether Northeast Denver was a unique situation or whether the district, as a whole, was a dual system. If the plaintiffs could prove that segregation occurred in one area of the district, then it could be reasonably assumed that it occurred in other areas of the district. The burden of proof thus fell on

DPS to show that its district-wide policies were not motivated by racial discrimination.

If the school district could not prove that Northeast Denver was a unique case, then it had

“the affirmative duty to desegregate the entire system root and branch.”447

This was a major victory for the plaintiffs because now school officials would have to prove the racial neutrality of their decisions over the previous two decades. If they could not convince Judge Doyle, then a system-wide remedy was the only constitutionally sound relief. Having ruled on the first complaint, the Court then turned to the question of whether Mexican-American and black students could be grouped into one “minority” category for the purpose of defining a segregated school. Judge Doyle had ruled they could not be grouped together, implying that he was uncomfortable with the ambiguity of Mexican-American racial identity. He knew they were different from

Anglos, but he was also certain they were different from African Americans. The

Supreme Court disagreed that these two groups of students could not be grouped together, officially designating Mexican Americans as “nonwhite.”448 Its decision, however,

447 Opinion, United States Supreme Court, Keyes, et. al, Jun. 21, 1973, 413 U.S. 189.

448 Opinion, United States Supreme Court, Keyes, et. al, Jun. 21, 1973, 413 U.S. 189.

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indicated that Mexican Americans’ precarious racial position was no more solidified than it had been before Keyes went to trial.

The opinion, written by Justice William Brennan, suggests that the Court continued to understand Mexican-American identity in ethnic rather than racial terms.

Brennan argued that the lower court erred in not recognizing a recent federal court ruling that determined Mexican Americans were an identifiable class. In Cisneros v. Corpus

Christi Independent School District (1970), the U.S. District Court for the District of

Texas ruled that Mexican Americans were a protected class and had a right to seek equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. Citing Hernandez v. Texas in its decision, the Texas court determined that Mexican Americans in Corpus Christi were treated as nonwhite and segregated into different schools and classrooms based on their perceived racial difference.449 In Denver, Brennan said, there was ample proof that “Hispanos and

Negroes have a great many things in common.” The District Court in Colorado itself recognized that both groups suffered the same “cultural and economic deprivation.”450

Even though this was the first time the Court had rejected Mexican-American whiteness, it continued to rely on ethnicity in its articulation of Mexican-American difference. The Court wrote, “Denver is a tri-ethnic, as distinguished from a bi-racial, community.”451 If Mexican Americans were nonwhite, then why didn’t the court describe Denver as a tri-racial community? The justices had clearly heard enough

449 The plaintiffs in Cisneros also appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court at the same time as those in Keyes. Both cases dealt with school segregation and both inherently dealt with the question of Mexican-American racial identity. The Court decided to hear Keyes rather than Cisneros, however.

450 Opinion, U.S. Supreme Court, Keyes, et. al, Jun. 21, 1973, 413 U.S. 189.

451 Opinion, U.S. Supreme Court, Keyes et. al., Jun. 21, 1973, 413 U.S. 189.

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evidence to convince them that whites in the city thought of Mexican Americans as nonwhite and that they had historically been subject to social, economic and political exclusion throughout the Southwest. “…[T]hough of different origins,” the Court wrote,

“Negroes and Hispanos in Denver suffer identical discrimination in treatment when compared with the treatment afforded Anglo students.”452 But whites in the city did not treat African Americans and Mexican Americans the same way. They were racialized in distinct ways, a fact that the Court failed to recognize. Of course, one of the primary reasons it did not acknowledge the separate histories of racialization for African

Americans and Mexican Americans was because the plaintiffs had not made a distinction.

In the presentation of its case, the plaintiffs’ attorneys had constructed both groups of students as minorities. In Denver, they argued, school officials treated white students one way and minority students another way, with no emphasis on the very different experiences of black and Mexican-American students within the district. The Court agreed. Its opinion thus reflected both an affirmation of discrimination against Mexican

Americans in Denver and a rejection of multiracial formations.

By conflating racial and ethnic identity, the court effectively collapsed all racial difference into one “minority” or “nonwhite” category. As Kristi Bowman has argued, this simply supplanted a white/nonwhite binary in place of the black/white binary.

Mexican Americans were legally no different than other people of color. Under this kind of racial understanding, the Court saw no distinctions between the racialization of

Mexican Americans and that of African Americans, a view that solidified whiteness as the normal standard. All others stood in contrast to whites, an undifferentiated mass that

452 Opinion, U.S. Supreme Court, Keyes et. al., Jun. 21, 1973, 413 U.S. 189. 227

was constitutionally protected. Yet because “nonwhite” offered no distinctions between groups, there were no distinctions required in formulating a remedy for a constitutional wrong. What worked for one group would work for another, and since African

Americans were historically marked as “the other” in the U.S. racial system, “nonwhite” became synonymous with blackness.453 This would have serious consequences for

Mexican American students once the District Court tried to a suitable desegregation remedy. For the time being, however, the Supreme Court’s ruling on

Mexican-American racial identity meant that a much higher number of Denver schools were segregated because the majority of students enrolled were either African American or Mexican American. Under Judge Doyle’s interpretation, such a school would not have been considered segregated because Mexican Americans were an ethnic minority but still—for all intents and purposes—white.

The creation of a white/nonwhite understanding of race also profoundly influenced the efforts of multiracial groups to secure equality in the decades after Keyes.

As Tom Romero points out, the shift in terminology from “bi-racial” to “tri-ethnic” was a significant shift in the Court’s reading of racial discrimination in the United States. “This loose articulation of race,” he argues, “transformed the racial, and by extension the historical, dimensions of the Fourteenth Amendment, into an ahistorical ethnic understanding of racial tensions and difference.”454 Keyes then, is a major watershed in

Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence because it marks the Supreme Court’s acceptance

453 Bowman, “The New Face of School Desegregation.”

454 Romero, “The ‘Tri-Ethnic’ Dilemma,” 855.

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of the Ethnicity Paradigm in its understanding of racial discrimination. Although this shift resulted from the Court’s examination of Mexican-American racial identity, its application in the years after Keyes has limited the efforts of diverse groups to secure equal access to education nationwide, especially in those regions where the population has long defied the black-white binary.455

The Court’s failure to acknowledge the history of Mexican-American racialization also made it easy for local residents to continue to debate the racial categorization of Mexican Americans and the meaning of racial difference in a multiracial city, even after the Court determined Mexican Americans were nonwhite. As the next chapter details, the decision of the nation’s highest court did not end the school desegregation controversy in Denver, nor did it settle the question of Mexican-American racial identity. As the Denver community struggled to come to terms with the court’s ruling and implement a workable desegregation remedy, racial categories remained in flux and Mexican-American demands remained unfulfilled.

455 The courts have been especially unreceptive to arguments for affirmative action in higher education when these programs seek to remedy racial discrimination against multiracial communities. See Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) and Grutter v. Bolinger (2003). Romero, “The ‘Tri-Ethnic’ Dilemma”; and Romero, II, “La Raza Latina.” 229

Chapter 6

Not Over Yet: The Struggle to Implement Court-Ordered Desegregation

In December 1973, Judge Doyle ruled that the entire Denver school system was segregated and ordered the district to desegregate city-wide. Both the plaintiffs and the defendants subsequently submitted desegregation plans. The court held hearings between

February and March 1974 on the proposed remedies. Unsatisfied with these plans, Judge

Doyle appointed a desegregation expert, Dr. John Finger, to develop an alternative plan for Denver. As soon as the court issued its Final Order and Decree, public response was intense. School Board meetings were packed with parents and other community members airing personal grievances and objections to the plan. Numerous high school students appeared before the Board to oppose their transfer to other schools. They wanted to be allowed to stay at their current schools for their senior year, a request with which board members and many others sympathized. Other speakers challenged the plan’s requirements for busing, multicultural education programming, and human relations training that would teach students the benefits of integration, which one parent declared was “Nazism.”456

456 Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, Apr. 18, 1974, quote on 8.

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Once again debate over the role of Mexican Americans in the plan, as well as the question of Mexican-American racial identity, took a prominent place in the discussions.

Several Mexican-American parents asked the Board not to close Boulevard Elementary

School, a majority Mexican-American school, as it proposed to do in one of the plans it submitted to the court.457 As a poverty area target school, Boulevard had been receiving federal aid to improve curriculum and implement new programs meant to increase parental involvement and student achievement. For the past couple of years, teachers and parents had noted significant improvement on both fronts, and they felt that closing the school would halt these developments. One of the school’s programs was meant to improve the language skills of parents. Francisco Lopez, the father of eight children, explained that he spoke very little English and his wife spoke only Spanish. The program had been helping them learn English and he feared that if the school were closed, they would lose that support. He also told the Board that his family was poor, which compounded the problem of trying to find suitable housing for such a large family. They liked where they lived and they liked Boulevard school. He requested that if the school had to be demolished, the district build a new, bigger school in the same area.458 His pleas demonstrated just one example of the rising dissatisfaction among many Mexican-

American parents regarding the proposed desegregation plans. Their fears were

457 The Finger Plan called for the demolition of some schools, including Boulevard. Judge William E. Doyle, Memorandum Opinion and Order, 380 F. Supp., Apr. 24, 1974.

458 Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, May 9, 1974, 12-13.

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confirmed when Judge Doyle’s court-ordered expert proposed to break up or close several Chicano community schools in the name of racial balance.459

Other parents thought that Judge Doyle’s final order was incoherent and that the schools had misidentified their children’s racial classification, an argument meant to re- situate them within the plan so that they could stay in their neighborhood schools. Lila

Lewis’ appeal to the Board that her four children were racially classified in different ways was a prime example. But she was not alone. After Judge Doyle issued his Final

Order and Decree, parents repeatedly pointed out what they perceived as a central problem of racially balancing the schools: racial balance required that each student had to be racially classified and racial groups had to be evenly distributed throughout the district.

Yet as they pointed out, race was not that easy to define, particularly as it applied to

Mexican-American students. The parents’ challenge, in turn, forced the lower court and the school district to maneuver their way through identities and categories that simply did not fit the black-white binary that dominated American perceptions of race. Over the next several years as the district tried to implement and challenge the Court’s order, and the city came to terms with the long-term reality of school desegregation, race remained a fluid and contested category.

459 The Finger Plan at first called for the closure of three predominately Mexican-American elementary schools: Greenlee, Fairview, and Garden Place. Intervenor’s Objections to Court Consultant’s Education Plan, Congress of Hispanic Educators, Keyes et. al., U.S. District Court in the District of Colorado, Apr. 3, 1974, in Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 25, Book3, No. 12. 232

The Congress of Hispanic Educators Intervenes

When the Supreme Court declared that Mexican Americans were nonwhite for the purposes of school desegregation it set into motion a series of debates that centered on the role of Mexican Americans in the desegregation plan. It is important to note that these students were not fully represented when the highest court made its determination; in fact, they had not been fully represented since the case was filed. Although the plaintiff class included Mexican Americans from the beginning, it was apparent that the plaintiffs focused most of their attention on the inequalities facing black students. Now that the Supreme Court had spoken and it was clear Denver Public Schools were going to be desegregated, several parties tried to intervene in the case, hoping to influence the final plan. One of these groups was the Congress of Hispanic Educators (CHE).

