The following is from a work-in-progress about the history of Fullerton. You can support my ongoing research and writing on Patreon.

In his book Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California scholar Daniel Martinez HoSang presents a realistic and unglamorized portrait of the messy struggle for civil rights in California through the lens of ballot initiatives. Today, California is seen as a liberal stronghold, but it wasn’t always that way.

One of the main insights of the book is to dispel the myth that California “figured out” and “fixed” social injustices and inequality back in the 1960s. A closer look at California’s schools and communities reveals lingering social, housing, employment, and educational segregation and inequality.

HoSang also demonstrates how, in the post-Civil Rights era, the language of “colorblindness” has been used by politicians to squash efforts at undoing the harmful legacy of discriminatory policies and to maintain the status quo.

HoSang’s book is helping me to peel back the layers of the onion and really try to understand how we got where we are, and how things might be different.

Prop 11 and the Struggle for Fair Employment 

In 1946, Californians voted on Proposition 11, which sought to create a state Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), which would officially ban discrimination based on race, religion, color, or national origin in the workplace. It was inspired by President Roosevelt’s Fair Employment Practices Commission, which was created at the outset of World War II.

At the time, employment discrimination was widespread in California. Hosang writes, “At the time, California’s burgeoning defense industry, from the sprawling Kaiser shipyards along the San Francisco Bay to the massive Lockheed airplane factories in Los Angeles County, routinely consigned black and Mexican American workers to the lowest paid jobs, if they hired them at all.”

The champion of Prop 11 was Assemblyman Augustus Hawkins, who at the time was the only African American in the California state assembly (he was very light-skinned). Other groups lent their support: The NAACP, the Urban League, the American Council on Race Relations, the California Federation for Civic Unity, as well as union organizations like the CIO.

Those opposed to Prop 11 included Frank Doherty, former president of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, as well as powerful agricultural lobbyists who had relied on cheap immigrant labor for decades. The ballot argument against Prop 11 stated that “certain minority racial groups are the most efficient agricultural labor.”

Another tactic to defeat Prop 11 was red-baiting. Doherty called it a “communist-inspired scheme.”

But the chief argument of those opposed to Prop 11 was one that would resonate in future civil rights debates, that discrimination was an individual choice which could not be “coerced” by legislation.  A Los Angeles Times editorial explained, “Admirable as it might be if race and religious prejudice ceased to exist, The Times does not believe that the disappearance of either can be helped by compulsion…prejudices by their very nature are matters of emotion rather than logic or reason.”

This argument, clothed in the language of individual rights, has proved a powerful one against large-scale civil rights legislation in California and elsewhere.

Ultimately, Prop 11 was “crushed on election day, capturing less than 30 percent of the vote.”  The FEPC would not be created until 1959, with the passage of the passage of the California Fair Employment Practices Act of the state legislature.

The 1946 defeat of Prop 11 led one historian to write, “The public was definitely not ready for fair employment.”

Prop 14 and the Struggle for Fair Housing 

“Men hate each other because they fear, they fear because they do not know one another, and they do not know one another because they are separated.”

–Martin Luther King Jr, speaking in Los Angeles at a 1964 anti-prop 14 rally

In 1963, the California State Legislature passed the Rumford Fair Housing Act, which sought to address widespread housing discrimination and segregation in California.  For years, non-whites had been excluded from buying or renting property in many neighborhoods across California by racially restrictive housing covenants, which were created and enforced by realtors and homeowners associations, because non-whites were perceived to drive down property values.

According to HoSang, “Bodies like the Southwest Realty Board in Los Angeles formed ‘race restrictions committees’ to organize homeowners to maintain racial restrictions, publicizing their success in the California Real Estate Association magazine.” It was racist housing covenants that created the widespread housing segregation across cities in California, even in my own hometown of Fullerton.

To address this social problem/injustice, California legislators William Byron Rumford, with the support of others like Augustus Hawkins and Jesse Unruh, introduced the Fair Housing Bill, which sought to make racially restrictive housing covenants illegal. The bill passed in 1963.

In response, the National Association for Real Estate Boards and the California Real Estate Associaion mobilized their 45,000 members and 171 local realty boards to get a proposition on the ballot to overturn the Fair Housing Act. A 1964 advertisement in the Oakland Tribune spelled out their argument:

“RUMFORD ACT FORCED HOUSING”

COMMITTEE FOR HOME PROTECTION

“In September 1963, the Rumford Act became state law. Heretofore, a man’s home was his castle. The Rumford Act makes a man’s home subject to the whims of a politically appointed State Board…The politically appointed Commission can FORCE you to sell or rent your home to an individual NOT OF YOUR CHOICE. Most people believe that a man has the right to sell, rent, or lease his property to whomever he wishes; consequently they OPPOSE the Rumford Act…VOLUNTEERS NEEDED TO CIRCULATE PETITIONS.”

The realtors and their supporters were successful in getting Prop 14 on the 1964 ballot, and thus began a widely public debate over the issue of fair housing in California. Both sides used the language of “rights.” Those opposed to Prop 14 spoke of the rights of non-whites to rent or purchase property. Those in favor of Prop 14 spoke of property owners’ rights to choose whom to sell or rent to.

Many heavy-hitters in the Civil Rights Movement (which was in full force in 1964) weighed in on the issue. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at an anti-14 rally in Los Angeles, stating, “Men hate each other because they fear, they fear because they do not know one another, and they do not know one another because they are separated.”

Ultimately, Prop 14 passed by a margin of 65 to 35 percent, striking down the Fair Housing Act. According to Lucien Haas, the press secretary appointed by governor Pat Brown to work on the anti-14 campaign, “Proposition 14 shattered [the myth] for me,” as he realized, “My God, we’re facing racism in the state of California.”

In 1966, the California Supreme Court ruled in Mulkey vs. Reitman that Prop 14 was unconstitutional. One realtor who ultimately changed his mind about Prop 14 stated, “The right we are giving up is the right to discriminate on the basis of race.  Is that a right we want to bat for? I don’t think this is a thing we should do a lot of breast-beating about. It is not a laudable right in the first place.” Another inquired, “I wonder if we are not in favor of this type of legislation because we are men of property and men who have not ever been discriminated against?”

Even though Prop 14 was ultimately struck down, it made clear the fact that California was deeply divided about the issue of housing integration, and remains so today. Today, despite what we tell our elves about civil rights progress, there remains widespread de facto housing segregation in many California cities, a legacy of both institutional and individual racism.

Prop 21 and the Struggle for School De-Segregation in California

In 1972, Californians voted on a ballot measure which seriously undermined school desegregation efforts. At the time, in the Los Angeles Unified School District, 95 percent of black students and 80 percent of white students were enrolled in highly segregated schools. The impetus for Prop 21 was the 1970 Crawford v. Los Angeles court case which “found the state’s largest school district [Los Angeles] to be deliberately segregated and ordered the [school] board to devise a far-reaching desegregation plan.” Soon after, the Bagley Act passed, which “formally established school desegregation as a policy goal of the state [of California].”

Proposition 21 (or the Wakefield Amendment), which sought to overturn the Bagley Act, was championed by a conservative Republican named Floyd Wakefield who “railed against the yoke of ‘forced integration.’” Wakefield represented the city of South Gate, “a working class city of fifty-seven thousand residents that, through the use of racial covenants and other restrictive practices, remained deeply segregated well into the 1960s. I recently read about South Gate in Luis Rodriguez’s memoir Always Running:

“One day my mother asked Rano and me to go to the grocery store. We decided to go across the railroad tracks into South Gate. In those days, South Gate was an Anglo neighborhood, filled with the families of workers from the auto plant, and other nearby industry. Like Lynwood or Huntington Park, it was forbidden territory for the people of Watts.

My brother insisted we go. I don’t know what possessed him, but then I never did. It was useless to argue; he’d force me anyway. He was nine then, I was six. So without ceremony, we started over the tracks, climbing over discarded market carts and tore-up sofas, across Alameda Street, into South Gate: all-white, all-American.

We entered the first small corner grocery store we found. Everything was cool at first. We bought some bread, milk, soup cans and candy. We each walked out with with a bag filled with food. We barely got a few feet, though, when five teenagers on bikes approached. We tried not to pay attention and proceeded to our side of the tracks.  But the youths pulled up in front of us. While two of them stood nearby on their bikes, three of them jumped off theirs and walked over to us.

“What do we got here?” one of the boys said. “Spics to order–maybe with some beans?”

He pushed me to the ground; the groceries splattered onto the asphalt. I felt melted gum and chips of broken beer bottle on my lips and cheek. Then somebody picked me up and held me while the others seized my brother, tossed his groceries out, and pounded on him. They punched him in the face, in the stomach, then his face again, cutting his lip, causing him to vomit.

I remember the shrill, maddening laughter of one of the kids on a bike, this laughing like a raven’s wail, a harsh wind’s shriek, a laugh that I would hear in countless beatings thereafter. I watched the others take turns on my brother, this terror of a brother, and he doubled over, had blood and spew on his shirt, and tears down his face. I wanted to do something, but they held me and I just looked on, as every strike against Rano opened me up inside.

They finally let my brother go and he slid to the ground, like a rotten banana squeezed out of his peeling. They threw us back over the tracks. In the sunset I could see the Watts Towers, shimmers of 70,000 pieces of broken bottles, sea shells, ceramic and metal on spiraling points puncturing the heavens, with reflected back the rays of a falling sun. My brother and I then picked ourselves up, saw the teenagers take off, still laughing, still talking about those stupid greasers who dared to cross over to South Gate.”

Wakefield argued that “forced busing” and other desegregation efforts would infringe on people’s freedom of choice. Hosang describes a story board for a “Yes on 21” campaign commercial: “The storyboard showed a terrified young white girl being forced to board a school bus as her mother stood by helplessly, explaining, ‘The government says you and your little friends can’t go to school anymore in the neighborhood, honey.’ The girl’s forlorn and bewildered response, ‘Aren’t we people too?’ implicitly set the rights of white viewers–the ‘we’–against a racialized other receiving unwarranted advantages from, as the ad described, ‘that old government.’  The storyboard’s concluding panel, ‘Restore Freedom of Choice,’ was again explicitly racialized, for such a ‘freedom’ was only available to white parents–minority students assigned to inferior and segregated schools had no such choice.”

Many of the groups who sought to defeat prop 21 were the same who had rallied (unsuccessfully) against Prop 14, just eight years earlier: the NAACP, the ACLU, the California Teachers Association, the State Federation of Labor, the League of Women Voters, and several faith-based organizations.

Ultimately, Prop 21 passed by a wide margin: 63 percent of the vote.  As with Proposition 14 (which overturned fair housing legislation) and Prop 11(which denied fair employment), Prop 21 demonstrated the fact that the struggle for Civil Rights was far from over in California.  Schools would remain essentially segregated.

In 1975, the state supreme court overturned Prop 21, stating that it “involved the state in racial discrimination.”  Though it was overturned, Prop 21 left a legacy of segregation, one which would be upheld in 1979 by Prop 1. Hosang describes the “chilling” legacy:

“Though it was only in effect for two years, Proposition 21 did have a chilling effect on many local school desegregation efforts. The Inglewood and Pasadena school boards immediately attempted to appeal their own desegregation orders, and in cities such as Whittier and Santa Ana planned desegregation measures were never put into effect. At the same time, the state auditor began monitoring whether school districts were complying with Proposition 21’s mandates. One state education official observed that ‘things have come to a dead halt in the area of desegregation since Proposition 21 passed…we have lost ground.’ Indeed, in early 1974, the state census revealed that 192,000 more students attended segregated schools in comparison to five years earlier.”

Floyd Wakefield’s political career ended shortly after Prop 21 passed, when his state assembly district was eliminated due to redistricting. In 1974, he moved to Anaheim to run in the newly-created 70th district, which included Anaheim, Brea, and Yorba Linda.  Wakefield stated in an LA Times article that north Orange County was “the area most compatible with his own philosophies.”  Ultimately, he lost the Republican primary, and his tenure in politics was over.

