The first successful school desegregation court order happened 23 years before Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. On January 5, 1931 in San Diego, California, Lemon Grove Grammar School principal Jerome Green, acting under instructions from school trustees, turned away Mexican children. In the resulting lawsuit (Roberto Alvarez v. the Board of Trustees of the Lemon Grove School District), the Superior Court of San Diego County ruled that building a separate school for the children of 50 Mexican families (said to be “backward and deficient” and in need of special Americanization education) violated CA laws because ethnic Mexicans were considered white under the state’s Education Code (which did allow segregating Oriental, Negro, and Indian children). Read more about this 1931 San Diego case as well as the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court Topeka ruling in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).