Established in the late 1960s, the group represented Mexican-American teachers, counselors, parents and students. In early 1974, the CHE obtained legal counsel with the

Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and filed a motion to intervene in the case on the side of the plaintiffs.460

In its motion, the CHE noted the Supreme Court’s determination that both African

Americans and Mexican Americans had similar experiences of prejudice and discrimination in the Southwest. But it moved from that point to highlight the findings of the U.S. District Court in Texas that found Mexican Americans were an identifiable class

460 Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Motion to Intervene as Parties Plaintiffs, in Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 25, Book 1, No. 47.

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for the purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment.461 As such, the CHE’s attorneys argued,

Mexican-American students had a right to their own representation because they had unique educational needs that were not being addressed by the plaintiffs. In fact, their interests could not be represented by the plaintiffs “because the existing plaintiffs who are primarily Blacks, and their counsel lack exposure to the diverse problems that confront the Chicano community.”462 Furthermore, the difficult task of devising a plan for equal educational opportunity in the Denver schools was further complicated by the fact that the interests of black students and Mexican-American students may be in competition. “[T]he existing plaintiffs cannot adequately and forcefully represent [both groups] in such a competitive situation,” the CHE insisted463

In its Memorandum of Law in Support of Motion to Intervene, MALDEF tried to convince Judge Doyle of four main points. Racial understandings were critical to each of its arguments. First, Mexican Americans had a significant stake in the outcome of the

Court’s decision regarding a desegregation remedy. The Courts had already recognized that Mexican-American students experienced discrimination within the Denver schools and they would have to abide by whatever plan the Court devised. Acknowledging that transportation was probably going to be a major part of the plan, the MALDEF attorneys

461 In Cisneros v. Corpus Christi Independent School District, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas determined that Mexican Americans were a protected class under the Fourteenth Amendment. See Cisneros v. Corpus Christi Independent School District, 324 F. Supp. 599 (S.D. Texas, 1970).

462 Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Motion to Intervene as Parties Plaintiffs, in Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 25, Book 1, No. 47.

463 Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Motion to Intervene as Parties Plaintiffs, in Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 25, Book 1, No. 47.

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insisted that Mexican Americans be treated equitably, which meant that they would not bear the brunt of busing and would not simply be shuffled into middle-class schools

“where they will be made to feel inferior and will be discriminated against by students, teachers, administrators, and staff because of their poverty and inalienable racial characteristics.”464 Hoping to capitalize on the newly emerging argument that Mexican

Americans were racially distinct, MALDEF put great effort into situating Mexican-

American students in contrast to both black and white students. As persons with

“inalienable racial characteristics,” Mexican Americans were a separate, identifiable racial group not currently being represented by the plaintiffs.

MALDEF also had to show that it was not intervening to sabotage the desegregation plan, a result of the long-standing legal argument that Mexican Americans were white. In other school desegregation cases, white parent groups had tried—mostly unsuccessfully—to intervene while the courts were developing remedies as a way of interjecting their anti-integration viewpoints into the planning process. When Mexican

Americans tried to intervene in a Houston, Texas school desegregation suit, claiming they had both a clear interest in the case and a constitutional right to seek relief as minority persons, Judge Ben Connally wrote:

Content to be “White” for these many years now, when the shoe begins to pinch, the would-be Intervenors wish to be treated not as Whites but as an “identifiable minority group.” In short, they wish to be “integrated” with Whites, not Blacks.465

464 Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Memorandum of Law in Support of Motion to Intervene as Parties Plaintiffs, in Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 25, Book 1, No. 49.

465 Ross v. Eckels, Civil Action No. 10-444 (S.D. Texas, May 24, 1971).

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Connally’s opinion was overturned on appeal when the Fifth Circuit rejected his decision regarding the intervention of Mexican Americans and, as MALDEF pointed out, the question of Mexican-American whiteness was later litigated by the Supreme Court in

Keyes. By law, Mexican Americans were now nonwhite.466

To drive the point home, MALDEF’s memo cited the Fifth Circuit’s ruling in

Ross v. Eckels several times, indicating that counsel may have been concerned its motion to intervene would be denied on the basis of their clients’ perceived whiteness and thus their perceived interest in undermining the plaintiffs’ efforts. In addition to situating

Mexican Americans as nonwhite, they also noted their interest in working with the plaintiffs to ensure equal education for both black and Mexican-American students. In numerous school desegregation cases, MALDEF argued, “white parents or other parents attempted intervention to oppose integration, while the Chicano parents here seek not to oppose integration, but to ensure that the court’s remedy: (1) treats all children equitably, and (2) considers the exigencies of Chicano education [emphasis original].” Later, they emphatically stated, “Chicanos cannot be counted as whites for any purpose in the Keyes desegregation suit.”467

One of the reasons MALDEF attorneys felt the need to argue so forcefully against the notion that Mexican Americans were white may have been their timing in intervention. The case had been in the courts since 1969. Since that time, the role of

466 Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Memorandum of Law in Support of Motion to Intervene as Parties Plaintiffs, in Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 25, Book 1, No. 49. For more on the Houston case, see San Miguel, Brown, Not White.

467 Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Memorandum of Law in Support of Motion to Intervene as Parties Plaintiffs, in Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 25, Book 1, No. 49.

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Mexican Americans had been a topic of conversation both in the courtroom and in the community. At one point, Judge Doyle even questioned whether Mexican Americans really wanted integration.468 Thus, the third argument MALDEF advanced in its

Memorandum of Law in Support of Motion to Intervene was that its intervention was timely and permissible under the rules of intervention. The organization stressed that although the case had been litigated since 1969, it was not until the Supreme Court determined Mexican Americans were nonwhite and the District Court found Denver to be a dual system that Mexican Americans had a real stake in the outcome. Until that point in December 1973, “the law of de jure segregation as it was understood prior to Keyes and as the Tenth Circuit found, excluded the bulk of the Chicano population from any real effect from Keyes.” Arguing that they were just as interested as the plaintiffs in seeing the Denver schools integrated, the lawyers pointed out that Mexican Americans were “primarily concerned with relief” in the case. 469

More pragmatically, MALDEF argued that it could not have intervened earlier because Mexican Americans generally lacked the legal resources needed to participate in a case as large as Keyes. Prior to the 1970s there had been only a handful of Mexican-

American school desegregation cases heard in the nation, none of which had reached the

U.S. Supreme Court.470 Cases that dealt with multi-racial student populations were only

468 Transcript, Hearing on Relief, May 11-14, 1970; “Hispano View of Busing Eyed,” Denver Post, May 11, 1970.

469 Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Memorandum of Law in Support of Motion to Intervene as Parties Plaintiffs, in Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 25, Book 1, No. 49.

470 For good summaries, see Bowman, “The New Face of School Desegregation,” and Wilson, “Brown Over ‘Other White.’”

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now being considered. MALDEF was founded in 1968. It took a couple of years to build its staff and learn the technical legal skills needed to participate in a case of

Denver’s magnitude. The MALDEF office in Denver was even newer, having been opened in 1971, two years after the plaintiffs filed their lawsuit.471

Finally, MALDEF pointed out that although the plaintiff class had included one

Mexican-American family from the beginning, the case had been “clearly Black dominated.”472 Most of the evidence the plaintiffs presented in court dealt with establishing discrimination against black students. This was apparent in their choice to focus on Park Hill schools. While Mexican Americans constituted about twenty-five percent of the city population as a whole, the Park Hill area was only about ten percent

Mexican American. As such, MALDEF maintained, “It only requires a syllogistic conclusion for the Court to find that the emphasis of Keyes has not been on Chicanos.”473

If it had been, the plaintiffs might have taken note of the May 25, 1970 HEW

Memorandum to School Districts With More Than Five Percent National Origin-

Minority Group Children, Hearings Before the Senate Committee on Equal Educational

Opportunity, which MALDEF now presented to the Court for consideration. HEW recognized “the particular discrimination directed at Chicanos,” a point the plaintiffs had

471 Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Memorandum of Law in Support of Motion to Intervene as Parties Plaintiffs, in Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 25, Book 1, No. 49.

472 Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Memorandum of Law in Support of Motion to Intervene as Parties Plaintiffs, in Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 25, Book 1, No. 49.

473 Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Memorandum of Law in Support of Motion to Intervene as Parties Plaintiffs, in Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 25, Book 1, No. 49.

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not made a part of their strategy. MALDEF thus sought intervention by arguing, “This case is for us, and about us—but without us.”474

MALDEF’s argument pivoted on the power of racial distinction. In fact, the lawyers used the term “Chicano” as opposed to “Hispano” to make their case that

Mexican Americans were racially different from both whites and blacks. The term

“Hispano” identified ethnicity, a term that had come to mean “other white” and celebrated cultural difference while rejecting racial otherness. “Chicano,” by 1974, had come to indicate racial pride and awareness that la raza represented a group quite different from both blacks and whites. Blacks and Chicanos were so distinct, in fact, that in its motion to intervene the Congress pointed out that counsel for the plaintiffs could not fully represent their interests because they may, in fact, be in competition with the interests of African Americans.475 Vilma Martinez, General counsel for the CHE and

MALDEF President, pointed out a couple months later, “[T]he anomalous position of the

Chicano—not white, yet not, in the old-style parlance, ‘colored’—has been one of the roots of Chicano tragedy in this country and has produced a history of legal struggle for equal educational opportunity that has been as difficult as, and at the same time, significantly different from, that waged by black Americans.”476

474 Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Memorandum of Law in Support of Motion to Intervene as Parties Plaintiffs, in Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 25, Book 1, No. 49.

475 Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Memorandum of Law in Support of Motion to Intervene as Parties Plaintiffs, in Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 25, Book 1, No. 49.

476 Vilma Martinez, Gen. Counsel, Mexican American Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Speech at the University of Notre Dame Center for Civil Rights Conference: Brown v. Board of Education Twentieth Anniversary, Mar. 22, 1974, cited from Romero, “La Raza Latina?” 256.

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Judge Doyle accepted the Congress’ argument, and insisted that a plan to desegregate Denver schools include provisions for school reforms meant to address the educational inequalities facing Mexican-American students, in addition to provisions to achieve racial balance. After the Supreme Court remanded the case to the District Court and the Congress intervened, Judge Doyle stopped using the term “Hispano,” which he had used consistently throughout the first trial, and began to use to term “Chicano,” suggesting that he no longer understood Mexican-American identity in ethnic terms, but in racial terms.477

The District Court issued its Final Order and Decree on April 17, 1974. It included several different provisions for ensuring racial balance, including re-drawing school boundaries through the use of a grid system, a part-time pairing plan and busing.