Hosang describes the decline of Floyd Wakefield, and what it suggests about the changing nature of Southern California politics at the time:

“The decline of Wakefield’s eight-year career in the state assembly paralleled important transformations in the political landscape of Southern California during the 1970s. Wakefield never tempered his ardent conservative postures. In the last months of his final term in the assembly, he sought to qualify a ballot measure to rescind the California Legislature’s 1972 ratification of the Equal Rights Act and sat at the head table of a John Birch Society political banquet where founder Robert Welch called for President Nixon’s impeachment. But Wakefield could no longer count on a constituency in South Gate to reliably support such appeals. The white working-class residents that a decade earlier had rallied behind Wakefield’s  defense of Proposition 14 and segregated South Gate High School were rapidly abandoning the inner suburbs south of Los Angeles for new residential developments in the San Fernando Valley and Orange County. Wakefield was no innocent bystander in this retreat. By insisting that cities such as South Gate could never prosper if they became racially integrated, he implicitly endorsed the exodus of white residents that ultimately led to his own political demise. Wakefield’s uncompromising assertion of white rights anchored in the white working-class suburbs of South Los Angeles would give way to a more subtle and sophisticated defense racial inequality and segregation centered in the burgeoning San Fernando Valley.”

These are not all the propositions HoSang chronicles in his book. In a future post, I will discuss his analysis of anti-immigrant propositions in the 1990s (like Prop 187), propositions banning affirmative action (the OG DEI), and propositions banning bilingual education. Understanding the political ideology behind these propositions helps us better understand current movements to roll back civil rights gains.

The following is from a work-in-progress about the history of Fullerton. You can support my ongoing research and writing on Patreon.

The Fullerton Observer newspaper was formed in 1978 by Ralph and Natalie Kennedy and friends to provide a more progressive counterbalance to the more conservative Fullerton News-Tribune and Orange County Register. Back then, Orange County (including Fullerton) was dominated by Republicans, and the Observer crew were definitely in the minority. The Fullerton Public Library has digital archives of the Observer stretching back to 1979. I am in the process of reading over these archives and creating a year-by-year summary of top stories. Here are some top stories from the year 2000.

Despite Y2K worries of worldwide computer-induced chaos, Fullertonians rang in the new millennium without a hitch. The world spun on, computers still worked, and hopes were high.

2000 was also the year of the crazy voting/election fiasco in the contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore for president. For months after the election there remained no clear winner. Problems with voting machines in Florida prompted demands for recounts, political shenanigans ensued, and ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court chose the next U.S. president–George “Dubya” Bush. Not a great precedent.

Pollution on the Former Hughes Site?

Perhaps the biggest local story, at least in the pages of the Fullerton Observer, was the presence of toxic industrial pollution on the site of the large former Hughes Aircraft facility in west Fullerton, which had closed down in 1994. The owners, including Raytheon, were seeking to convert much of the land into a large housing and commercial development plus an elementary school. Today, that development is called Amerige Heights.

Residents raised concerns about soil and water contamination from Hughes’ decades-long industrial activities, which could potentially pose human health risks, especially if homes and a school were built on the land.

“The California Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Toxic Substance Control (DTSC) revealed that toxics from the site, including Trichloroethylene (TCE), have reached the upper portion of the groundwater system aquifer of the Orange County Groundwater System located in Fullerton,” the Observer reported. “DTSC acknowledged that whether and when the contamination will impact local drinking water sources remains an open question.”

Raytheon insisted that they were complying with all environmental laws and, ultimately, that the land was safe for humans. Raytheon had sold nearly 300 acres of the former Hughes property to a developer called SunCal. Although Raytheon had conducted an analysis in 1997 showing that the area was safe for humans, The Observer and many local residents believed that more testing and possible clean-up was needed before the site was deemed safe for human habitation.

The Observer pointed to more recent testing showing that harmful contaminants were, in fact, present in the soil and water. “The results represent the highest concentration of 1,1-DCE that I have ever seen,” Will Rowe, an EPA Geologist, said.

After the Observer published a series of articles pointing out findings of more recent testing, as well as anonymous tips from former Hughes employees, SunCal sent a series of letters demanding corrections, retractions of certain statements, and even threatened a libel lawsuit against the paper.

The Observer responded to each of SunCal’s concerns, sometimes making corrections, but more often countering their claims with additional information and questions.

I’ll admit, the amount of data in some of these articles is a bit daunting. Not being an environmental scientist, I feel sort of unqualified in determining who is actually correct in these exchanges between the Observer and SunCal.

“Clearly the Observer has an agenda,” the developer’s lawyers chided, “That agenda is to disparage Hughes, Raytheon, LSF II Fullerton, LLC and those involved in the environmental remediation process taking place at the Hughes Raytheon site.”

Sharon Kennedy, the Observer’s editor replied: “The paper seeks the truth in every instance. We happily make corrections whenever errors are pointed out.”

Despite being a small newspaper with an all-volunteer staff, the Observer did an impressive job of poring through voluminous environmental reports on the property–stuff not exactly written to keep the reader engaged, documents so technical and boring that most people would probably not bother to read them unless they had to. But Sharon read them, and did her best to report on pollution still present on the land, and what further testing and cleanup was warranted. Did the Observer get some details wrong? Probably. But I think the effort, time, and care she put in were admirable, and did some good in prompting additional testing by the EPA.

Meanwhile, the Observer published letters from local residents who lived near the former Hughes site and had lost family members young to brain cancer.

“Over the years, Wendy maintained contact with her fellow classmates from Sunny Hills and began to compile a list. The list included the names of students who attended Sunny Hills between 1966 and 1970 who developed brain tumors approximately 10 years after graduation. Listed are the names of 17 alumni who died and 4 who survived,” the Observer reported.

Some public meetings were held on the project. It seems the developer had assembled a dream team called the Suncal Leadership Club which included local elected officials like Dick Ackerman and Ed Royce who were enlisted to support the project.

When the project came before City Council, it was unanimously approved.

“While extolling the values of Democracy, Mayor Jones and the rest of the City Council voted unanimous approval of Suncal’s housing and commercial development on the former Hughes site,” the Observer reported. “Although this outcome was expected, and in fact desired by the majority of speakers during the 8-hour public hearing, most also wanted certain adjustments made to the final deal. Nearly everyone on all sides of the issue mentioned the need for the environmental situation both present and future to be addressed.”

Local Politics

In the 2000 local election, Chris Norby, Dick Jones, and Mike Clesceri were elected to City Council. All were Republicans.

As usual, there was drama when it came to selecting a Mayor.

“Bridges were burned, laundry was washed in public, and lessons were learned. Flory learned that getting along with your colleagues is no guarantee of reciprocity. Jones learned the dangers of going back on a commitment. Several people learned that deals are never final,” the Observer reported.

Housing

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Fullerton’s conservative/Republican City Council majorities were generally opposed to building affordable housing projects, even (or perhaps especially) when the money came from the federal government.

“City Councilmembers and staff attempted to place the blame on each other for $850,000 in affordable housing money that will have to be sent back to Washington if not allocated to a specific program by June 30,” the Observer reported.

“In 1992, the City was sued to force it to use 20% of its redevelopment money for low income housing,” the Observer reported. “If the 4-million in housing funds the City currently has stockpiled is not used for affordable housing it will go to the Orange County Housing Development Authority which will then decide how it is to be spent.”

In addition to refusing to spend federal affordable housing dollars, City Council also joined a lawsuit against a local Fair Housing Foundation.

The need for affordable housing was acute, as demonstrated by the long waiting lists for existing affordable housing projects, like the East Fullerton Villas.

“The East Fullerton Villas affordable complex was dedicated in 1997 and has had a 100-family waiting list ever since,” the Observer reported.

During the cold weather months, the National Guard Armory was used as a homeless shelter, but the program had restrictions meant to keep Fullerton’s homeless out of sight during daylight hours.

“In a move both stunning in its heartlessness and ironic in this holiday season, Fullerton Police have ordered the Armory Homeless Shelter not to accept walk-ins or people who drive or bike to the shelter,” the Observer reported. “The homeless are to be picked up by bus at the outskirts of town, delivered to the shelter in the evening, and bused back to the city limits in the morning.”

Local Teachers Organize

Local elementary school teachers organized and picketed in front of the district office for better pay and working conditions.

And adjunct (part-time) faculty at Fullerton College organized into their own union called Adjunct Faculty United.

“Part-time faculty make up two-thirds of all faculty in the North Orange County Community College District and are paid only thirty-two percent of what full time faculty receive class for class. In addition, unlike their full time counterparts, part-time faculty receive no health insurance and have no rehire rights,” a representative of AdFac told the Observer. “Many part-time faculty are forced to teach at three or even four colleges to try to make a living.”

In other education news, students from Columbine High School in Colorado spoke to Fullerton High School students about preventing the kind of mass shooting tragedy that occurred at their school in 1999.

Sadly, as we all know, the number of mass shootings has increased dramatically since Columbine.

Postal Workers Fight for Their Rights

Local teachers were not the only ones fighting to improve their working conditions. A group of local postal workers filed formal complaints against and called for a full investigation of Postmaster Timothy Bomersback.

“Complaints accuse Bomersback and members of his management team with harassing, threatening, and intimidating employees through language and action, forcing workers to work off the clock in order to finish routes and discrimination against females and gay employees,” the Observer reported. “Over 100 current and former Fullerton postal workers and supporters picketed the Fullerton main office lining both sides of Chapman Avenue,. hey formed a gauntlet of neon signs that read ‘The Postmaster Must Go’ and ‘Stop The Abuse.’”

And in other public employee news, under a newly-passed California law, Fullerton firefighters gained the right to arbitration in labor disputes with the City.

Culture and Entertainment

The Fullerton Public Library underwent a massive remodel.

The City Planted a “Friendship Tree” at city hall as part its sister city program with Morelia, Mexico.

Fullerton built its first skate park at Independence Park.

Protecting the Arboretum

As has happened a few times throughout its history, CSUF administrators wanted to pave over part of the Fullerton Arboretum to make way for more parking.

“Three point five acres of Fullerton Arboretum will be paved over for a ‘temporary’ parking lot holding 320 automobiles if the Facilities Management Department has its way,” the Observer reported. “That space is now marked for a Mediterranean garden in the Arboretum general plan…At a recent meeting, 75 people expressed opposition to the paving, and no one from the public spoke in favor.”

CSUF President Milton Gordon sought to increase influence over the Arboretum Commission by appointing three members directly who were in favor of the parking lot.

“At a September meeting of the Fullerton Arboretum Commission held at the Arboretum’s Oak Hall, dozens of citizens, Arboretum supporters, CSUF employees and environmentalists vigorously objected to a proposal to turn a currently undeveloped portion of the Arboretum grounds into a ‘temporary’ parking lot for the University,” the Observer reported.

Eventually, the University administration caved to the Arboretum supporters and put the parking lot plan on hold. 

Transportation

In transportation news, plans for a new light rail train system in Orange County called Centerline were faltering.

The cities of Santa Ana, Anaheim, and Orange voted against the Centerline. Fullerton city leaders were also not too thrilled about the project.

“Critics of a light rail system insist that it is a waste of time and money on a technology that no one will use. The proof that they are ignoring facts is reflected in the continued increase in ridership on the Metro-Link trains,” the Observer reported. “Also ignored is the fact Orange County) already have mass transit systems in operation and are reporting them to be successful. Whether or not the critics (lovers of freeways) want to admit it, support for an Orange County mass transit system is overwhelming. People just do not want to continue building more freeways (or toll roads).” 

But the plan was not (yet) dead: “OCTA Board of Directors has made development of the Centerline corridor a priority, saying that its construction was promised during the passage of Measure M,” the Observer reported. “The unveiling of the revised lightrail plan showed the route is mostly elevated between Fullerton and Irvine and snakes among the county’s key commercial and entertainment centers, avoiding the street-level running which critics had opposed for traffic congestion and safety reasons.”

Deaths

Fullerton’s first elected female City Councilmember Frances Wood died.

She served on the Park and Recreation Commission and in 1970 was the first woman to be elected to Fullerton City Council…Frances was the driving force behind the Independence Park facility and pool and the new library was constructed during her tenure in office.

“She believed strongly in women serving on public boards and commissions,” the Observer reported. “She was a role model and mentor for women wanting to enter public life, and encouraged their entry. Many were from her Southwest Fullerton neighborhood, where she was one of the founders of a volunteer program for children.”

The Activity Building at Independence Park was named in Wood’s honor.

