Brown, Not White: School Integration and the Chicano Movement in Houston

8. Simple Justice

chapter 8 Simple Justice Despite the board’s commitment to consider Mexican Americans as an identifiable minority group, it continued to view them as white. This became apparent in December, 1970, when district officials drafted a new integration plan for the spring term that failed to consider them as an identi fiable minority group. Under this proposed plan predominantly Mexican American schools were paired with predominantly African American ones. MAEC members criticized the school board’s action and recommended additional changes, including the inclusion of Anglos in the pairing of schools. Their pleas were ignored. Incensed with the school board’s response, MAEC called on the community for further action. Realizing its organizational limits and the possible dissolution of mass support for continued protest activity, MAEC called for a policy of noncooperation that included a limited “stay-at-home” policy, selective pickets of individual huelga schools, and further negotiations with school board officials. The events that unfolded during the spring of 1971 indicate how traditional black/white racial policies of the past continued to clash with the new Chicano ideology of nonwhiteness and cultural pride. This chapter focuses on the activities associated with the politics of school desegregation from December , 1970, to February, 1971. initial response to hisd’s modified pairing plan MAEC’s boycott in September ended in large part after the school board agreed to most of MAEC’s demands, including the decision to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court the pairing part of the Fifth Circuit’s integration order. School pairing was based on the premise that Mexican American children were white for desegregation purposes; it directed the district to pair Mexican American schools with black schools. The appeal was predicated on the belief that Mexican Americans were not white but rather a distinct ethnic minority group. Thus, more Anglo schools had to be included in the pairing of schools in order for the district to achieve equitable integration. In response to the pressure from the Mexican American community and other sources, the school district also filed a request with the Fifth Circuit to delay implementation of the pairing provisions of its August 25 mandate until the Supreme Court reached its decision.1 On December 12 the Fifth Circuit denied HISD’s plea to delay implementation of the pairing provisions.2 The following day the school board stated that it would appeal the pairing order to the district court. As part of its appeal, the school district submitted a modified pairing plan to Judge Connally for review.3 This plan ignored the district’s commitment to MAEC to consider Mexican Americans a distinct ethnic minority group for desegregation purposes. The modified plan, according to Superintendent Garver, was prepared in conjunction with parents involved from all the schools to be paired. A journalist, however, described this plan as the result of closed sessions with a few select parents and principals and the three-member administrative committee of the twenty-five schools to be paired.4 Neither MAEC nor its supporters were active participants in the plan’s formulation.5 Lorenzo Díaz, the Northside MAEC representative, also charged that this was not a community plan. “This is their [the administration’s] plan,” he said. “They presented it to us and said we could take it or leave it.”6 Under the traditional pairing concept mandated by the court, grade levels were restructured in the paired schools so that kindergarten through the third grade were offered in one school and grades four through six in the other school. This type of pairing affected every neighborhood involved since all the children had to attend a school outside the community for at least three years of the elementary grades. The proposed plan retained kindergarten through the sixth grade in each school and only moved 1,876 pupils to different schools. The majority of those moved were “white” and black students residing in the north and east sides of town. Unlike the court’s original plan that paired twenty-seven elementary schools, this one paired only twenty-two. Under HISD’s plan two addi134 The Struggle for Recognition, 1970–72 tional elementary schools were rezoned and three of them—Eliot, Easter, and Ryan—were dropped from the pairing.7 The result with respect to Mexican Americans, however, was the same as the court’s earlier plan. Generally speaking, the new plan ignored their new...