Under the Finger Plan, so-named because it was developed by Dr. Finger, the court- appointed expert, a school was considered desegregated when it reached a certain percentage of Anglo students. Although Judge Doyle recognized that deviations could be expected and may even be desirable in some instances, he determined that elementary schools should be forty to seventy percent Anglo and secondary schools should be fifty to sixty percent Anglo. Importantly, the Finger Plan exempted five predominantly

Mexican-American schools—Garden Place, Del Pueblo (formerly Elmwood),

Cheltenham, and Swansea elementary schools; and Baker Junior High School—from the order, saying that some racial concentration in these schools was justifiable because of the desire to maintain or implement bilingual/bicultural programs. These five schools

477 Romero, “From Brown to Grutter,” 117. 240

were seventy-seven to eighty-eight percent Mexican-American.478 Judge Doyle argued that schools needed to provide equal opportunity for all students, otherwise the dismantling of segregated schools would lose some of its value. Though he did not frame his decision in these terms, his careful attention to the CHE’s arguments indicates that he believed school desegregation needed to transcend the black-white binary. “It seems particularly important at the present time,” he insisted, “that the Denver educational system be responsive to the educational needs of black and Chicano students as well as those of the majority Anglos [emphasis added].”479 Additionally, the court ordered DPS to implement the Cardenas Plan or something like it. Written by Dr. Jose Cardenas, the plan was submitted to the court by the CHE and was endorsed by the plaintiffs.

In many ways, the Cardenas Plan represented the spirit of what Mexican-

American parents, students and activists had been demanding for the last several years.

When the Crusade for Justice interrupted school board meetings and voiced its opposition to busing as a means of creating equal educational opportunity for Mexican Americans within the Denver schools, it was, in essence, articulating an alternative vision of school integration based on its particular experiences of racialization. So did those students who walked out of West High School almost four years earlier to protest a school system that devalued their culture, limited their opportunities, and eventually pushed them out. For these students, integration with white students would not necessarily create an environment that was conducive to their educational success.

478 Memorandum Opinion and Order, Keyes et. al., 380 F. Supp., Apr. 24, 1974, in William E. Doyle Papers, MSS-035, Auraria Library Archives and Special Collections, Denver, CO, Box 1.

479 Memorandum Opinion and Order, Keyes et. al., 380 F. Supp., Apr. 24, 1974, 695, in William E. Doyle Papers, Box 1. 241

As a community organization dedicated to the advancement of Mexican

Americans, LARASA had recognized that the problems facing these students were different from those faced by black students. When the group was founded in 1965, black activists had already been making demands on the school board for over a decade.

Mexican Americans had not. LARASA members determined to approach the many educational problems facing their community step by step, a strategy that—at the time— made sense based on its limited resources and access to DPS administrators. By 1973 it, too, was increasing its demands. “The intransigent character of this Board, and this

Administration,” LARASA wrote to school officials, “compels us to deal with the problem piecemeal.”480 What they tried to do little by little, the Cardenas Plan promoted as a wide-ranging program the DPS should implement immediately.

At the heart of the Plan was a fundamental shift in the way education was understood, as well as the way public schools were conceptualized. Dr. Cardenas called for major changes in curriculum and personnel, but also in the philosophical underpinning of the entire district. The schools must be reoriented for minority students, he said, taking into consideration both the race and class of the students at each school.

Teachers and administrators had to prepare themselves to go out into the community to communicate more effectively with students and their parents, rather than requiring parents to come to the schools. The schools, moreover, had to make it the responsibility of teachers and other school officials to instill a sense of pride and self-worth in each

480 LARASA, “Development of a Chicano Counselor Corps,” in William McNichols Papers, Box 93, Folder 12.

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student, and they must provide the basic resources and mechanisms for every student to learn, develop and thrive in a multicultural, modern world.481

This was a radical departure from previous educational philosophies that emphasized the role of public schools in education but left the task of developing well- rounded, self-confident children to individual families. In many ways Dr. Cardenas’ educational framework and set of recommendations were new ideas that had only just begun to receive attention from educational researchers and policymakers. Many War on

Poverty programs, with their focus on improving education for low-income communities, encompassed some of the same ideas. For example, the Cardenas Plan called for increased community input and control, breakfast and lunch programs, resources to ensure all students had the basic materials and supplies to be active participants in the life of the school—including , shoes, comprehensive health care, and fees for supplies, field trips and extracurricular activities—and programs aimed at helping parents become fully participating agents in their children’s education. It even required the district to hire minority attorneys to provide legal advice to students and their parents— free of charge.482

Significantly, the Plan centered on bilingual and multicultural education, reforms that addressed the specific needs of a multiracial student body, Mexican Americans in particular. Dr. Cardenas argued that language was an integral aspect of Chicano culture

481 Congress of Hispanic Educators, in consultation with Dr. Jose A. Cardenas, “Addendum to the Intervenor’s Education Plan for the Denver Public Schools,” (hereafter, Cardenas Plan) Feb. 5, 1974, in Keyes, et. al. Collection, Box 25, Book 2, No. 55.

482 Cardenas Plan, Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 25, Book 2, No. 55.

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and that it was the job of the school district to promote a healthy respect for that culture.

Furthermore, he argued, “Language and culture are an integral part of the child’s self- concept.” Thus, bilingual education for the CHE did not simply mean that the district would offer students an opportunity to learn another language or that it would set up bilingual courses for students who needed them. These were important aspects, but the mandate of the Plan as a whole was to value students’ different and cultures.

The district should hire more teachers, aides, and administrators who were themselves bilingual, and teachers who were not should take training in language appreciation and methods for communicating with bilingual students in an effective, healthy manner.

Additionally, courses in black and Chicano history and culture should be added to the curriculum for all schools. The CHE envisioned cultural pluralism in a very different way than the school district had understood it in the past, when it was considered detrimental to Mexican-American youth. Cultural pluralism was essential for students’ educational success but also for fostering a sense of racial pride. In this sense, multicultural education was actually a way of furthering racial justice, rather than the limited “Black History Week” and “Chicano Month.”483 This approach to learning and development had to be flexible, according to Dr. Cardenas. He noted that teachers and administrators had to be willing to implement different kinds of programs and course work based on the specific needs of each classroom.

Each child feels differently about his or her ethnicity depending upon his or her experiences. Teachers must be particularly sensitive to these differences and must adjust their instructional techniques accordingly.

483 Cardenas Plan, Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 25, Book 2, No. 55; Romero, “From Brown to Grutter,” 116.

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Unlike some other ethnic groups, the Spanish-surnamed are not always identifiable and “Spanish-surname does not a Chicano make.” Many Spanish-surnamed persons have become completely assimilated, some are comfortably bicultural, some are experiencing societal rejection, and some are promoting separatism…Any bilingual and bicultural program must be designed to accommodate all of these students.484

The notion that people from different racial groups were all the same was a common misconception. DPS was far from alone in essentializing different groups of people. Yet the CHE went beyond pointing this out to highlighting the complexities of racial identity, and the need to both recognize and explore these differences. In this way the interveners were directly challenging a central problem with Denver schools’ treatment of Mexican-American students. For years the district had promoted a cultural pluralist model of education that defined Hispanos, as an ethnic group, in ways that contradicted their treatment of Hispano students within the school system. The textbook,

Human Relations in Colorado: A Historical Record was used by the district to implement the cultural pluralist curriculum recommended by the Advisory Council on Equality of

Educational Opportunity in 1967. The chapter on Hispanos explains that Hispano is a cultural term—a term of ethnicity—that differentiates people who descend from any

“country with a Spanish heritage.”485 It goes on to discuss the many contributions of

Hispanos to the development of the state and defines Hispanos as identifying with “the presently powerful transplanted Europeans.” While it did not explicitly argue they were

484 In 1974, lawyers did not have the benefit of scholarship. Thus they did not have a critical language to articulate the differences between race and ethnicity. The courts used these terms interchangeably, as did many of the people involved in the case. MALDEF’s usage of the term “ethnicity” should not obscure the fact that it believed Mexican Americans constituted a distinct race. Cardenas Plan, Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 25, Book 2, No. 55.

485 Atkins, Human Relations in Colorado, 203.

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white, its description of Mexican Americans as European suggested to readers that they were “other whites.”486

While Denver schools taught students that Hispanos were white and they celebrated the cultural contributions of this “other-white” group, however, most Mexican-

American students did not receive the benefits of whiteness. In fact, they were met with low expectations, ridicule and disrespect. Many Mexican-American students were seen by school officials, teachers and classmates as “others,” regardless of what the schools taught about the group’s culture. When teachers like Harry Shafer disparaged Mexican

Americans in front of their classmates, or when students were singled out and placed in

EMR classrooms or vocational education tracks, the schools marked Mexican Americans as inferior. When school administrators targeted Mexican-American youth as trouble- makers and suspended them at higher rates than white students, the schools tagged them as criminal and even violent. The case of Manuel “Rocky” Hernandez is instructive. A student at North High School, Manuel emerged as a Mexican-American student leader.

He was soon targeted by the school’s principal, Pete Shannon, as a delinquent. When he wore a black beret to school Mr. Shannon sent police into his classroom to take him out and he was expelled for truancy. In a piece that originally appeared in El Gallo, the newspaper of the Crusade for Justice, the author noted that members of the black berets at

North High were singled out by Mr. Shannon and were dealt with harshly. “They

[members of the black berets] have one way or the other been expelled, have dropped out

486 Atkins notes that “Hispano” is the preferred term of classification, though there were other terms as well. Human Relations in Colorado, 203.

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because of teacher harrassment [sic.] by so-called teachers and the few that remained walk the thin line.”487

When Mexican-American students were verbally or physically assaulted by teachers they were unfairly punished for simply existing. Consider the experience of

James Martinez, a nine-year-old who attended Smitty Elementary School. While on the playground after school hours, the gym teacher, Mike Supanch, approached James and told him to turn it off. James replied that he did not have to since it was after school hours. At the point the teacher hit him, grabbed his tape deck and threw it to the ground.

The child’s father reported the incident to the Denver police and he demanded the teacher be fired, but Mr. Supanch was merely transferred to a school on the other side of town.488

Assaulting a child was not enough for the district to let him go.

The CHE recognized this in its proposal to Judge Doyle when it noted the ambiguous racial positioning of Mexican Americans. When Dr. Cardenas argued

“Spanish-surname does not a Chicano make,” he was articulating a nuanced perspective on racial identity that some Mexican Americans had been suggesting for years. At the same time, he was pointing out very clear divisions within the Mexican-American community over questions of race, ethnicity, class and worldview that neither the

487 “North High Walkouts,” in Crusada Para La Justica: Solo No Palabras. Pero Acciones (Denver: Joaquin Publications, 1977), in Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 2, Folder 6. Also see Richard Maes, “Chicano Student Movement Presents 17 Demands to School Board,” Rocky Mountain News, Feb. 14, 1970, newspaper clipping in Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 6, Folder 52; “Hispano Protest March is Slated,” Rocky Mountain News, Feb. 18, 1970, in scrapbook (Jun.-Aug. 1970), Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 12, Folder 17; and Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, Mar. 17, 1970, 3-6.

488 “Gringo Teacher,” Crusada Para La Justica: Solo No Palabras. Pero Acciones (Denver: Joaquin Publications, 1977), in Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 2, Folder 6. 247

plaintiffs nor the courts had recognized. In the debate over school desegregation, these divisions had become even more apparent.