Local businessman and photographer Chris Beard died. Beard ran the very cool Wilshire Theater, which sadly is no more. He also owned a photography business/gallery downtown, and wrote a regular column in the Observer called “The Last Boulevardier.”

“He was loved by his family and he built a business in this town that was an extension of the community that he loved so passionately,” the Observer reported. Many Fullertonians attended his memorial service.

Stay tuned for top local stories from 2001!

The following is from a work-in-progress about the history of Fullerton. You can support my ongoing research and writing on Patreon.

The Fullerton Observer newspaper was formed in 1978 by Ralph and Natalie Kennedy and friends to provide a more progressive counterbalance to the more conservative Fullerton News-Tribune and Orange County Register. Back then, Orange County (including Fullerton) was dominated by Republicans, and the Observer crew were definitely in the minority. The Fullerton Public Library has digital archives of the Observer stretching back to 1979. I am in the process of reading over these archives and creating a year-by-year summary of top stories. Here are some top stories from 1997.

Government and Politics

In 1997, Fullerton City Council was made up of four Republicans (Don Bankhead, F. Richard Jones, Chris Norby [mayor], Julie Sa, and one Democrat (Jan Flory). 

In 1996, California voters passed Prop 208, which sought to limit campaign contributions to local candidates to $250 per individual. The measure sought to curb undue influence of wealthy donors on politicians.

Unfortunately, the Proposition was declared unconstitutional and never went into effect. Fullerton has never imposed contribution limits; however state law sets the ceiling at $5,900. Local elections continue to be affected by the influence of large donors–developers, police and fire unions, etc.

In 1997, City Council faced off against the Firefighter union over pay and working conditions.

And the city settled a lawsuit alleging that it had discriminated against minorities in hiring of firefighters.

Orange County politics had long been dominated by Republicans; however in 1996, a Latina Democrat named Loretta Sanchez got herself elected to congress, perhaps signalling changing voter demographics.

Culture and Entertainment

There was talk of building a community Plaza next to the Fullerton Museum Center, something that would eventually happen.

The Fox Theater in Fullerton had been closed down since 1987; however there was talk of restoring it, somehow.

In 1997, Fullerton still celebrated “A Night in Fullerton”–an annual community arts celebration.

Fullerton residents joined together and restored the “Pastoral California” mural on the side of the high school auditorium, which had been painted over for nearly 60 years.

“After years of investigation and planning the Kassler painting is about to be restored,” the Observer reported. “Its blankets of five or more coats of wall paint will be removed by a chemical process and then the fresco will be restored in an authentic fashion by Conserv Art Associates, Duane Chartier and Susanne Friend…The current work is being financed by a combination of private contributions, City of Fullerton Redevelopment Agency money and the Calif. Heritage Fund.”

Fullerton High School art students also helped with the restoration.

Housing

Fullerton City Council, being dominated by conservative Republicans, was reluctant to support government-subsidized affordable housing, despite the growing need, and even when the projects involved federal (not city) money. This issue came to a head in 1997 over a proposed Single Room Occupancy (SRO) affordable housing project planned for downtown Fullerton.

At first, the conservatives on council voted the project down. This led to pushback from the progressive Fullerton Observer, and other supporters of affordable housing.

Eventually, perhaps because of the pushback, as well as legal pressure, council approved the project.

William J. Davis, attorney for the developer, “cited extensive case law, Federal Civil Rights statutes and California state law surrounding political actions affecting Federal and state housing, particularly where minority groups are involved and the actions of public officials reveal an animus toward such minorities,” the Observer reported. “Davis quoted Councilmember Dick Jones’ comments regarding hotel guests possible use of a nearby methadone clinic, alleging that the remarks could indicate an ‘anti-handicap bias,’ and that other remarks by Jones indicated, he said, a desire to “cordon off’ hotel clients and other working poor to ‘one section of the city.’”

In this case, City Council grudgingly approved the project, despite their reservations about approving housing for poor people. Today, the project still stands–it is called City Lights.

When it came to allocating federal HUD funds, the conservative majority preferred to allocate the least amount possible toward affordable housing.

Council also sought to tighten eligibility requirements for those who could access Fullerton’s affordable housing, with some suggesting that non-citizens were getting this benefit, although there was no evidence that this was happening.

A resident named Patricia Shuff “told the city council that the city programs are vulnerable to fraud— fraudulent social security cards, fraudulent drivers licenses, fraudulent birth certificates,” the Observer reported.

“And I don’t think the program should be available to persons who don’t speak English,” she said. 

Councilmember Don Bankhead said, “I fully agree we shouldn’t give money to illegal aliens, but there is no evidence we ever have.”

With regard to affordable housing, the Council’s conservatives seemed to believe that the “free market” would sort things out, although they had no problem placing numerous restrictions on what types of housing could be built where.

But perhaps things were softening (a little). An affordable housing project called East Fullerton Villas opened.

One of Fullerton’s best organizations (in my opinion) is Fullerton Interfaith Emergency Services (FIES), which is now called Pathways of Hope. They provide affordable and transitional housing, and they operate a distribution center where they offer free food and clothes to the poor.

In 1997, as is the case today, Fullerton had its share of people experiencing homelessness. Although there was no year-round shelter, the National Guard Armory opened its doors during cold weather months for the homeless (unless the National Guard needed the space).

In 1997, the old Hetebrink House (that creepy mansion next to Fullerton College on Berkeley and Chapman) was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Albert Hetebrink, the house’s occupant at the time, was allegedly a member of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Bad vibes.

Street Vendors Banned

In another assault on the “free market” City Council sought to ban street vendors.

Transportation

A big part of why Orange County has such shitty public transit is that local politicians for years refused to invest in this. In 1997, Fullerton City Council did not support a study to determine the feasibility of a light rail train. It would not be built.

Fullerton City Council, being Republicans, rejected a proposed Electric Vehicle, Clear Air Plan.

Library

The Hunt Branch Library, gifted to the City by Norton Simon in 1962, celebrated its 35th Anniversary.

An agreement was made to acquire land and build a third branch library in north Fullerton along Bastanchury. Sadly, this branch would never come to fruition.

Education

Meanwhile, Fullerton’s Maple School had re-opened in 1996 after having been closed for over two decades.

St. Jude

The St. Jude medical complex expanded by adding a large Pavilion across the street from the main hospital–displacing the old Dal Rae restaurant.

Police

The Fullerton Police Department got a new SWAT vehicle.

Observer

In 1996, longtime Fullerton Observer editor Ralph Kennedy was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He would pass away in 1998. In 1997, a number of local and civic organizations honored Kennedy for his service to the community.

Ralph’s daughter Sharon, an artist who would eventually take over the paper, returned to town from northern California.

Stay tuned for stories from 1998!

The following is from a work-in-progress about the history of Fullerton. You can support my ongoing research and writing on Patreon.

The Fullerton Observer newspaper was formed in 1978 by Ralph and Natalie Kennedy and friends to provide a more progressive counterbalance to the more conservative Fullerton News-Tribune and Orange County Register. Back then, Orange County (including Fullerton) was dominated by Republicans, and the Observer crew were definitely in the minority. The Fullerton Public Library has digital archives of the Observer stretching back to 1979. I am in the process of reading over these archives and creating a year-by-year summary of top stories. Here are some top stories from 1996.

Government and Politics

In the 1990s, Fullerton was still a fairly conservative place. In 1996, City Council was made up of four Republicans (Don Bankhead, Peter Godfrey, Chris Norby [mayor], and Julie Sa). The lone Democrat on council was Jan Flory. Just two years prior, in 1994, Flory had faced a Howard Jarvis-style tax revolt over a proposed utilities tax, and was recalled. She was, however, reelected shortly thereafter, and remained a force in local politics through at least 2016. Republican Richard “Dick” Jones was elected in 1996, and would replace Godfrey in 1997.

Both Jones and Bankhead, along with Pat McKinley (see below) would be recalled in 2012 in the aftermath of the murder of Kelly Thomas.

The Observer’s editor Ralph Kennedy and many of its writers were Democrats, so they tended to include articles that were critical of the Council’s conservatives.

In Congress, Fullerton was represented by Ed Royce, who was a fairly typical 90s Republican.

Law and Order

In 1996, Fullerton’s Police Chief was Pat McKinley, who was hired in 1993 after a 29-year career with the LAPD. McKinley had been involved in the formation of the LAPD’s SWAT squad, which was the first in the nation. It was created following the 1965 Watts Riots and was an important step in militarizing the police, and ramping up aggressive policing tactics.

It was under the leadership of Pat McKinley that the community policing activity of “Operation Cleanup” in Fullerton’s Latino-heavy Maple area took a much more aggressive turn.

In 1996, The Fullerton Police department conducted an aggressive “sweep” of over 33 homes in the Maple area of South Fullerton, breaking down doors of suspected “drug dealers” and terrorizing families.

Reporting for the OC Weekly, Nick Schou wrote that the department “adopted operations reminiscent of Vietnam: an occupying army bent on separating the ‘bad guys’ from the ‘responsible’ population it claims to protect—and, at the same time, using brutal tactics that tend to punish both groups in equal measure.”

Following the sweep, McKinley faced a room full of angry residents at a meeting at the Senior Center.

An elderly Mr. Alberto Sambrano said, “I have lived here since 1939 and I have never seen anything like this before, the way they treated my 70-year-old wife. They destroyed my garage, a dresser in the house and a tool shed. We were treated like animals. They handcuffed my grandson Jonathan Navarro, who has never been in trouble. They took a gun my dad had given me 50 years ago.”

“Officer #1037 pulled my disabled brother up from his hospital bed and threw him on his wheel chair,” Gloria Hernandez told the chief.

Maple area resident Bobby Melendez said, “Use of stormtrooper tactics by the police and physically & verbally abusing people in their homes is not a minor matter.”

Education

In 1996, Fullerton’s Maple School re-opened after being closed since 1972 as part of an effort to de-segregate Fullerton schools. I have written a fairly comprehensive account of the story of Maple school and its desegregation efforts HERE.

Efforts to desegregate Fullerton schools were hampered by historic housing segregation, leading to disparate test scores between the more affluent and white schools of the north part of the city and the more low-income and Latino schools of the southside.

Meanwhile, conservative elements on the Fullerton School Board were pushing for a “fundamental” school at Pacific Drive.

Culture and Entertainment

In 1935, artist Charles Kassler painted the large “Pastoral California” mural on the western wall of the Fullerton High School Auditorium, formerly called Plummer Auditorium. The “Plummer” name was removed in 2020 following revelations that the auditorium’s namesake Louis Plummer was associated with the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, when he was Fullerton High School Superintendent.

The mural was a WPA-funded public art project. The result was one of the two largest frescoes commissioned by the WPA, a 75 foot long by 15 feet high depiction of a pre-American California. The mural depicts historical figures like Jose Antonio Yorba, a large landowner whom Yorba Linda is named after. In the background is Mission San Juan Capistrano. To the right is Pio Pico, the last Mexican governor of California. Most of the figures are Latinos doing everyday activities: washing clothes, riding horses, eating together.

1930s LA art critic Merle Armitage praised the mural: “Kassler has adhered not only to the beautiful traditions of pastoral California, but at the same time has also borne in mind the splendid Spanish architecture, and, lastly, created a beautiful fresco of amazing vitality and freshness of viewpoint.”

But not everyone was happy with Kassler’s mural. In 1939, the High School Board of Trustees voted to paint over the mural. Why did they do this?

“It was too Mexican, that’s why,” Charles Hart told the LA Times. Hart was a student at the high school and remembers the mural before it was covered up. “The school board didn’t want to leave the impression that this town was anything else but Anglos. Too extreme for them, I guess.”

However, in 1996, a campaign was afoot to restore the mural.

In 1997 the mural would be restored, thanks to a massive community effort. I was actually attending Fullerton High School at the time. Some of my friends, art students, helped with the restoration. I remember thinking, even then: Why would anyone have painted over something so beautiful?

I have written a fairly in-depth history of “Pastoral California” HERE.

