The Nation's First Successful Desegregation Court Case

THE LEMON GROVE INCIDENT
by Robert R. Alvarez, Jr.

The history of school desegregation legislation in the United States is not often associated with the Mexican Community in Southern California and is usually thought to have begun with the 1954 landmark Supreme Court case of Brown vs. the Topeka schoolboard ... Roberto Alvarez vs. the Board of Trustees of the Lemon Grove School District, was the first successful school desegregation court decision in the history of the United States. It is important .. because the community took court action and .. established the rights of their children to equal education, despite local, regional and national sentiment that favored not only segregation, but the actual deportation of the Mexican population in the United States ...

Lemon Grove provided jobs in agriculture, a local mining quarry, a railroad packing house and relatively easy access to the growing City of San Diego ... Some fifty families settled here, most .. of Baja California heritage. These families included Cesena, Alvarez, Castellanos, Smith, Blackwells, Arce, Mesa and others ... Most .. had been in Lemon Grove for .. years and had offspring who were .. American citizens by birth. Seventy-five of these children attended the Lemon Grove Grammar School where a total of 169 students were enrolled.

On January 5, 1931, Jerome T. Green, principal of the Lemon Grove Grammar School, acting under instructions from the school trustees, stood at the door and admitted all pupils except the Mexican students. Principal Green announced that the Mexican children did not belong at the school, could not enter, and instructed them to attend a two room building constructed to house Mexican children.

Dejected, embarrassed and angry, the Mexican children left the school and returned home. Instructed by their parents, they refused to attend the so-called new school ... "It wasn't a school. It was an old building. Everyone called it 'La Caballeriza' " ...

http://www.sandiegohistory.org/journal/86spring/lemongrove.htm