What is a Minority Student?: The Struggle to Achieve Racial Balance

When the Supreme Court ruled on Keyes and remanded the case back to Judge

Doyle to determine if the district was a dual system, the highest court’s ruling on

Mexican-American racial identity became a pivotal part of public debate because it so dramatically altered the ramifications of the case. Now many more schools were segregated and many more students would have to be involved in a desegregation remedy.

The Denver Post editorialized that it was strange the justices would make such a decision when, from what they could see, most Mexican Americans in the city did not seem to favor integration. The editor admitted that Hispano children often experienced the same educational inequities as blacks. But he insisted “…that most Hispanos in Denver—the articulate ones at least—apparently do not want their children to have the same degree of school integration sought by most blacks.”489 While this editorial ignored the various opinions within the Mexican-American community, it did highlight both the centrality of

Mexican Americans to the case and the lack of consensus over the question of racial balance, even after the Supreme Court ruled.

Even though the Courts had determined Mexican Americans were a distinct class that was neither white nor black, Denver residents could not agree on their racial definition. Recognizing the ambiguity of racial categories, as Lila Lewis did when she

489 “Supreme Court has Spoken,” Denver Post, June 24, 1973.

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presented photographs of her children to the Board of Education, gave parents the ability to claim a particular status in order to manipulate their child’s placement in the district’s scheme to create racial balance. Lewis, in fact, spoke at several different Board of

Education meetings in 1974, as the District Court was determining a remedy and trying to implement it. As a member of the Citizens Association for Neighborhood Schools

(CANS), she opposed any busing program and the Court’s order for bilingual and bicultural education, arguing that most minority parents wanted their children to speak

English. Furthermore, she argued, Judge Doyle’s mandate that the district create these programs was unconstitutional because the courts could not tell individual school districts what they had to teach or how they had to teach it.490

Race was a significant motivating factor for Lewis’ viewpoints and her strategies for fighting integration. If the courts were going to rule Denver a segregated school system and order racial balance, she would fight the courts through any means necessary.

Challenging the soundness of racial balance when racial classifications were so uncertain allowed her to demonstrate the inconsistency—and thus the unfairness—of the court- ordered remedy. At the same time, her rejection of the Cardenas Plan suggests that she didn’t agree with LARASA, the CHE, and the Crusade for Justice. Interestingly, she told the Board that she supported the efforts of Mexican-American parents to stop the closure of Boulevard Elementary School. Yet her reason for opposing the closure was quite different: she was opposed to any plan that ordered desegregation.

490 Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, May 9, 1974, 7-8.

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Another parent, Marguerite Cardova, made similar arguments. She went one step further, however, arguing that the Board of Education should appeal Judge Doyle’s desegregation plan based on the fact that the racial categories utilized by the court were inconsistently gathered At one point, she said, students were classified as Anglo, Negro,

Hispano, or Other; while at another point they were grouped into one of the following categories: Anglo, American Indian, Oriental, Negro, Spanish-surnamed, and Other. Not only did the number of categories change but so did the categories themselves. She also learned that students were grouped based on teacher observation of hair and skin color and texture, eye shape, and the sound of their name, a highly subjective process complicated by the fact that racial categories were not uniform. Judge Doyle’s determination that Denver schools were segregated—and his subsequent desegregation plan—thus relied on incorrect racial data.491

Accordingly, the Board of Education should appeal the court’s decision, she said, and the district should implement a more standard and objective method of determining the “ancestry” of all students. Parents, she maintained, should be able to decide the race of their children and should be allowed to change it if they found it incorrect. They should also be able to classify their children as “mixed heritage.”492 Cardova made this plea to the Board of Education on several occasions, suggesting that she felt she had something to gain by the creation of a multi-race category. Both Cardova and Lewis pin-

491 Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, Apr. 18, 1974, 12 At another Board of Education Meeting, Lila Lewis also argued that the court had used a “flagrantly wrong ethnic count” in its ruling. Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, Jun. 13, 1974.

492 Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, Apr. 18, 1974, 12.

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pointed the problem of trying to integrate schools based on legal definitions of race: race was malleable, had no inherent meaning and could be manipulated. Once the court approved a plan to allow children in satellite areas to stay in their neighborhood schools if their presence contributed to racial balance at that school, the district was inundated with demands from parents that they be able to choose their child’s race.493

As a result the district had to ask Judge Doyle to define minority categories. If some pupils are going to be exempt from busing, DPS wrote in its Motion for

Modification and Clarification, “it is necessary that certain standards be established for determining whether a child is a minority child for these purposes.”494 At a court conference in June, Judge Doyle addressed the defendants’ request:

Now, as to what constitutes a minority child, my thinking throughout, as I said at the other hearing, was to follow the School District Staff’s categories as a Black or Chicano and Oriental and American Indian. And I said that I was not going to measure and add up the percentage of parentage. If a person claims to be a minority child, why, that’s the end of it as far as I am concerned.495

He seemed hesitant to issue more concrete definitions, assuming that it was not really necessary for the district to successfully implement his desegregation plan. From the perspective of the defendants, who had to deal with the day-to-day execution of the plan, the court needed to be clearer about who constituted a minority student. By June the

493 Reporter’s Transcript, Conference, Keyes et. al., U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, Jun. 10, 1974, in Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 17, Folder 6.

494 Defendants’ Motion for Modification and Clarification of Judgment and Decree, Apr. 17, 1974, in Keyes, et. al. Collection, Box 25, Book 3, No. 32.

495 Reporter’s Transcript, Conference, Keyes et. al., U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, Jun. 10, 1974, in Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 17, Folder 6.

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district had already heard from many parents on the question of racial definitions and expected more to follow.

There was also the problem of terminology: DPS had traditionally used different racial categories than those the court had used in trial, as Marguerite Cardova had pointed out. Especially problematic, according to the defense, was the shift from Spanish surname to Hispano. William Ris, the defendants’ lead counselor, asked the court’s permission to standardize the term “Hispano” across all district offices and documents.

“That’s all right with me, the use of Hispano,” responded Judge Doyle.

Gordon Greiner, the plaintiffs’ lead attorney, asked, “That is just a change in the term without a change in the definition?

“Essentially, yes,” answered Ris, “I think the Spanish surname, they might not be

Hispano, if they said totally Hispano, if they had not just a Spanish surname [emphasis added].”496

As the defense revealed, this was not simply a discussion about terminology. The two sides were still debating the meaning behind terms. Ris implied that there was a difference between “Hispano”—a nonwhite race—and “Spanish-surnamed”—an ethnic group that may or may not be racially white. This was no different than the arguments put forth by Corky Gonzales when he distinguished between Chicanos and Hispanos or

Spanish-surnamed. Their terminology was different, but both Ris and Gonzales agreed that Mexican Americans could be white or nonwhite, and it made no difference whatsoever that the Supreme Court had ruled them nonwhite.

496 Reporter’s Transcript, Conference, Keyes et. al., U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, Jun. 10, 1974, in Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 17, Folder 6.

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That is where their agreement ended. For Gonzales and other Crusade for Justice activists, being Chicano meant adhering to the spirit of . As a radical philosophy, Chicanismo meant accepting a distinct Chicano identity, becoming more aware of Chicanos’ shared history of struggle and injustice, and developing a desire to work within the community for Chicano liberation.497 It did not depend on an ability to speak Spanish or having a Spanish surname; to the contrary, there were many people who could speak Spanish and/or had a Spanish surname who were not Chicano. It also did not necessarily depend on skin color. As mestizos, they recognized that there were a range of skin shades within the Chicano nation. For the defendants, in contrast, skin color was a defining feature of race. The district determined a child’s race first by noting his or her surname. If the student did have a Spanish surname, school officials then conducted “an eyeball observation of the child.”498 Thus, Spanish surname was only a clue that a person was Hispano. It was not the final determination; color was.

Even though the district had raised the issue with the court, the plaintiffs were just as troubled about the way some city residents were interpreting Judge Doyle’s order.

Greiner was particularly concerned about two possible scenarios. First, he wondered about students with “a Chicano parent and an Anglo parent.” How would they be classified? The fact that parents like Lila Lewis and Marguerite Cardova kept insisting on a mixed race category had to have influenced his preoccupation with this issue. As

497 See Ignacio M. García, Chicanismo: The Forging of a Militant Ethos among Mexican Americans (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1997).

498 Reporter’s Transcript, Conference, Keyes et. al., U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, Jun. 10, 1974, in Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 17, Folder 6.

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outspoken opponents of the court’s order, what did these parents stand to gain from the creation of such a category? And how would “mixed race” fit into the plaintiffs’ Anglo- minority argument that had won over the Supreme Court? Griener had to have considered the possibility that a mixed race category could jeopardize any plan for racial balance and could give the district a way of appealing Judge Doyle’s ruling that DPS was a dual system. He also worried that white students might try to claim minority status to remain in their neighborhood school.499

To address these questions, Judge Doyle issued an order that dictated four minority categories for the district to use: American Indian, Oriental, Black, and Hispano.

He also laid out the process whereby school officials would assign racial classifications.

The district was to continue its normal practice—teacher observation—unless a parent claimed their student’s race was incorrectly documented. In that case, the parent could fill out an affidavit with the correct race, which the district would then recognize. As per a request made by Gordon Greiner, probably in order to monitor the number of parents changing their child’s race in an attempt to exempt them from the desegregation plan,

Judge Doyle also ordered that the school administration keep track of these affidavits and file periodic reports to the court on the usage of this process.500

When Lila Lewis appeared in front of the Board of Education again in August

1974, she claimed to speak for herself and two of her neighbors, all of whom had filled

499 Reporter’s Transcript, Conference, Keyes et. al., U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, Jun. 10, 1974, in Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 17, Folder 6.

500 Order, Judge William E. Doyle, Keyes et. al., U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, Jun. 19, 1974, in Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 25, Book 3, No. 30.

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affidavits requesting that the district change their children’s racial designation to mixed race. She demanded to know why this had not been done. In response board member

Omar Blair told her that the district had just submitted a report to Judge Doyle that summarized the number of parents who had requested a change to their child’s official racial classification. The report revealed that there were two hundred students whose official racial classification had been questioned by their parents.501 Though this was less than one percent of the entire district, two hundred students was not an insignificant number when you consider the delicate racial balancing that the court was trying to achieve.502

Some parents in Southwest Denver made this point abundantly clear. Using the official racial classification affidavit, parents of fifty-seven children at Johnson

Elementary School began to change their children’s race, claiming they had been mistakenly identified as Anglo when they were American Indian. Under Judge Doyle’s plan, children were exempt from the plan if they were minority and living in a predominantly Anglo school attendance zone or if they were American Indian. Naomi

Bradford, a member of CANS and a future Board of Education member, was one of the parents who filed “false affidavits.” Once the high number of claims coming from parents in Southwest and Southeast Denver was investigated and Bradford was questioned, she explained that although she was not a member of the tribe, she was

Navajo. The reason so many parents had not identified their children as American Indian

501 Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, Aug. 8, 1974, 26.

502 As of September 1974, the total student population of the district was 79, 670. Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, Nov. 21, 1974, 25. 255

before was because there was no need to racially classify them before court-ordered desegregation.503 There is not any evidence that supports or refutes her claims, but many people in the local American Indian community were unconvinced and protested the parents’ attempts. The fact that so many parents had tried to manipulate the system forced Judge Doyle to take further action to define racial categories. He issued a supplemental order on October 9, 1974 that addressed the “American Indian” classification directly. Any parent, he said, who had filed a claim that his or her child was American Indian must file a new affidavit if he or she wanted the schools to identify the child as such. The schools would then need to determine whether the claim was valid.