In 1964, “A Night in Fullerton” was conceived when local artist Florence Arnold wanted to create a cultural event to show Norton Simon (owner of Fullerton’s Hunt foods) that we were an art community. Norton Simon was a well-known collector of fine art, and he had offered to gift the city a world-class art museum. He built the Hunt Branch Library as a proposed site. Sadly, due to disagreements with the Fullerton City Council, Simon would take his work-class art collection elsewhere, to Pasadena in 1972.

I have written a history of “A Night in Fullerton” which you can read HERE. Despite the devastating loss of the Norton Simon Museum, Fullerton continued with “A Night in Fullerton” until 2009.

Housing

By the 1990s, housing in Fullerton had become increasingly unaffordable to working class people. A continuing theme starting at least in the 1980s was the question of whether the city would support federal and state-funded affordable housing projects. Mostly, in those days of Republican domination, the answer was a resounding “no”.

Civil Rights (or Wrongs)

In 1996, Californian voters passed Proposition 209, which ended affirmative action programs in the state. California’s governor was Pete Wilson (a Republican) and the Republican Party was still a force to be reckoned with.

Prop 209 was called the California Civil Rights Initiative, and it used the language of civil rights to argue against programs aimed at aiding formerly underrepresented minorities. It was the original anti-woke, anti-DEI initiative.

The Observer reported on protests and argued against Prop 209.

Ralph Kennedy Diagnosed with Cancer

In 1996, longtime Observer editor Ralph Kennedy was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

Ralph passed away in 1998, and his daughter Sharon Kennedy took over as editor of the Observer.

Stay tuned for top news stories from 1997.

The following is from a work-in-progress about the history of Fullerton. You can support my ongoing research and writing on Patreon.

The Local History Room of the Fullerton Public Library has microfilm from the Fullerton Daily News-Tribune newspaper stretching back to 1893. I am in the process of reading over the microfilm, year by year, to get a sense of what was happening in the town over the years, and creating a mini archive. Here is a compilation of stories from the 1940s.

World War II

After the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States finally entered World War II, which had already been raging for two years. Many young Fullertonians went off to war.

“Many tears rolled down the cheeks of proud mothers and fathers who saw their sons and other relatives off to induction stations,” the News-Tribune reported in 1942. “Fullerton citizens quickly adjusted themselves to the war…every phase of Civilian Defense was organized quickly here…Red Cross activities boomed…War bonds sales went over with a smashing success, the quota being topped every month in Fullerton…Tire rationing, food stamp, auto use stamp and other new regulations brought on by the war were met without confusion here…’Let’s Knock Out the Axis’ seemed to be the the theme of the city’s efforts throughout the year.”

Prior to World War II, the United States didn’t have nearly the big military it does today, so people had to pitch in by buying war bonds and participating in salvage drives to beef up the war machine.

Everyone had a job, from air raid wardens, to a home guard, to a civilian defense council, to auxiliary police, and more.

“Deep in the sub-basement of the city hall, surrounded by heavy reinforced concrete, in what is generally conceded the most adequate bomb-proof shelter in Fullerton, the control center of the civilian defense council meets each week,” the News-Tribune reported.

Just as World War II was the catalyst for greatly increasing the size of the U.S. military, the war also prompted a huge increase in war-related industries like aerospace, shipbuilding, and weapons manufacture. Many of these new defense industries were located in California.

“Northern Orange county, including Fullerton, has approximately 1.400 men and women engaged in war industries, principally aircraft and shipbuilding,” the News-Tribune reported. “Of the little army of 1,400 workers who are commuting to their war industry jobs, more than 750 are from the city of Fullerton.”

Val Vita Food Products (later called Hunt Foods) in Fullerton had a contract to supply the military with canned goods.

Douglas Aircraft opened a “feeder” shop in Fullerton for local workers to assemble airplane and other parts.

Local industries, like Kohlenberger Engineering and Hunt Foods produced products for the war. Kohlenberger built transimission systems for Amphibious Landing Craft, like the kind used in the invasion of Normandy on D-day.

Another way to contribute to the war effort was by growing your own food in a “Victory Garden,” so more foodstuffs could be sent overseas.

World War II opened up many new opportunities for women, who were recruited to work in local war industries, and to serve in WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) as a women’s branch of the Naval Reserve.

The following article from 1943 gives a good sense of the changing ideas about gender roles that World War II brought about.

“The thing that surprises everyone is that Fullerton residents who never before have done any such kind of work are building intricate wiring assemblies for Flying Fortresses and C-47 transport planes. And they are doing the work well!

Naturally, the average housewife looks puzzled when, for the first time in her life, she faces the problem of using a soldering iron.

“Why I’ll never be able to learn how to use that thing,” she usually says.

There’s an answer that has yet to fail. The plant instructor smiles at the perplexed pupil and replies:

“If our boys from Fullerton can learn to fire machine guns and jump in parachutes, surely we can learn to run this little old soldering iron.”

And within a week or so, the new pupil has taken a place on the production line, doing vitally needed work which boosts America’s war efforts.

During World War II, Nazi war prisoners were taken to camps (including one in Garden Grove) and “hired” out to lower growers.

Japanese Incarceration

In 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, ordering all “enemy aliens” to be removed from their homes and ultimately sent to incarceration/concentration camps for the duration of the war.

Over 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry, many of whom were American citizens, were detained and removed without due process, merely because they looked like the “enemy.” It was one of the most shameful episodes in modern American history.

“Three civilian exclusion orders which will evacuate Japanese and enemy aliens from Orange county and a small section of northern San Diego county were issued late Saturday by Lieut Gen. J.L. DeWitt,” the News-Tribune reported. “This order will mean that all Japanese still remaining in Fullerton and Orange county areas will be evacuated by next Sunday noon.”

This local order affected about 700 people, including some living in Fullerton. Formal placards containing the notices were posted throughout the area by soldiers. Ultimately, over 1,300 Japanese Americans were taken away from their homes in Orange County.

While direct blame for this injustice is usually placed at the feet of President Roosevelt, it’s important to note that Japanese exclusion/incarceration was a very popular idea and was merely the outward manifestation of long-standing racism against Japanese-Americans. Quotes from the News-Tribune in 1942 show that state and local leaders across the political spectrum supported Japanese incarceration:

“The League of California Cities asked President Roosevelt to order immediate evacuation of all Japanese, American-born as well as alien from the western combat zone.”

“Federal, state and county authorities in Los Angeles began an investigation which may result in seizure of Japanese-owned property.”

“California congressmen and other public officials have advocated removal of all aliens from the state, instead of merely moving them back from the defense zone.”

“The Orange County grand jury recommended to the board of supervisors today that all Japanese, German, and Italian aliens and their children be removed from Orange County.”

“For weeks the West Coast, through city councils and city officials, patriotic organizations and civic groups, has been demanding all Japanese be removed from the coast as a safeguard against fifth column sabotage and invasion threats.”

Sometimes people were given warning, other times they were just rounded up without notice.

The closest Japanese incarceration camp in California was Manzanar, built in the Owens Valley, but this was not the only one. Prior to being sent to these camps, some local Japanese Americans were sent to the Santa Anita race track and other temporary facilities, which were converted into a temporary relocation center.

One such Japanese American was Betty Oba Masukawa, who was born and raised in Fullerton. In an interview for the CSUF Oral History Program, she recalls her experiences during WWII. I am amazed at the matter-of-fact way she recalls her experiences, and the fact that, years later, she is able to laugh about it:

CSUF: You mentioned evacuation. What was your major concern at the beginning of the war?

Betty: Honestly, I didn’t think anything of it, because I was born here. I didn’t pay any attention to any of the rumors, until it was really happening.

CSUF: How were you told about the evacuation?

Betty: It was in the newspaper.

CSUF: And what were your feelings at the time that you found out about the evacuation?

Betty: If we had to evacuate, we had to evacuate (laughter).

CSUF: What sorts of provisions did you make?

Betty: You mean our home?

CSUF: Yes.

Betty: The mayor of Fullerton, William Hale and his son Harold took care of all our things. We gave him power of attorney and he took care of our ranch; we had a ranch at that time. Well, it was my parents’ ranch. He took care of all our personal belongings for us, so we had no worry.

CSUF: Was he a friend of your family?

Betty: Yes, a very good friend. The whole family was very good. My personal things he took to his house, and he stored it up in his room, which he didn’t have to; he could have just put it in the garage. But, no, he put it in his house, and really took very good care.

CSUF: Where were you then sent?

Betty: We were sent to Poston, Arizona.

CSUF: From Fullerton?

Betty: From the Anaheim train station. We were the last family to go from Orange County.

CSUF: And you went on the train?

Betty: Yes.

CSUF: And what was it like when you arrived in Arizona?

Betty: Terrible.

Betty’s husband (Mas): It was hot and dusty. Rattlesnakes all over.

Betty: If it wasn’t rattlesnakes, it was scorpions.

CSUF: What was the physical building that you lived in at Poston like?

Betty: Like barracks, a lot of cracks in it, you know, so the dust could go through.

CSUF: Oh dear. What time of year was that?

Betty: In May. A really hot time. It was really hot.

CSUF: You were in a barracks with how many people?

Betty: Well, each barrack had four rooms; it was all partitioned. We had the font, and it was a larger one. The dust blows, and everything gets dusty inside. You can just have tears, you know.

CSUF: So your little girl was how old when you went to Poston?

Betty: Four years old. There was a class in front of our barracks, so she went to school there.

CSUF: Was there a social life going on in camp?

Betty: Yes. There were dances.

Mas: Outdoor baseball.

Betty: Outdoor theater.

CSUF: Do you have any special memories about that period of time?

Betty: Well, a group of friends would come over to our apartment, and we’d play cards and stuff for the evening. That’s about all we could do in the evening.

CSUF: And how long were you in Poston?

Betty: Three and a half years.

Education

In 1940, in a major shake-up, long-time Fullerton High School and Junior College Superintendent Louis Plummer decided to leave the position. Plummer first came to Fullerton Union High School in 1909. He helped organize Fullerton Junior College in 1913, and served as superintendent since 1919. Though no specifics were given, it seems clear that there was tension between Plummer and the Board of Trustees.

“My chief concern through the years of my service here has been, and it must continue to be, the welfare of the school,” Plummer wrote in a letter to the Board. “It is probably that the members of the board will unite harmoniously in support of another, elected to take the duties of this office, than they would in carrying out any program I might propose.”

As further evidence that there was tension between the Board and the administration, fifteen teachers were also released. Plummer’s replacement was F.T. Chemberlen.

In other 1940 news, FUHS’s old auditorium was condemned. With the rise in international tensions, a military training program was begun at the High School.

Superintendent Frederick Chemberlen, who had been hired to replace Louis Plummer, resigned and was replaced by William T. Boyce in 1943, and Stanley Warburton in 1945.

In 1945, segregation of Mexican students from their white peers was being challenged in Orange County in a case that would eventually become Mendez et al v. Westminster.

In the early 20th century, local school districts created separate “Mexican” schools.

“By the mid-1920s there were 15 such schools in Orange County, all but one located in the citrus-growing area that would be involved in Mendez v. Westminster,” Phillipa Strum writes in Mendez v. Westminster: School Desegregation and Mexican American Rights, “by 1931 more than 80 percent of all California school districts with a significant number of Mexican (non-American citizen) and Mexican-American students were segregated, usually through the careful drawing of school zone boundaries by school boards that had been pressured by Anglo residents. The ostensible rationale for the separate schools was the children’s lack of proficiency in English.”

These schools were often of lower quality, both in facilities and materials provided. They “were usually built of wood, while the ‘white’ schools were made out of brick or block masonry…Books and other equipment were castoffs from the ‘white’ schools.”

Many of the “Mexican” schools had shorter hours so that children could join their parents in the fields.

Because of these factors, “Many students had to repeat grades, and they dropped out of school as soon as they could.”

Many Mexican schools, including those in Fullerton, had “Americanization” programs that focused on basic English, math, sanitation, and citizenship. Girls were trained to do housework.

“School boards throughout the state operated on the assumption that segregating what were viewed as the underachieving Mexican-American students was a good thing,” Strum writes. “By 1934, more than 4,000 pupils in Orange County–25 percent of the county’s total student enrollment–were Mexican or Mexican-American. Seventy percent of the county’s students with Spanish surnames were registered in the 15 Orange County elementary schools that had 100 percent Mexican enrollment.”

Unlike elementary schools, high schools in Orange County were, for the most part, integrated. For example, Isabel Martinez graduated from Fullerton High School in 1931, the first Mexican-American to graduate from FUHS.

During World War II between 300,000-500,000 Mexican American men served in the armed forces. This experience of fighting against fascism abroad instilled in many Mexican-Americans a determination to fight for their rights here at home.

One Mexican-American veteran said, “We’d just been at war. We didn’t like it when we came home and found out we’d risked our lives, but now we weren’t treated equally, and that our children wouldn’t be getting as good an education as the white student was going to be getting.”

Gonzalo Mendez was born in Mexico in 1913. He and his family migrated north in the 1920s, settling in Westminster, California. He married his wife Felicitas (an American citizen born in Puerto Rico) in 1935. They opened the Arizona Cafe in a Mexican barrio of Santa Ana.

In 1943, Gonzalo and Felicitas leased a 40-acre asparagus farm from the Munemitsus, a Japanese-American family who had been “relocated” to an internment camp. The Mendez’s traveled to the Arizona internment camp to meet the Munemitsus, who agreed to lease their farm.

There is an excellent children’s book about the friendship between Sylvia Mendez and Aki Munemitsu called Sylvia & Aki.

The Mendezes and their relatives the Vidaurris worked the farm. Meanwhile, Gonzalo became a naturalized citizen.

In 1945, Soleldad Vidaurri went to the Westminster Main School to enroll her two daughters–Alice and Virginia–and her niece and two nephews–Sylvia Mendez, Gonzalo Mendez Jr., and Jerome Mendez–in their neighborhood public school, Westminster Main Elementary School.

“The Vidaurri girls were light-skinned. The Mendez children, however, were visibly darker and, to the teacher, their last name was all too clearly Mexican. They would have to be taken to the “Mexican” [Hoover Elementary] school a few blocks away,” Strum writes.

“We were too dark,” Gonzalo Jr. later recalled.

Carey McWilliams, who wrote a history of Mexican Americans, described the Anglo Westminster school as “handsomely equipped” with “green lawns and shrubs” whereas the “Mexican” Hoover School had “meager equipment [that] matches the inelegance of its surroundings.”

Gonzalo, the father of Sylvia, Gonzalo Jr, and Jerome did not want his children to go to the “Mexican” school, especially because Westminster Main was closer to their house.

“Gonzalo went to the Westminster school the day after his children were turned away and spoke to the principal, but his children were still not permitted to register. The following day he went to the Westminster School Board, where he was equally unsuccessful. Eventually he went to the Orange County school board, again to no avail,” Strum writes.

Henry Rivera, who worked for the Mendezes, told Gonzalo about lawyer David C. Marcus, who had worked for the Mexican consulates in Los Angeles and San Diego.

Marcus, the son of immigrants himself, had experienced anti-Semitism in his life. He was married to Maria Yrma Davila, a Mexican immigrant.

The Mendezes joined with other families in Garden Grove, Santa Ana, and El Modena and brought a class action suit against the four school districts, their superintendents, and all the members of the school boards on behalf of “some 5,000 persons of Mexican and Latin descent,” all of them citizens and residents of the four districts.

The petitioners were Mendez and his children Sylvia, Gonzalo Jr, and Jerome; William Guzman and his son Billy; Frank Palomino and his children Arthur and Sally; Thomas Estrada and his children Clara, Roberto, Francisco, Sylvia, Daniel, and Evalina; and Lorenzo Ramirez and his sons Ignacio, Silverio, and Jose. 

Marcus argued that the segregation of Mexican students deprived them of their federal right to equal treatment by the state, as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. He also argued that Orange County was violating California law which at the time allowed segregation only of Asian and Indian children. Mexicans were considered “white.”

Marcus used the wording “Mexican or Latin descent or extraction” rather than “race.”

In 1945, segregation on the basis of race was officially legal–this was before Brown v. Board of Education.

The case was assigned to Judge Paul J. McCormick.

The lawyers for the school districts argued that the segregation of Mexican-American students was appropriate and for their benefit because the children “were unfamiliar with and unable to speak the English language” when they began school.

Their responses sometimes relied on stereotypes of Mexican-Americans.

The Garden Grove response stated that “a large percentage of said persons [Mexican-Americans] residing in said communities have not been instructed in or are familiar with the proper rules of personal hygiene.”

They also argued that segregation was merely the result of where the students lived, often in segregated neighborhoods.

The thrust of the district’s defense was “that the segregation was based on lack of language proficiency rather than ethnicity.”

Early in the trial, Marcus showed that the Mendez children spoke English.

As the trial began, Judge McCormick stated, “The claim here is that they have just taken the Mexican people, their children, en masse, and drawn a line around where they live and said to them, ‘Now you have to go to a school in this place here. You can’t go to a school here where the others who aren’t of this origin go.’

He quoted from Meyer v. Nebraska: “The protection of the Constitution extends to those who speak other languages as well as to those born with English on the tongue.”

Manuela Ochoa was the first witness on the stand, stating that her children had been denied entry to Lincoln school.

“Marcus wanted to attack segregation itself, and to do so, he first had to demonstrate that the school districts were systematically segregating the students on the basis of ethnicity, without reference to their language or other academic abilities,” Strum writes. “That would knock out the districts’ claim of language facility as the basis for the separation. As Mrs. Ochoa indicated, the children were given no tests before being assigned to ‘Mexican’ schools.”

Garden Grove superintendent James L. Kent, who had written his master’s thesis (called “Segregation of Mexican School Children in Southern California”) argued that all “Mexican” students should be segregated.

“He believed Mexicans constituted a separate and nonwhite race,” Strum writes. “He wrote that Mexicans were ‘an alien race that should be segregated socially’ and this had been accomplished in Southern California ‘by designating certain sections where they might live and restricting these sections to them…Segregation into separate schools seems to be the ideal situation for both parties concerned.’”

Marcus, who had read Kent’s thesis, sought to show the court that Kent’s views, “were based on racism rather than on legitimate pedagogic considerations.”

Kent admitted that there was no special training of the teachers at the “Mexican schools,” and that the teachers there did not speak Spanish. He “admitted that the Garden Grove District intentionally segregated its Mexican American students, regardless of their English proficiency.”

Kent also, stunningly, “admitted that he believed Mexican children were inferior to white children in their educational ability, and that he did not believe Mexican children were white.”

Kent stated that the Mexican child, on average, “is lower intellectually than the child of Anglo-Saxon descent.”

Marcus asked Santa Ana Superintendent of Schools Frank Henderson how the district determined which children were Mexican American. 

“By their names,” Henderson replied.

Felicitas Mendez testified: “We always tell our children they are Americans, and I feel I am an American myself, and so is my husband, and we thought that they shouldn’t be segregated like that, they shouldn’t be treated the way they are . So we thought we were doing the right thing and just asking for the right thing to put our children together with the rest of the children there.”

Professor Ralph L. Beals, chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of UCLA testified that “Segregation defeats the purpose of teaching English, certainly, to the Spanish-speaking child.”

Beals said that segregation also impeded “the assimilation of the child to American customs and ways…a feeling of antagonism is built up in children, when they are segregated in this fashion…The disadvantage of segregation, it would seem to me, would come primarily from the reinforcing of stereotypes of inferiority-superiority, which exists in the population as a whole. The advantages [of desegregation], properly handled, would come, then, in the breaking down of those stereotypes and in the broadening of understanding of people of different cultural background and the understanding of different cultures.”

Judge McCormick asked what would happen if children with varying degrees of facility in English were mixed together. Wouldn’t that be better, in terms of Americanization, than segregation? Yes, Beals replied, “with regard to the Americanization program, the mixed group would become much more rapidly aware of the main trends in American life.”

Marcus’ closing statement was powerful: “Of what avail is our theory of democracy if the principles of equal rights, of equal protection and equal obligations are not practiced…of what avail are the thousands upon thousands of lives of Mexican-Americans who sacrificed their all for their country in this great ‘War of Freedom’ if freedom of education denies the equality of all?”

Judge McCormick handed down his opinion on February 18, 1946, seven months after the trial ended. The verdict was a resounding victory–one that upheld all the plaintiffs’ arguments–segregation violated the state’s own laws.

“The equal protection of the laws pertaining to the public school system in California,” he wrote, “is not provided by furnishing in separate schools the same technical facilities, text books and courses of instruction to children of Mexican ancestry that are available to the other public school children regardless of their ancestry.”

Their actions, he concluded, reflected “a clear purpose to arbitrarily discriminate against the pupils of Mexican ancestry and to deny them the equal protection of the laws.”

He wrote that Mexican-Americans as a group were protected by the Fourteenth Amendment and could not legitimately be discriminated against.

The four school districts appealed the decision. 

Strum writes that the Mendez decision “had a marked impact on local Mexican-American organizing efforts.” In Ontario, Mexican-American protests led the town to desegregate its Grove School. Similar protests took place in Riverside.

“In Pomona, a group of 50 young Mexican-Americans, most off them WWII veterans, created a Unity League to help organize against discrimination and to push the candidacies of Mexican-americans running for office,” Strum writes.

The case also caused a strong reaction in the legal community.

The NAACP, the American Jewish Congress (AJC), the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), and the national office of the ACLU all supported the case at the appeals level with amicus briefs.

Robert Carter of the NAACP later said of his amicus brief, “I used it as a trial run for Brown.”

Robert W. Kenney, attorney general of California, submitted an amicus brief in support of the Mendez decision.

The Appeals court upheld McCormick’s decision that the school districts had violated California law. The districts would have to desegregate or carry their appeal to the US Supreme Court.

The school districts did not appeal the Ninth Circuit’s decision to the US Supreme Court.

“Because the case had been decided on the basis of California law rather than the Fourteenth Amendment, the case carried legal weight only in California,” Strum writes. “It had a substantial impact nonetheless.”

In 1947 the California state legislature passed a bill ending segregation based on race, repealing laws permitting the segregation of Indian and Asian children.

The Orange County school districts more or less complied with the ruling.

“Anglo parents in El Modena, however, continued to resist desegregation. Many transferred their children to other districts; later, they managed to have part of the district itself transferred to the nearby, all-white Tustin district,” Strum writes.

“The case got the Mendez children and other Mexican-American children in California the education that enabled so many of them to become lawyers, judges, doctors, nurses, teachers, and legislators,” Strum writes. “For them, Mendez made the American dream reality.”

When the war ended, the Munemitsu family returned to Westminster, and got their farm back from the Mendez family, as agreed.

The three Mendez children went to school at Westminster Man, which now housed all the district’s children in grades one through four.

“Sylvia went on to college and became a registered pediatric nurse. Jerome joined the armed forces and served as a Green Beret for many years; Gonzalo Jr became a master carpenter,” Strum writes.

Sylvia Mendez dedicated herself to educating the public about the case.

In 2007, the US Postal Service issued a stamp entitled “Mendez v. Westminster 1947: Toward Equality in Our Schools.”

Strum acknowledges that the struggle for school desegregation has not always been linear, noting the persistent fact of de facto segregation due to historic housing patterns: “As of the first decade of the 21st century, the majority of Mexican-Americans–like far too many African American students–were in [de facto] segregated urban schools.”

Gary Orfield and Chungmei Lee of UCLA’s Civil Rights Project reported that in 2006-2007, “Latino students across the country attended schools in which more than half the students were Latino. Ninety percent of Latino students in California were in such schools; 50 percent of them went to schools where Latinos made up 90 percent of the student body.”

In 2008 the California legislature passed a bill mandating the teaching of Mendez as part of the state’s social studies curriculum. Governor Schwartzenegger vetoed it.

There is a park and trail in Westminster dedicated to Mendez v. Westminster.

To accommodate the population growth, new schools were constructed. In 1949, Fullerton opened Valencia Park school. New schools and expansion of existing schools were often paid for with bonds.

Housing and Civil Rights

While large swaths of former orange groves were being removed to make way for buildings, the citrus industry was still a notable presence in Fullerton, and would remain so through the 1960s.

The war created a shortage of farm labor. This led to the establishment of the Bracero Program in 1942, in which thousands of Mexican men were recruited to work in agriculture and other vital industries. Local high school students were also enlisted to work in local agriculture.