Judge Doyle further ordered that to be classified as “American Indian,” the child must fall into one of four strict categories.504 Apparently unable to meet such requirements, fifty-four of the sixty Johnson parents who had filed these claims retracted their affidavits and their children were once again classified as Anglo.505

503 Denver Post, Nov. 10, 1974.

504 “An Indian means any individual who 1. Is a member of a tribe, band, or other organized group of Indians, including those tribes, bands, or groups terminated since 1940 and those recognized now or in the future by the State in which they reside, or who is a descendant, in the first or second degree, of any such member, or 2. Is considered by the Secretary of the Interior to be an Indian for any purpose or 3. Is an Eskimo or or other Alaskan Native, or 4. Is determined to be an Indian under regulations promulgated by the Commissioner [of education], after consultation with the National Advisory Council on Indian Education.” Judge William E. Doyle, Order, Keyes et. al., Oct. 9, 1974, in Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 26, Book 1, No. 68.

This continued to be a problem for the school district and the court. In April 1975 Judge Doyle had to go even further to establish rules for the “American Indian” classification. He ordered that any parent who filed an affidavit claiming their child was American Indian would undergo an investigation that would be conducted by the Parents Committee formed under the Indian Education Act of Title IV. Judge William E. Doyle, Supplemental Order, Keyes et. al., Apr. 25, 1975, in Keyes, et. al. Collection, Box 26, Book 1, No. 68.

505 Interview with Gordon Greiner, conducted by Frederick Watson, “Removing the Barricades,” 216.

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Naomi Bradford, however, continued to pursue this strategy. In November 1974 she appeared before the Board of Education with several of the other parents whose

American Indian affidavits had been rejected by the district after Judge Doyle’s October order. She demanded to know:

1. What do you do when someone cannot document his ancestry? 2. Can an individual demand to be classified as minority because of dark skin? 3. Can a person of mixed ancestry switch from one racial classification to another? 4. Does a married Anglo woman who bears a Spanish surname qualify to be Hispano?506

She raised important questions that, centrally, were about racial knowledge. What was race? Was it ancestry? Was it skin color? Was it blood quantum? Or was it surname? The implementation of Judge Doyle’s order had thus far relied on common sense understandings of race that blended aspects of all of these. But as the 1974-1975 school year got under way, the uncertainties of race began to create more and more problems.

One after the other, the parents whose claims had been denied by the district revealed their racial knowledge as they tried to grapple with the rules regulating racial classification. “No one could state with any degree of accuracy, the ethnicity or race of a child except the mother or father,” argued Robert Weaver. “Does [my] skin have to be black, brown, yellow, etc., before the public officials feel [I] could be discriminated against?” Stanley Reberger asked. Another parent resented that her claim had been denied by the district and she accused Judge Doyle of calling her and her parents liars.

506 Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, Nov. 14, 1974, 4.

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Both of her grandparents, she said, had been “born on a in

Kentucky.”507

Interestingly, several of the claims appear to have been related to Mexican-

American children, or those who were “half Anglo and half Hispano.” Betty McClain showed pictures of her children, just as Lila Lewis had done, and pointed out that even though they all had dark skin, hair and eyes and were “half Spanish,” they had been categorized as Anglo because their father was Anglo. Donna Thorberg, on the other hand, admitted she had negotiated with the system “on the basis of hardship” and she did not see anything wrong with that. She told the board that her two eldest children, whose last name was McBride, had been classified as “other” by school officials while her youngest child, whose last name was Romero, had been classified as “Hispano.” Consequently, her “Hispano” child was exempted from busing while her two “other” children were bused to another school. She claimed this had created a negative environment in her home because her children recognized that their different school assignments were based on skin color. In an attempt to unify her home and prevent “permanent psychological division” in her family, she explained that she had filed American Indian affidavits for the two older children “rightfully claiming their Indian blood.”508

Bradford accused the court and the school district of imposing unfair and absurd requirements for proving one’s American Indian identity when such stringent regulations were not imposed for other racial categories. She further accused the board of

507 Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, Nov. 14, 1974, 12-14.

508 Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, Nov. 14, 1974, 12-14.

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deliberately concealing the fact that parents had a right to file an affidavit changing their child’s official racial designation. Most parents, she said, only learned of this right from reading it in the newspapers. She demanded that the board request Judge Doyle to establish definitions for each of the other four racial categories, Black, Hispano, Oriental, and Anglo, and that the practice of teacher observation be eliminated. Finally, she suggested that the court had given parents—particularly those with children who had some amount of Hispano ancestry—no recourse for proving their race. “Since the court made it impossible to qualify as Indian,” she told board members, “some considered claiming Spanish ancestry, but had no assurance this would not be met with the same opposition.”509

Bradford’s appeal to the board indicates that parents were willing to classify their children in whatever way would allow them to stay in their neighborhood school. The ambiguity of Mexican-American racial identity, moreover, provided several options for people to pursue. Parents could insist their children were Hispano, American Indian or

Anglo. They could use ancestry, blood quantum, skin color, hair and , surname, or place of birth to make their claims. As a result, board members lamented the fact that

“establishing the ethnicity of students was a real problem” and they argued that parents needed to be provided with “some kind of basis for determining ethnicity to legitimately register his child.”510 Even as parents, school officials, lawyers and the courts wrangled with the meaning of race and exposed its malleability, they never wavered from the idea

509 Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, Nov. 14, 1974, 14-15, quote on 14.

510 Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, Dec. 19, 1974, 30.

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that race was a real, inherent aspect of one’s identity. That they sought more specific racial definitions from Judge Doyle in order to “legitimately register” their child’s race demonstrates their acceptance of racial categorization as a natural process even as they challenged the use of such categories for creating racial balance in Denver schools.

Unloading the “Excess Baggage”: The Appeals Court’s Rejection of the Cardenas Plan

To many observers, the requirements of the Cardenas Plan must have seemed far beyond the societal obligations of the public school system. The school district argued as much in its appeal of the Finger Plan, which included the Cardenas Addendum. The

Addendum applied the principles laid down in the Cardenas Plan to the specific conditions of the Denver schools. The district opposed both the Plan and the Addendum.

Of central concern to the board of education were the mandates to establish an affirmative action hiring plan and to implement a comprehensive bilingual/bicultural program at all levels of the Denver school system. “The Cardenas ‘plan,’” wrote the board, “represents a blanket indictment of the total educational effort of today and is, in reality, not a plan for the desegregation of schools but rather an independent approach to the educational process that bears little relationship to the racial or ethnic mix within the schools.”511 In short, bilingual and bicultural education were completely separate from desegregation and Judge Doyle’s order that the district implement the Cardenas Plan went far beyond what was required of a school district to ensure racial balance. This was

511 Reply Brief of School District No. 1, Keyes et. al., U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, Oct. 31, 1974, 11, Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 26, Book 3, No. 27.

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a major judicial overstep, the defendants argued. They cited the Supreme Court’s decision in Swann v. Mecklenberg that the intent of Brown and its progeny was to eliminate dual school systems based on race only, not to remove every single factor that could lead to discrimination.

The elimination of racial discrimination in public schools is a large task and one that should not be retarded by efforts to achieve broader purposes lying beyond the jurisdiction of school authorities. One vehicle can carry only a limited amount of baggage. It would not serve the important objective of Brown I to seek to use school desegregation cases for purposes beyond their scope.512

School administrators around the state agreed. The Colorado Association of

School Boards, the Colorado State Board of Education, and the Colorado Association of

School Executives submitted amicus briefs in support of DPS’ appeal. Noting Judge

Doyle’s exemption of five predominantly Mexican-American schools from the Finger

Plan, these briefs argued that under federal law, the maintenance of racial concentrations for bilingual/bicultural education was not a substitute for racial balance. The “lack of a rational relationship” between court-ordered desegregation and the Cardenas Plan was so profound that the plan did not seem to be a remedy for a dual school system at all “but rather the imposition of a new social and educational system throughout the City and

County of Denver.”513 The provisions that some Mexican Americans had been demanding for years, these briefs implied, had nothing to do with race and were beyond what was required of a school district to provide equal educational opportunity. In fact,

512 Swann v. Mecklenberg, 402 U.S. 1 (1971), 22, cited in Reply Brief of School District No. 1, 14. 513 Brief of Amicus Curiae, Colorado Association of School Boards, Keyes et. al., U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, c.a. Fall 1974, 16 and 19, Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 18, Folder 4.

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argued the Colorado State Board of Education, the Cardenas Plan may be calling for the re-establishment of a dual school system, “one for ‘chicanos’ and one for ‘anglos

[sic.].’”514 The Colorado Association of School Executives concurred. “Under the guise of providing equal educational opportunity the court has offered it’s [sic.] own panacea for social ills, but the prescribed cure is constitutionally more offensive than the sickness.”515

In its brief in support of the Cardenas Plan, MALDEF took great care to explain the educational needs of Mexican-American students and the legal arguments that supported bilingual and multicultural education programs. Here the intervenors directly addressed the racial positioning of Mexican Americans in a multiracial school district.

MALDEF wrote, “Implicit in the Court’s requirement that Hispanos be counted with

Blacks for purposes of determining the degree of segregation is the realization that a tri- ethnically segregated school system cannot be serving the particularized needs of the

Hispano student, thereby denying them the equal protection of the laws.” Attorneys for the CHE, then, immediately challenged the white/nonwhite binary that the Supreme

Court had established. Even though Mexican Americans had been deemed nonwhite, they suggested, the court’s recognition of a tri-ethnically segregated district meant that any remedy to redress segregation had to include provisions for improving the quality of education for Mexican-American students. Though the Supreme Court had articulated its

514 Brief of Amicus Curiae, State Board of Education, State of Colorado, Keyes et. al., U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, Sep. 6, 1974, 16, Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 18, Folder 3.

515 Brief of Amicus Curiae, Colorado Association of School Executives, Keyes et. al., U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, Sep. 9, 1974, 27, Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 17, Folder 7.

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decision in ethnic terms, the CHE interpreted “tri-ethnic” to mean tri-racial. This interpretation was the only one they could have made—at least the only one they could have made in their arguments to the Appeals Court—because they had to establish

Mexican Americans as a distinct race to situate their arguments within the constraints of school desegregation case law. “The dismantling of an illegal tri-ethnic school system,”

MALDEF continued, “is not limited to the physical displacement of students to achieve racial and ethnic balance throughout the school district.” Any plan that did not include bilingual/bicultural education was bound to fail Mexican-American children and,

MALDEF argued, was merely the continuation of segregation.516

The Appeals Court sided with the defendants. In August 1975 it issued its decision, invalidating the Cardenas Plan. Although Judge Doyle had tried to implement a remedy for the discrimination Mexican Americans experienced as a distinctly racialized group, the Appeals Court could not see past the white/nonwhite binary. “Instead of merely removing obstacles to effective school desegregation,” the court wrote, “the

[District] court’s order would impose upon school authorities a pervasive and detailed system for the education of minority children. We believe this goes too far.”517 The judges acknowledged that the district had an obligation to teach monolingual Spanish- speaking children English but the bi-lingual/bi-cultural approach of the Cardenas Plan was too much. This indicates that the court continued to view Mexican Americans as a white ethnic group, at the same time that it recognized their nonwhite status in this case.