Most of the Mexican men who came to pick oranges and other crops in Orange County lived in segregated camps that were built for them. One of the camps was located near downtown Fullerton, at Balcom and Commonwealth avenues. This became known as Campo Pomona.

“The Mexican nationals are in America as essential war workers and deserve to be treated as such. They may be recognized by the white badges they wear, with large black numbers below the letters “C.G.” These men are here to work and are inclined to cause no trouble,” the News-Tribune reported in 1943. “It is to the men’s advantage to live in the camps which have been provided for them. In fact, the county health department rightly insists upon this.”

An article in the News-Tribune expressed local concerns about the new arrivals: “Will the Mexican nationals remain in Orange county permanently? No! They are here by special contract and will return to Mexico at the expiration of that contract.”

The following 1943 article gives a good summation of the Bracero Program in Orange County:

Mexico’s contribution to the war effort in Orange County is now in full sway with the arrival of over 2,000 Mexican national “war workers” to aid in the harvesting of the county’s huge citrus crop.

This information was learned at a luncheon held at the new Mexican camp on S. Balcom St., in Fullerton yesterday when city and county officials and representatives of service clubs and growers gathered as guests of the Placentia Orange Growers Association to obtain facts regarding the new Mexican labor and for a tour of the camps in northern Orange county.

Realizing that the draft and the defense plants had taken a large portion of the available labor formerly employed in the harvesting of over 35,000 carloads of fruit in the county, the industry looked to the Mexican government for help. Under a contract entered into between the Citrus Growers Inc, representing 99 percent of the industry of the county, and federal agency handling the importation of Mexican nationals arrangements were completed early this-year to bring the 2,000 Mexican workers into the county.

Housed in seven camps in strategic sections of the county, these Mexicans are assigned to various packinghouses for the picking of the fruit. The largest of the camps, which were visited bv the group yesterday, are the Imperial camp, located south of La Habra, where 450 are housed and the camp south of Anaheim where 435 are being cared for.

The other camps in the northern section of the county are the Fullerton camp, accommodating 100 men and the Atwood school (in Placentia) where 25 are being housed.

The large presence of of Mexicans in Fullerton was sometimes protested by white residents. During the Bracero Program, some citrus growers sought to supplement their workforce with undocumented immigrants.

A 1946 census showed that, while Fullerton’s population was 12,173, there were only 96 Black people living in the city. Orange County has historically had a very low Black population due to housing (and other forms of) discrimination. 

In a 1946 student essay, African-American student Robert Goodwin (son of famous Fullerton author Ruby Berkeley Goodwin), described the specific type of housing discrimination Black people faced in Fullerton at this time:

“Many people in Fullerton do not know that there are only certain sections where Negroes and Mexicans can live. This is due to the fact that years ago when Fullerton was first being settled, real estate men found out that they got lower prices for the property where Mexicans lived; so they enacted a law called the Restrictive Covenant. This forced the Negroes and Mexicans into one small section. This condition has caused many deaths in Fullerton because it forces large and small families to live in houses that are run down, badly roofed, and badly lighted. Such conditions are play grounds for Tuburculosis and other diseases.

“At present we have two drives on. One is to feed the starving children of the world and the other is to clothe and house them. We are taught that “Charity begins at home.” Such should be the case in Fullerton. “Restrictive Covenants” have been in effect too long. It’s time the people of Fullerton stopped talking about equality and started practicing it. When I was small I used to wonder about our “Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag.” When I’d get to the part, “With Liberty and Justice for All,” I knew that part of the pledge didn’t apply to me.

“Let us of Fullerton strive to do better. Let’s make the future Mexican an Negro children of Fullerton know that the “Pledge of Allegiance to our Flag,” isn’t just a bunch of fancy words: but that it is their guarantee of equal rights in the country that their fathers along with their white brothers fought for.”

Many Mexican Americans at this time did not live in regular neighborhoods, but rather in segregated citrus camps, or colonias, and white people did not not want these anywhere near their neighborhoods.

In 1946, when a new colonia was planned for the west side of town (at Orangethorpe and Magnolia), local white residents successfully blocked its construction.

“A group of property owners appeared before the council and presented a petition signed by 148 property owners and renters in that neighborhood voicing their objections,” the News-Tribune reported. “Objections raised were that since the neighborhood was fully developed as a residential district, the establishment of the camp would diminish the value of the residential area; that the quality of the usual people in such camps was not satisfactory and would create unwelcome problems.”

George A. Graham, manager of Citrus Growers, Inc., the company attempting to build the camp, argued that it “was the only site large enough and that there may be need for 3000 workers for next season who needed a place to live.”

After hearing the residents’ objections, Fullerton City Council, and then the Orange County Planning Commission, denied approval of the proposed camp.

Today, when Americans think about the term “segregation” they are probably thinking about the South–where segregation was loudly and publicly enforced until it became officially illegal (though unofficially still practiced) through various court cases and Civil Rights legislation.

Many Americans are probably not as aware that housing and school segregation actually extended far beyond the south and affected every part of the United States. In the North and out West, segregation was kept quieter, but it was pervasive. 

By the 1920s, the most common method for enforcing residential segregation was something called “racially restrictive covenants.” These were agreements on the deeds of housing that prevented non-whites from renting or purchasing those homes. These covenants were standard practice among developers and realtors all over the US including in Fullerton.

Because of these covenants, for the first half of the 20th century, most neighborhoods in Fullerton were off-limits to people who weren’t white. Mexican-Americans, by far the largest minority group, were confined to agricultural work camps or carefully proscribed “barrios.”

However, in 1943, a Mexican American family in Fullerton–Alex and Esther Bernal–challenged this widespread practice, and won. The legal case was called Doss v. Bernal.

“Doss v. Bernal successfully challenged the residential segregation of Mexican Americans in Orange County, resulting in one of the earliest legal victories against racial housing covenants in the United States,” Robert Chao Romero and Luis Fernandez write in “Doss v. Bernal: Ending Mexican Apartheid in Orange County.”

This case preceded by five years the more well-known (at least among civil rights lawyers) Shelly v. Kraemer (1948), a Supreme Court case which declared racially restrictive covenants legally unenforceable.

Born in Corona, Alex Bernal was raised in Fullerton’s Truslow barrio. He married Esther Munoz De Anda in 1937 and the couple had two children, Irene and Maria Teresa. Alex worked as a produce truck driver. To accommodate their growing family, the Bernals decided to purchase a white stucco home at 200 E. Ash in a neighborhood called the Sunnyside Addition, near but outside the Truslow barrio.

Unbeknownst to the Bernals, this house, like all the others in the Sunnyside Addition, had a racially restrictive covenant which stated “That no portion of the said property shall at any time be used, leased, owned or occupied by any Mexicans or persons other than of the Caucasian race.”

Despite this restriction, the owners Joe and Velda Johnson sold the property to the Bernals, and the family moved into their new home–happily following their American dream.

“For many Mexican Americans, suburban homeownership symbolized a chance towards upward mobility,” Shannon Anderson writes in Remembering the Bernals: Untangling the Relationship Between Race, Space, and Public Memory in Fullerton, California. “Additionally, suburbanization allowed Mexican Americans to stake their claim to permanent American identity in defiance of the stereotype that all people of Mexican descent were migratory, temporary residents.”

But their white neighbors were not so happy.

“Within a week of living on East Ash Avenue, the Bernals returned home one evening to find that someone had broken into their new home and thrown all their possessions into the street,” Anderson writes. “In a separate incident, Esther answered the door to a man who described himself as an officer of the law. In a ‘vulgar manner,’ he told Esther that she and Alex should move out of their new house because the white residents didn’t want Mexicans living in their neighborhood.”

When this harassment failed to get the Bernals to move, all the neighbors signed a petition saying they wanted the Bernals out. When that didn’t work, some of their neighbors (the Dosses, Shrunks, and Hobsons) filed a lawsuit in the OC Superior Court “on behalf of a majority of all the other lot owners” of the Sunnyside Addition requesting legal enforcement of the racially restrictive housing covenant.

The neighbor’s legal complaint is a clear expression of the racist social attitudes of the time:

“The permitting of Mexicans and other races to live in and to use and occupy the residence buildings in said tract, would necessitate coming in contact with said other races, including Mexicans in a social and neighborhood manner, and that if said race and Mexican Residential use and restriction in said tract of land is broken, other Mexicans and persons of other races will soon move in and occupy residences in said Restricted residential district, and that the value of said residential property therein will be greatly depreciated…and for further reasons that such breach of said restrictions and conditions will greatly lower the social living standard.”

After being served this legal complaint, the Bernals still refused to leave. Instead, they hired lawyer David Marcus to defend their rights. Marcus, a Jewish lawyer who was married to a Mexican woman, would go on to represent Orange County Mexican American families fighting school segregation in the landmark 1947 case Mendez et al v. Westminster.

The first judge assigned to the Bernal’s case, Justice Morrison of Orange County, tried to issue a ruling against the Bernals before the case even went to trial. Marcus successfully petitioned to have an outside judge, Albert F. Ross, brought all the way down from Shasta County in northern California to hear the case.

The Doss v. Bernal trial took place in late August, 1943 in the Old Orange County courthouse in Santa Ana.

One of the central points of contention in the trial was whether the Bernals, and by extension all Mexican Americans, were “white.” Race is, of course, a social construct, not a biologically meaningful concept. It was meaningful insofar as it could be weaponized to exclude people like the Bernals. The plaintiffs’ lawyer Gus Hagenstein tried to prove that Mexican Americans were a part of a distinct race (not white), and Marcus argued that the Bernals should be classified as white. Both sides brought in anthropologists to try to sort this out.

One anthropologist explained that there were three types of races: European, Negroid, and Mongoloid, and that because the Bernals were neither Negroid or Mongoloid, they were more akin to European, and therefore white. 

This whole discussion of race ends up sounding pretty silly in retrospect, but it did have repercussions because, according to this “race” argument–covenants that excluded African Americans and Asians could still be considered valid.

Hagenstein also claimed that the presence of Mexican-Americans in suburban neighborhoods would do “irreparable damage” to property values. He brought in real estate professionals, including former Fullerton Mayor Harry Crooke, to attest to this. Marcus sought to refute harmful stereotypes of Mexican Americans in an attempt to show that the Bernals were respectable people who would not be a detriment to their neighbors or bring down property values.

When you really drill down into the logic behind these covenants, they turn out to be based mostly on fear, scientifically dubious ideas about race, and negative stereotypes. What they were mostly about was preserving white supremacy.

The arguments in the Bernal case that would have the most lasting significance had to do with Constitutional rights.

“Marcus cited the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution, which maintain that no one can be ‘deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.’ Unbeknownst to Marcus, this would be the first time that these amendments were successfully invoked in a lawsuit regarding racialized housing discrimination, beginning a trend in subsequent civil rights cases,” Anderson writes.

It was not lost on Marcus that this trial was taking place during World War II, when the United States was fighting against the racist and fascist Nazi Germany in defense of liberty and democracy. Some local Mexican American soldiers even attended the trial in a show of support for the Bernal family.

After a four-day trial, Judge Ross ruled in favor of the Bernals, declaring the racially restrictive covenant “null and void.” He further stated that such covenants were “injurious to the public good and society; violative of the fundamental form and concepts of democratic principles.” He agreed that the covenant violated the 5th and 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Despite the historic importance of this ruling, it’s interesting that the local press (the Fullerton News-Tribune) barely mentioned the case, devoting just two small articles to it. Neither the Orange County Register nor the Los Angeles Times even mentioned the case.

But other news outlets were paying attention. The Bernals got their picture in Time magazine, along with a story about their legal victory, and were even featured in the radio program “March of Time.”

An African American newspaper in Los Angeles, the California Eagle, featured the Bernal story prominently on the front page with headlines like “Race Property Bars Held Illegal!” and “Santa Ana Judge Says Restrictions No Good!”

Mexican Consul Manuel Aguilar was also paying attention, stating: “We consider any restriction on the rights of Mexicans to live where they please against the Good Neighbor Policy and against the Constitution of the United States.”

Interestingly, “One of the most detailed accounts of the Bernals’ trial comes from the San Antonio, Spanish-language newspaper, La Prensa,” Anderson writes. “Running on multiple pages, ‘Decision en Favor de Una Familia Mexicana Que Reside en Fullerton, California’ details the legal proceedings, including additional statements from Marcus and quotes from Ross’s ruling and subsequent lecture.”

Doss v. Bernal set legal precedent that would eventually lead to the 1948 Supreme Court case Shelley v. Kraemer, which ruled that racially restrictive covenants were legally unenforceable.

But it would be wrong to conclude that Doss v. Bernal ended housing discrimination and segregation in Fullerton or elsewhere.

“Although the outcome of Doss v. Bernal set legal precedent in determining that Mexican Americans are white and racialized housing covenants are unconstitutional, this ruling was not widely enforced in Orange County,” Anderson writes. “Rather, residential space would remain racialized within the region, with instances of racialized housing discrimination against nonwhite individuals cropping up in the decades to come.”

The fact of lingering housing discrimination is perhaps best represented by the fact that in 1964 (21 years after Doss v. Bernal), a majority of California voters passed Proposition 14, which sought to overturn the state’s Rumford Fair Housing Act. This action was later declared unconstitutional, but it sent a strong signal that a majority of white property owners were just fine with housing discrimination.

In a case of history repeating itself, Alex and Esther’s daughter Irene experienced housing discrimination in the 1960s “when she tried to rent an apartment in Fullerton and was refused by the landlord,” Anderson writes. “However, her husband, who was white, had no problem when he applied to rent out the same apartment.”

And although they won, the case was also devastating for the Bernal family.

“Alex and Esther no longer felt safe in their home…the Bernals were concerned that their newfound exposure would result in additional, ramped-up harassment,” Anderson writes. “Thus, the Bernals never got the chance to live in the home that they fought so hard for. Instead, the family of four moved into Alex’s parents’ house. After all that happened, the Bernals ended up back on Truslow Avenue—Fullerton’s segregated barrio designated for residents of color.”

Two years after the trial, Esther Bernal died of cancer at age 29. The stress of the trial likely exacerbated her declining health.

For a while after the trial, the Bernals received dozens of letters of support from all over the United States. 

But as time went on, the thing that disappeared in Fullerton was not housing segregation, but public memory of the Doss v. Bernal case.

The case is not mentioned in the two “official” Fullerton history books: Ostrich Eggs for Breakfast by Dora Mae Sim and Fullerton: A Pictorial History by Bob Ziebell.

Even Alex Bernal himself seemed to want to forget, rarely discussing the case, and putting all the letters, clippings, and court files into a box and storing it away for decades.

For nearly 70 years, the Doss v. Bernal case fell out of public memory, sort of like the Pastoral California mural on the side off the high school auditorium, which had been painted over for nearly 60 years.

It was not until 2010 that an intrepid reporter for OC Weekly named Gustavo Arellano and a CSUF grad student named Luis Fernandez re-discovered the story and brought it back into public memory. 

In a remarkable piece of local history reporting, Arellano’s “Mi Casa Es Mi Casa: How Fullerton produce-truck driver Alex Bernal helped change the course of American civil rights” re-introduced Orange County to Doss v. Bernal.

For his article, Arellano interviewed Bernal family members, pored through Alex’s box of old letters and files, and unearthed old news stories about the case.  

Fernandez would go on to co-author an excellent 2012 article for UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center, entitled “Doss v. Bernal: Ending Mexican Apartheid in Orange County.”

The story of Doss v. Bernal was featured in a 2022 book entitled A People’s Guide to Orange County by Gustavo Arellano, Elaine Lewinnek, and Thuy Vo Dang.

In 2023, CSUF graduate student Shannon Anderson wrote a Master’s thesis entitled Remembering the Bernals: Untangling the Relationship Between Race, Space, and Public Memory in Fullerton, California. Her study highlights omissions in previous narratives, like the role of Esther Bernal in purchasing the house, and her deposition during the trial.

That same year, the Orange County Hispanic Bar Association (OCHBA) hosted a live reenactment of the Doss v. Bernal trial.

Anderson describes how in some cases, popular retellings have oversimplified the Bernal story into one of total victory, of having ended housing discrimination and segregation.

A 2023 article in the Fullerton Observer, reporting on the reenactment of the trial, was titled “A Reenactment of the 1943 Historical Trial that ended housing discrimination.” 

“The issue with this is that the Bernals’ trial did not immediately put an end to housing discrimination. Although the case set legal precedent that would eventually go on to influence Supreme Court cases, racist housing practices would not be solved, but rather reified over the decades,” Anderson writes. “Also, the Bernal family suffered immensely from their experience with racialized exclusion.”

The problem with seeing the Bernal’s story as one of total victory is that it may prevent us from understanding how housing discrimination still persists.

“Perpetuating the idea that segregation is an issue of the past when it still exists, just in a different form, allows contemporary forms of racialized housing segregation to continue to operate without objection,” Anderson writes. “While racial segregation is no longer enforced on an institutional or legal level, de facto segregation continues to be upheld through longstanding cultural ideas, economic inequality, and social practices.”

A stark expression of this is the racial wealth gap. In 2019, the average income of a Caucasian household in the U.S. was about $188,200, while the average income of a Mexican-American household was $36,100. This gap dictates which neighborhoods Mexican-Americans and people of color can live in.

Rather than seeing Doss v. Bernal as something that ended housing discrimination and segregation, it is more accurate to see the case as part of a decades-long struggle of chipping away at the enduring effects of white supremacy.

There have been two attempts to commemorate the Bernal house as a historically significant property under the Mills Act, in 2010 and 2020, but both attempts were unsuccessful.

“Commemoration of the site would require Fullerton to come to terms with its shameful, racist past,” Anderson writes.

Growth and the Post-War Boom

The 1940 US census found that population growth in Fullerton had slowed significantly during the Great Depression, with a population of about 11,200.

“Discussion of population changes brought out the fact that elementary school registration is nearly 600 below the total of 1930,” the News-Tribune reported. “It also was pointed out that two large Mexican colonies which once flourished on the former Bastanchury ranch, no longer exist and that occupants do not live in Fullerton.”

Fullerton’s two large dams (the Fullerton Dam and the Brea Dam) were completed in 1941, as part of a larger countywide flood control program.

The dams were built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

In 1941, Fullerton (being a member of the Metropolitan Water District) began to receive water from the Colorado River, courtesy of the Colorado River Aqueduct.

The post-war period has been rightly called the “Boom Years.” Fullerton grew quickly. It was a perfect location to build a suburban middle class lifestyle. By 1946, Fullerton’s population was a little over 12,000, with room to grow.

“Large, previously undeveloped areas are being subdivided and plans call for the erection of houses at the rate of city blocks at a time. In addition to lesser buildings programs on W. Wilshire and W. Amerige avenues, Jewett Brothers are preparing a tract on N. Basque ave for construction of 78 homes for sale to war veterans,” the News-Tribune reported in 1946. “In the northern hills of Fullerton is one of the largest subdivisions of its kind in the entire west. Eighteen hundred acres of the Sunny Hills Ranch in this are area available for development of residences. According to planners of this subdivision of rolling hills and orange groves, it will make up one of the most exclusive residential areas in California and will attract new citizens to the extent of doubling the population of the city of Fullerton.”

To accommodate this growth, the city also spent a lot of money expanding the city’s infrastructure, including roads and sewers.

In 1941, Fullerton finally completed construction of City Hall at the corner of Highland and Commonwealth. The building now serves as the police station.

The building was designed by architect by G. Stanley Wilson, and was funded by the WPA, a New Deal federal program.

In addition to housing various city government offices, the building also was home to the Chamber of Commerce, the local welfare department, the police department, and the city jail.

The City Council chambers were also used as a court room for use by the city judge or justice of the peace.

“Most outstanding of city projects to be undertaken is street development, calling for an expenditure of nearly $1,000,000 within the next 10 years,” the News-Tribune stated in 1946. “Under the program being considered the city will build new streets, widen, resurface, and improve existing arterials.”

Fullerton continued to benefit from various New Deal programs, including construction of a new library on the site of the original Carnegie Library (built in 1907). The Library, built in 1940, is now the Fullerton Museum Center. Other public works projects underway in 1940 included flood control measures like construction of the Brea and Fullerton dams and paving of barrancas.

In 1940, the sprawling Sunny Hills Ranch, formerly part of the Bastanchury Ranch, was partly subdivided into residential housing. Unfortunately, the properties had racially restrictive housing covenants.

For those thousands of GIs who were eventually discharged, a new problem emerged—a housing crisis. There was not enough housing for all the vets, and it much of it was too expensive. Both federal and local governments responded by building lots of new housing and establishing programs like the GI Bill that made is affordable for vets to get home loans and go back to college.

Here in Fullerton, homebuilding increased dramatically after the war, and some of the new homes were explicitly for veterans, such as the 25-unit College View adjacent to Fullerton College.

Because housing production and affordability was a national and local priority, both federal and state governments had some form of rent control.

As both Fullerton and Anaheim grew, annexation fights began between the two cities to incorporate land between the two cities. The first salvo of this fight occurred when Anaheim city officials convened a special Saturday session in 1948 to annex a 60-foot strip close to the south border of Fullerton.

In an editorial called “Skulduggery in Anaheim,” the Fullerton News-Tribune reported:

“When a city council finds it necessary to meet in special session on a Saturday, it is either a case of dire emergency or some kind of skulduggery. Anaheim’s city council met in special session last Saturday.

The business before the council consisted of passing a resolution to annex a strip of land 60 feet wide along the south side of Orangethorpe from Highland avenue to a point approximately midway between Harvard [Lemon] and Raymond avenue where a finger of Anaheim’s north city limits extends.

That a city council would hold a special session to pass a resolution to annex a piece of land which seemingly has no immediate bearing o the welfare of Anaheim, such action can hardly be called a “dire emergency.” That leaves only one category under which it can fall: skulduggery!

One need only to study a few of the facts behind the action by the Anaheim council to understand why it went to the trouble of a special Saturday session.

The area along Highway 101 between Fullerton and Anaheim is unincorporated. Its growth and development in recent years have made it obvious that it will some day become a part of some municipality, which would mean either Fullerton or Anaheim. An area of this nature needs the advantages that any city offers: fire and police protection, trash and garbage collection, sewer and water facilities.

Sentiment for becoming part of a municipality has run high in recent years, and especially more since a Metropolitan Water District edict forbids any new users outside the city limits. This ruling checks and futurity development of property in this unincorporated area until it becomes. Part of one city or another.

On September 11 of this year property owners took legal steps for becoming part of Fullerton by filing a notice of intention to circulate a petition relative to annexation of the territory. With enough signatures to the petition the matter could be put to the vote of the people of the area concerned. The people could choose between remaining unincorporated (with a chance of later joining Anaheim) or joining with Fullerton. Property owners who are working to initiate the petition say that the vote would be overwhelmingly for Fullerton.

It is no secret that Anaheim has coveted this territory. It would stand to lose by letting the people express their desires at the ballot box. With the handwriting on the wall, there was only one course for Anaheim to follow: throw up a legal roadblock between the territory and the Fullerton city limits by annexing a piece of land between the two.

It is reminiscent of Hitler’s tactics in instituting his famous “JA” and “neon” ballots during European plebiscites.

Fullerton officials sought to head-off this land-grab by meeting with Anaheim officials, but their efforts came to naught.

It would fall to property owners to sue Anaheim over the annexation move, which they won. But the fight was not over.

The second biggest local news story of 1949 was the annexation fight between Fullerton and Anaheim over a strip of “no man’s land” that once separated the two towns. At stake was future tax dollars from housing and industrial development. After much legal maneuvering, court fights, resident protests, and council meetings, Fullerton won the fight over the coveted land.

The Labor Strikes of 1945-46

Amid all the jubilation and relief following the end of World War II, some of the largest labor strikes in American history swept major industries like cars, oil, motion pictures, coal, steel, canning, and more. Hundreds of thousands of workers struck–with many of them gaining the kind of strong union powers (like collective bargaining for better wages, benefits, and working conditions) that helped build America’s post-war blue collar middle class.

Both the Fullerton News-Tribune and local business elites tended to portray strikers negatively, sometimes associating strikers or unions with communism.

Powerful business interests, like the Associated Farmers and and Employers Industrial Relations Council, who had spent the depression colluding with government to suppress strikes and labor movements, did their part to paint the strikers as dangerous, lawless radicals and communists.