516 Brief of the Congress of Hispanic Educators, Keyes et. al., U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, Oct. 15, 1974, 32-33, quotes on 32, Keyes et. al. Collection, Box 26, Book 3, No. 24.

517 Opinion, Keyes et. al., 521 F.2d 465, 482 (10th Cir. 1975), 57.

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As such, they needed to be racially balanced throughout the district, but the only other remedy they needed to achieve educational equality was assimilation. “The clear implication in arguments in support of the court’s adoption of the Cardenas Plan,” the court continued, “is that minority students are entitled under the fourteenth amendment to an educational experience tailored to their unique cultural and developmental needs.

Although enlightened educational theory may demand as much, the Constitution does not.”518 Once again, the court described Mexican-American difference in cultural terms rather than racial ones. As Tom Romero argues, “the Tenth Circuit’s opinion made it clear that courts were to consider Chicanas/os solely as an indistinguishable ‘non-White’ group.”519

The court also remanded the issue of the five predominantly Mexican-American schools back to Judge Doyle. Saying that bilingual/bicultural education was “not a substitute for desegregation,” it ordered Judge Doyle to determine if there was another compelling reason to maintain racial concentrations in those schools. If not, the five schools were to be included in desegregation plan immediately, an order that dramatically limited the hopes of many Mexican-American students, parents and activists. The court concluded that any bilingual/bicultural program “must be subordinate to a plan of desegregation.”520 Six years after Keyes was filed, Mexican Americans were still being told their needs were secondary to the requirement for racial balance.

518 Opinion, Keyes et. al., 521 F.2d 465, 482 (10th Cir. 1975), 59.

519 Romero, “La Raza Latina?” 268.

520 Opinion, Keyes et. al., 521 F.2d 465, 482 (10th Cir. 1975), 51.

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In its amicus brief in support of the school district’s appeal of Judge Doyle’s desegregation plan, the Colorado Association of School Executives argued that the

Cardenas Plan and the Cardenas Addendum were “totally unrelated to the goal of disestablishing a segregated system and instead have been loaded on as prime examples of the ‘excess baggage’ the Swann Court cautioned against.”521 By ruling against Judge

Doyle’s plan to eliminate the effects of racial discrimination against Mexican Americans in Denver, the Court of Appeals accepted this argument. In school desegregation litigation, the distinct educational needs of Mexican-American students were nothing more than “excess baggage.”

“Soon We Will have Chicano Schools in All of Atzlan”522: An Alternative to Integration

While the CHE attempted to work within the constraints of court-ordered desegregation, the Crusade for Justice and its supporters moved in another direction.

Since the late 1960s, the Crusade had been promoting a vision of education for Mexican-

American students that did not easily co-exist alongside the demands of black activists who sought school integration. Crusade members’ cultural nationalist vision of a

Chicano utopia—Atzlan—celebrated Chicano indigenous heritage and claimed the

Southwest as the Chicano ancestral homeland.523 Paramount to this new identity was racial pride—a brown is beautiful mentality—and a rejection of assimilationist

521 Brief of Amicus Curiae, Colorado Association of School Executives, 21.

522 “Chicano Liberation School,” Crusada Para La Justica: Solo No Palabras. Pero Acciones (Denver: Joaquin Publications, 1977), in Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 2, Folder 6.

523 For a good explanation of , see Chávez, ¡Mi Raza Primero!

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viewpoints. To these young activists, integration was simply another method of eradicating Chicanos’ unique histories and cultural traditions. After Judge Doyle released his desegregation plan, Eduardo Lucero wrote an editorial in the LARASA newsletter describing integration as “disintegration” of Chicano culture and heritage. He claimed Chicanos were a “racial and linguistic civilization,” not served by the decimation of their schools. Comparing desegregation to Mexican removal in the 1930s and 1950s,

Lucero resented Mexican Americans being used to achieve integration on a black-white basis, which could only result in the elimination of their language and thus, their culture and community. His viewpoint stemmed largely from the belief that as a distinct race with a unique history and language, racial balance could not serve Chicanos’ needs.524

Racial politics were central to the way Crusade members conceptualized their place in the world.525 In their writings and speeches, members frequently addressed the differences between themselves and other activists within the community who also claimed to represent the interests of Mexican Americans. From their perspective, it was the lack of identification with the Chicano race that limited the effectiveness of these other groups’ and it was their refusal to acknowledge Chicano racial difference that made them ineffective. A 1970 exchange reveals the tension. A Mexican-American man, E.

Elizando, began the argument by writing in a newspaper editorial that he was tired of all the “militants” giving Spanish-Americans a bad name. He argued that he and others like him were doing just fine, living the American Dream and doing so without resorting to

524 Eduardo Lucero, “Desegregation Purification and Disintegration,” Editorial in the newsletter of the Latin American Research and Service Agency, Polly Baca Papers, Box 24, Folder “LARASA.”

525 Haney-Lopez, Racism on Trial. 266

intimidation and radicalism. Neither Corky Gonzales nor the Crusade, he implied, were needed or wanted in his community. Donald Urioste, a counselor for the Mexican

American Education Program at the University of Colorado-Denver and a Crusade supporter, responded to Elizando in an open letter that highlighted the of the organization. “To begin with,” he explained, “I am a Mexican American (no hyphen please) or an American of Mexican descent, but I prefer to be called Chicano, and may I add that I am damned proud to be what I am. I do not deny, however, that my ancestry and culture are partially Spanish as Mr. Elizando does deny his Indian ancestry.”526 Here

Urioste was articulating a distinct Chicano identity, in contrast to Elizando, who claimed to be “Spanish-American.” It is clear that the different racial identities these men claimed played an important role in the ways they understood both the historical and contemporary experiences of Mexican Americans. Elizando saw a world where Spanish-

Americans had succeeded—where they had good jobs, owned their own homes, and followed the law of the land. Urioste saw a world where Chicanos were relegated to the worst jobs, dropped out of school in high numbers, lived in poverty and were underrepresented in the echelons of power.527 “You seem to be hiding so as not to see such facts of life, Elizando,” Urioste said, telling the man he just needed to open his eyes to what is happening all around him, “and you will realize that your America has not

526 Letter to the Editor by Donald Urioste, “Unshackling the Chicanos,” Denver Post, Oct. 11, 1970, newspaper clipping in scrapbook (July-Dec. 1970), Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 12, Folder 14.

527 Letter to the Editor by Donald Urioste, “Unshackling the Chicanos,” Denver Post, Oct. 11, 1970, newspaper clipping in scrapbook (July-Dec. 1970), Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 12, Folder 14.

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been too good to you Spanish-Americans or to us Chicanos.”528 He concluded by chastising Elizando for his politics: “It is people with your mentality that cause stagnancy amongst our people, for you are all bark and no bite. Action counts—words don’t; so straighten up, man.”529

Most Crusade members felt the same way about the more moderate activists within their community. Unless you accepted that Chicanos were a distinct race with a history of racial oppression, you were unlikely to promote the same vision of social justice that the Crusade promoted. This dynamic influenced the ways that the Crusade approached the question of equal educational opportunity for Mexican-American youth.

It had tried to persuade the school district to hire more Chicano teachers and institute bilingual and bicultural education. Its tactics had gotten them nowhere. The Board of

Education did not take kindly to having its meeting interrupted and occupied by young

Mexican Americans, nor did the school administration appreciate the school walkouts that the Crusade had helped to orchestrate. After the walkouts, students from West High became extremely attracted to the radical philosophy and oppositional politics of the

Crusade, transforming the group into a youth dominated organization with many concerns about the quality of education DPS was providing Mexican-American students.530

528 Letter to the Editor by Donald Urioste, “Unshackling the Chicanos,” Denver Post, Oct. 11, 1970, newspaper clipping in scrapbook (July-Dec. 1970), Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 12, Folder 14.

529 Letter to the Editor by Donald Urioste, “Unshackling the Chicanos,” Denver Post, Oct. 11, 1970, newspaper clipping in scrapbook (July-Dec. 1970), Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 12, Folder 14.

530 Vigil, “Rodolfo Gonzales and the Advent of the Crusade for Justice”; Goodstein, DIA and Other Scams, 136-137; and , “A Spokesman of the Mexican American Movement.”

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Starting in 1968 and again in 1969, the group put together a summer school program, called the Crusade Freedom School, or Liberation School, where volunteer teachers exposed participants to Chicano history, art, and music. They also offered courses in Spanish and sewing. For four hours a day, three days a week, for six weeks the school encouraged the “Ninos de la Cruzada” [sic.] to be independent thinkers and to feel pride in their culture and language.531 At the end of the program, the students felt gratified with their experience and asked why their public school teachers could not be like those in the Freedom School. Many also asked when they could have their own school year round. The Crusade’s newspaper exclaimed in response, “Soon, soon we will have Chicano Schools in all of Atzlan.”532

While the group continued to publicly push the school district to address the urgent needs of Mexican-American students, it also set out to create an alternative space for education, much like the summer Liberation School. Members largely stayed out of the desegregation case, other than to say that integration and busing were not going to help improve educational outcomes for students in their community. In 1970 the

Crusade opened Escuela Tlatelolco, a primary and secondary school named after an area of that was once a major city-state of the Aztec Empire and also the site of the 1968 , where student and civilian protestors were killed by the

531 Salazar, “Crusade Freedom School,” Crusada Para La Justica: Solo No Palabras. Pero Acciones (Denver: Joaquin Publications, 1977), in Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 2, Folder 6.

532 “Chicano Liberation School,” Crusada Para La Justica: Solo No Palabras. Pero Acciones (Denver: Joaquin Publications, 1977), in Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 2, Folder 6.

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Mexican government.533 During its first year the school enrolled about 250 students between kindergarten and twelfth grade, taught by a staff of twenty.534

At the primary level, teachers tried to instill the values of the Crusade into the students, bringing out the individual talents and interests of each student. Pupils were organized into different groups, which were each named after a different tribe: the

Olmecas, Mayas, and Toltecas, for example. They then learned the histories of each of these groups and shared their knowledge with each other in a “lab school” environment.535

At the secondary level, students had courses in the typical subjects—math,

English, and science—but they also took specialized courses in Chicano history and culture. For students in the upper grade levels, the school expanded its focus on experiential, active learning and encouraged students to ask questions and seek alternative truths. According to the Crusade:

The public schools have failed to teach or reach our young people. All they have succeeded in doing is brainwashing and creating robots not only of Chicanos but all students. Their role models have created robots of students. The teacher-student model. I teach, you learn. I know it all, you know nothing. I talk and you listen. All the student (robot) does is absorb what the teacher tells him. At the Escuela the role models are different. There is a two-way dialogue between the teacher and the student. The

533 “Escuela Tlatelolco; Reality,” Crusada Para La Justica: Solo No Palabras. Pero Acciones (Denver: Joaquin Publications, 1977), in Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 2, Folder 6; and Goodstein, DIA and Other Scams, 133.

534 “History of Escuela Tlatelolco,” Official website of Escuela Tlatelolco, http://www.escuelatlatelolco.org/Escuela_2013/History.html, accessed on May 20, 2013.

535 “Escuela Tlatelolco; Reality,” Crusada Para La Justica: Solo No Palabras. Pero Acciones (Denver: Joaquin Publications, 1977), in Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 2, Folder 6. A lab school is a school that focuses on experiential learning and promotes interactive teaching methods, rather than the more traditional lecture-style schools.

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student talks and the teacher will listen. The teacher and the student both teach and learn. The student does not sit in the classroom and just absorb information, but he goes out and does research and investigations. He becomes an analyzer. However, this knowledge is not stored but shared with the rest of the class.536

Not only was the school an alternative educational space operated by Mexican Americans with the volunteer assistance of Mexican-American parents and community members, it also instituted an alternative pedagogy, a practice that did not require integration with white students.

Escuela Tlatelolco hired only Chicano teachers, which reinforced the perspective of the organizers that only teachers who truly understood the background of their students could teach them effectively. “The effect of having a true Chicano teacher instead of an

Anglo or Spanish surname teacher,” explained a Crusade booklet, is that a Chicano teacher “can more easily reach Chicano students compared to an Anglo spanish-surname.

[sic.] The reason for this, is that teachers in the Public School were not aware of the problems of the Chicano or his environment.”537 Just as racial identity was a primary component of Crusade politicization it was also a major factor in the educational philosophy and administration of La Escuela. They did not simply want Mexican-

American teachers; they wanted Mexican-American teachers who identified as Chicano and who understood the role of Chicano racial oppression in society. The Crusade thus agreed with the CHE when it proclaimed: “Spanish-surname does not a Chicano make.”

One could have a Spanish surname yet still identify as white. Anglo Spanish-surname

536 “Secondary Education,” Crusada Para La Justica: Solo No Palabras. Pero Acciones (Denver: Joaquin Publications, 1977), in Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 2, Folder 6.

537 “Secondary Education,” Crusada Para La Justica: Solo No Palabras. Pero Acciones (Denver: Joaquin Publications, 1977), in Corky Gonzales Papers, Box 2, Folder 6. 271

teachers could not relate to Chicano youth any more than white teachers could, an argument that reinforced the Crusade’s dedication to a distinct racial identity and accompanying racial politics.

The establishment of Chicano Liberation Schools and La Escuela demonstrate the dissatisfaction of some Mexican Americans with the Denver schools. Unable to convince the district to meet their demands or convince the public that they had a real stake in the question of school desegregation, they forged an alternative path. The

Crusade’s educational justice work on behalf of Denver school children reflected their understanding of Chicano racial identity and history, which the Appeals Court had been unwilling to consider in its ruling on the Cardenas Plan. Other Denver residents, however, continued to seek out the best educational opportunity for their children within the structure of court-ordered desegregation. Through strategic negotiations, parents sought to rework their children’s racial identity in order to secure exemption from the busing plan. As they did so, they revealed the ambiguity and malleability of race and demonstrated the significant role that Mexican Americans played in Denver’s school desegregation drama, a role they continued to play in the ensuing years when DPS remained under court order.

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Conclusion

Keyes v. School District No. 1 and Contestations over Mexican-American Racial Identity

After the Appeals Court rejected the Cardenas Plan, the CHE submitted a petition for a writ of certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court but it refused to hear the case. The

1975 Tenth Circuit Court’s decision signaled the last time Keyes was argued before a court. After that the district stopped fighting the order to desegregate and tried to implement Judge Doyle’s order. Throughout the fall of 1975 and winter of 1976, the

Board of Education heard from parents whose children would be affected by the desegregation of the five predominately Mexican-American schools.538 They did not want to be a part of the busing order. Having no other justification for maintaining racial concentration at these schools, Judge Doyle included them in his desegregation plan in

March 1976.539

Just weeks before Judge Doyle released his new plan, a large group of parents from the Swansea-Elyria school area, a neighborhood with a significant percentage of

Mexican-American residents, appeared before the board. They presented a petition with

538 Minutes, Board of Education Meetings, Aug. 1975 to Mar. 1976.

539 Brown-Bailey, “Journey Full Circle,” 114.

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five hundred signatures of parents who objected to the inclusion of their school in the desegregation order. Their petition listed several benefits of the school and its teachers and specifically named its bilingual-bicultural program as a factor in wanting to keep their children at that school. “At Swansea,” the petition read, “we have a very good teaching staff. Most of them really care if the children learn or not.”540 The Mexican-

American teachers at the school, however, were unanimous in their support of being included in the desegregation plan, as were the majority of Mexican-American teachers in the district.541 Although the motivation behind the petition seems to have been a desire among Swansea parents to maintain the bilingual/bicultural program, they nonetheless adopted anti-busing rhetoric.

That month several Swansea parents filed Garcia, et. al. v. School District No. 1 et. al.542 Their suit alleged that the district was using a system of “discriminatory classification” in order to achieve balance based on “race, color, and ethnic background.”

Essentially, the parents argued that their children’s Fourteenth Amendment rights were being violated by the district’s practice of racial classification and busing. Their complaint again discussed the desire to maintain bilingual/bicultural education in addition to several other benefits of the school, but their general argument was shaped by their

540 Minutes, Denver Board of Education Meeting, Mar. 11, 1976, 10.

541 Bernard Valdez, now President of the Board of Education, met with several members of the CHE and other Mexican-American teachers, who told him that they fully supported integration. He then conducted a poll of all the teachers in the five Hispano schools to determine if they, too, supported the inclusion of their schools in the desegregation order. Teachers at four of the schools were unanimous in their support of integration. At the forth school, the teachers were in support of it by a margin of 14-4. Art Branscombe, “Cultural, Desegregation Factors: Valdez Puts Hispano Goals on Scales,” Denver Post, 1976.

542 There were eight families listed on the complaint. Complaint, Garcia, et. al. v. Board of Education, School District No. 1, et. al, U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, Mar. 16, 1976, Omar Blair Papers, Box 1, Folder 10. 274

rejection of racial classification. In particular, they objected to the way they had been racialized by the courts and, subsequently, by the school district. “Plaintiffs are of

Hispano ancestry and are being labeled and classified by defendants as ‘minority’ students,” their complaint stated. Several times, in fact, they rejected the term “minority,” and insisted they were “American.” Articulating their identities in ethnic terms, they opposed being racially classified with black students as “minorities” and explicitly distanced themselves from black integration proponents. The parents also objected to the argument that their interests had been represented in the case by the CHE. “[T]he

'Congress of Hispanic Educators,’” they argued, “did not represent the Hispano community and most certainly did not speak for plaintiffs or plaintiffs' community.”543

In short, they challenged their racialization as nonwhite and argued that because they had been categorized as minority, they were being discriminated against by the district.

What is so interesting about this case is that Swansea would have been included in the desegregation order long before 1976 if, as the parents seemed to believe, they were racially white. The school would have been one hundred percent white, thereby ensuring it would have been a part of Judge Doyle’s earlier desegregation order. In the 1960s school districts in Texas and elsewhere had argued Mexican Americans were white to delay desegregation by placing Mexican-American and black students in the same schools. Here, Mexican American parents implied that they were white in order to claim discrimination against a district trying to integrate them with white and black students.

543 Complaint, Garcia, et. al. v. Board of Education, School District No. 1, et. al, U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, Mar. 16, 1976, Omar Blair Papers, Box 1, Folder 10. 275

Although both earlier school districts and Swansea parents had different, contradictory goals, both used the logic of whiteness to make their claims.

Garcia et. al. never went anywhere. Both the District Court and the Appeals

Court ruled that the plaintiffs had no case and that they had, indeed, been fully represented in Keyes—either by the CHE or CANS. But their suit highlights two significant points about racial understandings. First, people could deploy whiteness in a variety of different contexts and with multiple goals. Its boundaries were flexible enough to allow its continuous reshaping. At the same time it maintained its ultimate objective: the maintenance of whiteness as an exclusive—and superior—identity in a demographically shifting city with increasing numbers of racially mixed individuals who seemed, at times, to defy racial categorization. Second, the parents’ suit is an excellent example of the multiple and contesting ways in which Mexican Americans racially self- identified. While the courts and the district racialized them one way, many chose to racialize themselves in other ways. There was no agreement, moreover, among Mexican

Americans in Denver over their racial identity. The very clear animosities between those who claimed to be “Hispano” and those who claimed to be “Chicano” were a constant reminder of this fact and helps explain the different perspectives that Mexican Americans had of school desegregation, racial balance and busing.

The White/Nonwhite Binary

Keyes was filed in U.S. District Court in 1969 on behalf of black students in

Denver. Financed by African American civil rights organizations, the case did not

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include Mexican American civil rights lawyers until the Supreme Court had handed down its decision. As the lower courts tried to implement the ruling, however, Mexican-

American racial identity became a major fixation of the court, the school district, parents, and community activists, all of whom used their racial knowledge to frame their arguments for or against school desegregation and busing. Yet not everyone shared the same racial knowledge. People drew their ideas about race and racial classification from a number of places, including common sense, history, local custom, and national debates over civil rights, poverty, immigration, and school desegregation.

The white/nonwhite (or majority/minority) binary created by the Supreme Court provided a new framework for understanding race in the post-Keyes period. As Kristi

Bowman argues, the white/nonwhite binary was really a re-articulation of the black/white binary in that it reified the naturalness of whiteness. All nonwhite groups became juxtaposed in opposition to whiteness, a positioning that limited the remedies meant to address inequalities for nonwhites. In Keyes, Mexican Americans were grouped with

African Americans (minorities) to prove that the entire Denver school system was segregated. Because blackness had for so long been the defining attribute of nonwhites in the legal discourse of equality jurisprudence, it continued to dominate the conversation about what constituted equality and inclusion for all nonwhites, including Mexican

Americans. This had devastating long-term impacts on the efforts to fashion appropriate remedies for Mexican Americans and other Latinas/os in the United States, as their

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distinct needs have been constantly subsumed under those of African Americans, who— under the white/nonwhite binary—are the most visible and legitimate minority.544

People in Denver constructed race independently from the courts, however.

Denverites had to learn how to maneuver within the white/nonwhite binary, a process that is clear in the efforts of the court, the attorneys, school officials, and parents to negotiate racial identities, especially during the remedy phase of the case. Almost all parties became invested in establishing firm racial categories that the school district could use to implement the court’s desegregation order. In so doing, they fixed most of their attention on racially naming Mexican Americans—were they “Spanish-speaking/Spanish- surnamed,” “Hispano” or “Chicano”?—and defining the meaning of that name. Parents were concerned over these categories because they could determine which school their children would be assigned to and whether or not they would have to board a bus to get there.

Some parents used the ambiguity of racial categories to point out the limitations of trying to achieve racial balance in the schools when it was apparent that so many children looked as if they were racially somewhere in-between the established categories.

This does not mean that they rejected race as a baseless criterion of social organization; quite the opposite, they accepted that race was real but they used it in self-interested ways.

Just like the judges in the racial determination trials of the previous century, they recognized that some people did not neatly fit into the current racial classification scheme.

But that did not mean that racial categories were pointless or that people could not be

544 Kristi Bowman, “The New Face of School Desegregation.” Also see Tom I. Romero, II, “The ‘Tri- Ethnic’ Dilemma: Race, Equality, and the Fourteenth Amendment in the American West,” Temple Political and Civil Rights Law Review 13, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 817-856. 278

categorized. Now that Mexican Americans were on the nonwhite side of the color line, people struggled to articulate what that actually meant in terms of identifying these students. Was Spanish-surname enough to define someone as a member of a minority?

Was it physical attributes? Or was it blood quantum? Was a child who was “half Anglo and half Hispano” considered a minority? And who got to decide?

Others continued to challenge the construction of Mexican Americans as nonwhite, including both white integration opponents and some Mexican Americans.

One of the ways the school district maintained its opposition to court-ordered desegregation was to constantly remind the court that the district did not believe all

Mexican Americans were nonwhite. Hoping to skew the numbers by making it appear there were fewer Mexican American students in the district, school officials sought a reversal of the court ordered plan. Their reliance on the “other white” argument is illustrative of their refusal to accept the white/nonwhite binary. Some Mexican

Americans, meanwhile, adamantly rejected a nonwhite identity. They continued to claim a distinct ethnic or cultural identity that placed them on the white side of the color line.

While Keyes represents a major shift in the ways in which the courts constructed

Mexican-American racial identity, it is also emblematic of the continuing power of whiteness to shape both the micro and macro levels of racial formation.545

Finally, a large number of Mexican Americans in Denver proudly embraced their nonwhite identity. They did not need the courts to tell them they were nonwhite; they

545 Omi and Winant maintain that there are two levels of racial formation, the micro and the macro. At the micro level people individually self-identify, while at the macro level society at large racializes an entire group of people. The micro and the macro work together, reinforcing each other, to create a particular racial order. Racial Formation in the United States, 66-68.

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had been articulating a distinct “brown” identity for years before the Supreme Court made its decision. Central to their activism and politicization was a refusal to claim the possessive investment in whiteness. In rejecting whiteness they were specifically staking out common cause with African Americans and other racially oppressed groups in the

United States and around the world.546 In so doing, however, they were also rejecting the white-nonwhite binary. Such a positioning defied the dichotomous understanding of race that dominated racial thinking in the U.S., the unfortunate by-product of which was that the demands of Mexican Americans and African Americans came into competition, reinforcing the tenuous relationship between activists of both groups. Once again, whiteness operated to widen the gulf between groups of people who had much in common and who sought similar goals, the eradication of white supremacy and an educational system that treated all students with respect and dignity.547

The Consequences of Race

One of the difficult aspects of studying race is that we are forced to constantly reconcile its socially constructed nature and the ambiguity of racial classification with the very real consequences of racial inequalities. Although the history of Mexican-American racial identity in Denver’s school desegregation drama demonstrates the fluidity and malleability of race, it also shows the absolute centrality of racial understandings to the

546 See Ian F. Haney Lopez, Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003.

547 For more on the relationship between black and Mexican American activists in school segregation cases, see Neil Foley, Quest for Equality; Neil Foley, “Over the Rainbow”; Guadalupe San Miguel, Jr., Brown, Not White; and Brian Behnken, Fighting Their Own Battles.

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outcome of the case, the remedy that was implemented and the educational experiences of all students. It was because the Supreme Court determined that Mexican Americans were nonwhite that the Denver schools were forced to implement a district-wide desegregation plan. If the court had ruled they were white, as the courts had done since

1848, school officials would have had to develop a plan for northeast Denver only. The story of school desegregation in Denver would have looked very different.

The consequences of race in this story are perhaps most devastating in the Tenth

Circuit Court’s rejection of the Cardenas Plan, a plan that was developed specifically to address the experiences of Mexican Americans and other Latinas/os as a distinctly racialized group in the United States.548 In Denver, Mexican-American students were caught up in the long-standing idea of Hispano exceptionalism even as the newly emerging Chicano Movement was challenging that myth. Chicano activists recognized the harm that claiming an Hispano identity had done to their community and they articulated a distinct racial identity based on their experiences of discrimination and inequality in the city, and in the schools in particular. The acceptance of the Cardenas

Plan was one way the courts could have recognized this history. Instead, the Tenth

Circuit Court’s insistence that Mexican Americans were an indistinguishable minority group led it to the conclusion that the plan was outside the scope of the constitution.

How then, were Mexican Americans supposed to obtain equal educational opportunity?

548 Indeed, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund submitted an amicus brief in support of the plan when the CHE and MALDEF filed a petition for a writ of ceritiori with the Supreme Court. The Cardenas Plan applied to them as well because Puerto Ricans were racialized as inferior and foreign, just like Mexican Americans. In fact, many people derogatorily referred to Puerto Ricans as “Mexicans” to denote their lower social position. Differences between the two groups—particularly the fact that Puerto Ricans were U.S. citizens—did not matter.

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The story of racial formation in Denver’s school desegregation drama is multi- layered. Its ramifications are also multi-layered. I have tried to show how Mexican

Americans racially self-identified and how their conceptualization of self informed their perspectives on educational equity, integration and busing. At the same time, I also demonstrate how the dominant white population in the city racialized Mexican

Americans, a process that shifted over the course of the twentieth-century and complicated efforts to racially categorize Mexican-American students for the purposes of racial balance. Finally, I explain how the courts determined Mexican-American racial identity and how legal understandings of race complicated local understandings.

Combined, these three processes reinforced systems of racial categorization and stratification, even when they clashed. While racial categories were ambiguous and negotiable, they mattered. Racial classification determined which school children would attend and whether or not they would have to board a bus. It thus influenced which teachers were at each school, which curriculums were taught, and the kinds of compensatory education available. The demands of parents to be able to racially classify their children, regardless of the racial maneuvering that needed to be done, make sense because race played such a prominent role in their children’s educational experiences.

Significantly, court-ordered desegregation made public the consequences of racial categorization but it did not create them. Prior to Keyes, the Denver school system racialized students in order to maintain segregation. Racially concentrated schools existed throughout the district and school officials operated under policies they knew had racial consequences. Keyes exposed the harmful effects of racially segregated education

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for nonwhite students. It was not until after Judge Doyle issued his final order in 1974, however, that some parents began to argue racial categorization, specifically, was detrimental to their children’s education.

The ideas that give race its meaning shape the power relations that guide social interactions and legal understandings. Although race was malleable and unclear, it worked to limit the possibilities for judicial intervention in the discriminatory practices of the Denver school system, even while the courts were seeking to remedy such discrimination. As Ian Haney-Lopez notes in his analysis of Hernandez v. Texas, we must be concerned with the power of perception. It should not matter so much to the courts whether Latinas/os are a distinct racial group because they are so often perceived to be a distinct racial group.549 Many people perceived Mexican Americans to be a race, not white and not black. That the Denver schools treated them differently from both black and white students is a testament to the race thinking under which the district operated. Once we conceive of race as perception, it is easier to throw out the outdated, inaccurate, and harmful black/white and white/nonwhite dichotomies. Keyes helped establish this understanding of Mexican-American racial identity almost four decades ago.

It is up to us to dismantle it.

549 Ian F. Haney López, “Race, Ethnicity, Erasure: The Salience of Race to LatCrit Theory,” Berkeley La Raza Law Journal 57 (1998): 58-125. 283

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Dissertations and Theses

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Primary Sources

Archival Collections

Polly Baca Papers, WH1793, Denver Public Library, Western History and Genealogy, Denver, Colorado, Unprocessed.

Omar Blair Papers, Blair-Caldwell African-American Research Library, Denver Public Library, Denver, Colorado.

Denver Commission on Community Relations Papers, WH903, Denver Public Library, Western History and Genealogy, Denver, Colorado.

Denver Urban League Collection, Archives, University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries, Boulder, Colorado.

William E. Doyle Papers, MSS-035, Auraria Library Archives and Special Collections, Denver, Colorado.

Don & Carolyn Etter Papers, WH1974, Denver Public Library, Western History and Genealogy, Denver, Colorado, Unprocessed.

Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales Papers, WH1971, Denver Public Library, Western History and Genealogy, Denver, Colorado.

Helen Lucero Papers, WH2029, Denver Public Library, Western History and Genealogy, Denver, Colorado, unprocessed.

Keyes (Wilfred) v. Denver School District Collection, Accession 1 (1963-1986), Archives, University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries, Boulder, Colorado.

Latin American Research and Service Agency Papers, WH1842, Denver Public Library, Western History and Genealogy, Denver, Colorado.

William McNichols Papers, WH1015, Denver Public Library, Western History and Genealogy, Denver, Colorado.

Rachel Noel Papers, ARL117, Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library, Denver Public Library, Denver, Colorado.

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Minoru Yasui Papers, Auraria Library Archives and Special Collections, Denver, Colorado.

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Denver School District No. 1 Administration Records

Advisory Council on Equality of Educational Opportunity, Final Report and Recommendations to the Board of Education School District Number One, Denver, Colorado (Denver: Denver Public Schools, 1967).

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Published Reports and Research

“Comment: The Courts, HEW, and Southern School Desegregation,” Yale Law Journal 77 (1967).

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Court Records

Appendix, vol. 1, Supreme Court of the United States, October Term 1971, No. 71-507, Keyes et. al., Petitioners v. School District No. 1, Denver, Colorado, et. al.

Appendix, vol. 2, Supreme Court of the United States, October Term 1971, No. 71-507, Keyes et. al., Petitioners v. School District No. 1, Denver, Colorado, et. al.

Appendix, vol. 3, Supreme Court of the United States, October Term 1971, No. 71-507, Keyes et. al., Petitioners v. School District No. 1, Denver, Colorado, et. al.

Appendix, vol. 4, Supreme Court of the United States, October Term 1971, No. 71-507, Keyes et. al., Petitioners v. School District No. 1, Denver, Colorado, et. al.

Appendix, vol. 5, Supreme Court of the United States, October Term 1971, No. 71-507, Keyes et. al., Petitioners v. School District No. 1, Denver, Colorado, et. al.

Cases

Brown v. Board of Education (1954)

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Cisneros v. Corpus Christi Independent School District (1970) Delgado v. Bastrop Independent School District (1948) Del Rio Independent School District v. Salvatierra (1930) Grutter v. Bolinger (2003) Hernandez v. Driscoll Consolidated Independent School District (1957) Hernandez v. Texas 91954) Keyes v. School District No. 1 (1973) Mendez v. Westminster (1946) Norris v. Alabama (1935) Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) In re Rodriguez (1897) Ross v. Eckels (1971) Salazar v. State (1946) Sanchez v. State (1944) Swann v. Mecklenberg (1971)

Websites

“History of Escuela Tlatelolco,” Official website of Escuela Tlatelolco, http://www.escuelatlatelolco.org/Escuela_2013/History.html, accessed on May 20, 2013.

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Appendix A: Map of Denver

Figure 1. Map of Denver Source: Denver Community Planning and Development, 2007

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