The labor troubles reached Fullerton, with over 400 workers at Hunt Bros. going on strike in 1946. The strikes affected Fullerton in other ways by (briefly) stopping the postal service, travel, and shipping of goods.

“The processing of oranges in Fullerton has been stopped at some plants and greatly retarded in others due to the railroad strike,” the News-Tribune reported in 1946. “The California Fruit Distributors have stopped picking and packing until arrangement can be made to receive oranges in trucks…There is not much danger of losing the crop as the oranges are not too ripe yet.”

The strikes affected peoples’ ability to buy certain foods, like meat. In response, congress passed a “tough” anti-strike bill, the Taft-Hartley Act.

The Cold War

In 1945, the Axis powers surrendered, and the Allies won the War.

Fullertonians decided to honor the war dead with a memorial in Hillcrest Park, listing the 54 names of those Fullertonians who died, inscribed on a huge sequoia tree cross section.

Perhaps the thorniest post-war question was what to do now that the atomic bomb existed–a weapon that could theoretically destroy the world. On a more positive note, congress passed the GI Bill in 1944, which provided veterans with financial aid for housing, education, and more.

The first frosts of the Cold War were being felt between the capitalist west and large communist countries like Russia and (eventually) China, despite the fact that these were our allies during the War. The existence of the atomic bomb, and Russia’s attempts to create one for itself, exacerbated these tensions.

This tension between the US and Russia would also spark increased espionage and paranoia which in the US would eventually become the Red Scare.

Defeated Axis powers Germany and Japan were occupied by Allied powers to ensure they would demilitarize and follow the political path the Allies wanted them to follow.

Both German and Japanese war criminals were tried and executed.

Just as World War I caused the end of old empires like the Ottoman Empire, the end of World War II brought about the beginning of decolonization of European empires like the British and Spanish. India, a former British colony, would achieve independence in 1947.

While European colonial empires were losing some of their power and global reach, the post World War II era saw a rise in the United States’ international military and economic presence around the world. This did not usually take the form of overt colonization (which was becoming out of fashion), but rather took the form of military bases, plus increased US business and political presence globally. Some might call this a new kind of empire.

A young Republican congressman from Yorba Linda named Richard Nixon (who attended Fullerton High School) was making a name for himself by fanning the flames of anti-communism.

“Disclosure of Communist infiltration in high places in the administration in Washington will be made by Congressman Richard M. Nixon, “working” member of the Thomas Committee which unearthed the national intrigue, at a dinner meeting Oct. 13 at 7pm in Santa Ana Masonic Temple,” the News-Tribune reported. “The committee will resume hearings in Washington later and its probe will be largely on the findings Nixon makes. It will mark the first public appearance at which Capt. Nixon has talked in Orange County, although he was guest Oct. 1 of the Chamber of Commerce at Yorba Linda, his home town, where he attended school as a boy. The meeting is to be under the sponsorship of the Orange County Republican Assembly, now headed by Roscoe G. Hewitt of Santa Ana, who recently succeeded Hilmer Lodge of Fullerton as president.”

Local Politics

President Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to an unprecedented four terms in office. He died in 1945 during his fourth term, and Harry S. Truman took office. In 1947, Congress approved the 22nd Amendment, which bars presidents from serving more than two terms.

During the 1940 election, Republican candidate Wendell Wilkie made a brief train stop in Fullerton, where he greeted a large crowd.

Those who ran and were elected to City Council throughout the 1940s were all white businessmen who tended to be fairly conservative politically. Here’s a breakdown of who was elected during this period and what line of business they were in:

1940: William Montague, Walter Muckenthaler, and Hans Kohlenberger.

1942: Alfred Beazley, Carl Bowen, Hans Kohlenberger (mayor), William Montague, and Walter Muckenthaler.

1944: Verne Wilkinson, William Montague, and Hans Kohlenberger. Montague, an orange rancher, was selected as Mayor.

1946: Homer Bemis and Irvin C. Chapman (son of Fullerton’s first mayor and powerful citrus grower Charles C. Chapman) were elected to city council in 1946. Bemis was “engaged in real estate, building, brokerage, and development,” according to the News-Tribune. “In the past four years he has been actively engaged in the construction of homes, having built more than 100 homes within this period, with his associates.” Chapman, of course, helped manage the citrus and business empire his father built. Local drug store owner Verne Wilkinson was chosen as mayor.

In 1947, Sam Collins (from Fullerton) was chosen to be Speaker of the California State Assembly. Collins was a very influential politician in Sacramento. He remains the longest-serving Republican Speaker in history.

In 1948, Verne Wilkinson, Hugh Warden, and Thomas Eadington were elected to City Council. Irvin “Ernie” Chapman, son of Fullerton’s first mayor Charles C. Chapman, was chosen as mayor. 

Culture and Social Life

In 1940, social clubs were popular in Fullerton, including Rotary, Kiwanis, Lions, Business and Professional Women’s Club, Fullerton Junior Chamber of Commerce, American Legion, 20-30 club, Ebell Club, YMCA, YWCA, Masons, Odd Fellows, and more.

For entertainment, Fullertonians went to see movies at the Fox Theater.

In 1947, a new theater was built—the Wilshire Theater, which has its own interesting history. This eventually was replaced by apartments.

Leo Fender, who had a popular radio repair shop in town, was beginning to design and manufacture electric Fender guitars, although his ads in the local newspaper focused on radios and records.

Throughout the 1940s, minor league baseball teams from the Pacific Coast League played games at Amerige Park–like the Portland Beavers, the Los Angeles Angels, the Hollywood Stars, and the Sacramento Solons. Local teams also used the field, including the Fullerton Firemen.

I’m currently reading a newly published book called Spring Training in Fullerton, which is all about this subject. Stay tuned!

Local Pilots Set World Endurance Record

Perhaps the biggest local news event of 1949 was the flight endurance record set by local pilots Dick Reidel and Bill Barris who flew their plane the Sunkist Lady for 1008 hours.

The following is from a work-in-progress about the history of Fullerton. You can support my ongoing research and writing on Patreon.

As part of my research into Fullerton history, I like to read books about local and California history to help give broader context for what was happening here. I just finished reading a book called Mendez v. Westminster: School Desegregation and Mexican American Rights by Philippa Strum, which is about a landmark court case in Orange County which held that segregation of Mexican-American children into separate schools was illegal. This case, which was decided in 1947, preceded the more well-known Brown v. Board of Education case by seven years.

Mexican-Americans in California

Mexicans have lived in California for hundreds of years. In fact, prior to the Mexican-American War (1846-48), California (and much of the Southwest) was part of Mexico. Spanish was spoken here before English was.

After California became a U.S. state in 1850, Mexican-Americans continued to live here and to migrate north from Mexico, seeking jobs and opportunity.

“Labor agents recruited workers in Mexico and arranged transportation to the United States for them,” Strum writes. “By the mid-1920s, Mexican workers constituted the bulk of farm laborers throughout the citrus groves of southern California.”

Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans often faced housing, educational, and social discrimination and segregation in California, and they were often paid lower wages than their Anglo counterparts.

“Mexican Americans were not chosen for juries. They were not welcome in places of public accommodation such as movie theaters and swimming pools–or, if they were permitted in, they were restricted to the balconies of the movie houses and special “Mexican days” at the pools. Restrictive covenants prevented them from moving into better “white” neighborhoods,” Strum writes. “Many of them settled in poorer neighborhoods–colonias–next to citrus groves or vegetable fields. The Mexican farm laborers who lived on the outskirts of Anglo towns in Orange County in the 1930s found themselves in neighborhoods that for the most part lacked sewers, gas for cooking and heating, paved streets, or sidewalks.”

Nonetheless, Mexican-Americans formed strong and dynamic communities. For more on this, check out my book report on Gilbert Gonzalez’s book Labor and Community: Mexican Citrus Workers Villages in a Southern California County, 1900-1950.

When the Great Depression hit, Mexican-Americans were often scapegoated as taking jobs from white workers, and the Hoover administration began a mass deportation program in 1931.

“An estimated one-third of the entire American Mexican population, comprising more than 500,000 people, left voluntarily or otherwise, even though perhaps 60 percent of them were American citizens. In 1930 at least 2,000 ‘Mexicans’ were repatriated from Orange County alone,” Strum writes.

School Segregation, Southwest-Style

In the early 20th century, local school districts created separate “Mexican” schools.

“By the mid-1920s there were 15 such schools in Orange County, all but one located in the citrus-growing area that would be involved in Mendez v. Westminster,” Strum writes, “by 1931 more than 80 percent of all California school districts with a significant number of Mexican (non-American citizen) and Mexican-American students were segregated, usually through the careful drawing of school zone boundaries by school boards that had been pressured by Anglo residents. The ostensible rationale for the separate schools was the children’s lack of proficiency in English.”

These schools were often of lower quality, both in facilities and materials provided. They “were usually built of wood, while the ‘white’ schools were made out of brick or block masonry…Books and other equipment were castoffs from the ‘white’ schools.”

Many of the “Mexican” schools had shorter hours so that children could join their parents in the fields.

Because of these factors, “Many students had to repeat grades, and they dropped out of school as soon as they could.”

Many Mexican schools, including those in Fullerton, had “Americanization” programs that focused on basic English, math, sanitation, and citizenship. Girls were trained to do housework.

“School boards throughout the state operated on the assumption that segregating what were viewed as the underachieving Mexican-American students was a good thing,” Strum writes. “By 1934, more than 4,000 pupils in Orange County–25 percent of the county’s total student enrollment–were Mexican or Mexican-American. Seventy percent of the county’s students with Spanish surnames were registered in the 15 Orange County elementary schools that had 100 percent Mexican enrollment.”

Unlike elementary schools, high schools in Orange County were, for the most part, integrated. For example, Isabel Martinez graduated from Fullerton High School in 1931, the first Mexican-American to graduate from FUHS.

The Times They are ‘A Changin’

During World War II between 300,000-500,000 Mexican American men served in the armed forces. This experience of fighting against fascism abroad instilled in many Mexican-Americans a determination to fight for their rights here at home.

One Mexican-American veteran said, “We’d just been at war. We didn’t like it when we came home and found out we’d risked our lives, but now we weren’t treated equally, and that our children wouldn’t be getting as good an education as the white student was going to be getting.”

A group of veterans in Santa Ana created the Latin American Organization (LAO), to combat school segregation. The cultural climate was changing.

Gonzalo Mendez was born in Mexico in 1913. He and his family migrated north in the 1920s, settling in Westminster, California. He married his wife Felicitas (an American citizen born in Puerto Rico) in 1935. They opened the Arizona Cafe in a Mexican barrio of Santa Ana.

In 1943, Gonzalo and Felicitas leased a 40-acre asparagus farm from the Munemitsus, a Japanese-American family who had been “relocated” to an internment camp. The Mendez’s traveled to the Arizona internment camp to meet the Munemitsus, who agreed to lease their farm.

There is an excellent children’s book about the friendship between Sylvia Mendez and Aki Munemitsu called Sylvia & Aki.

The Mendezes and their relatives the Vidaurris worked the farm. Meanwhile, Gonzalo became a naturalized citizen.

In 1945, Soleldad Vidaurri went to the Westminster Main School to enroll her two daughters–Alice and Virginia–and her niece and two nephews–Sylvia Mendez, Gonzalo Mendez Jr., and Jerome Mendez–in their neighborhood public school, Westminster Main Elementary School.

“The Vidaurri girls were light-skinned. The Mendez children, however, were visibly darker and, to the teacher, their last name was all too clearly Mexican. They would have to be taken to the “Mexican” [Hoover Elementary] school a few blocks away,” Strum writes.

“We were too dark,” Gonzalo Jr. later recalled.

Carey McWilliams, who wrote a history of Mexican Americans, described the Anglo Westminster school as “handsomely equipped” with “green lawns and shrubs” whereas the “Mexican” Hoover School had “meager equipment [that] matches the inelegance of its surroundings.”

Gonzalo, the father of Sylvia, Gonzalo Jr, and Jerome did not want his children to go to the “Mexican” school, especially because Westminster Main was closer to their house.

“Gonzalo went to the Westminster school the day after his children were turned away and spoke to the principal, but his children were still not permitted to register. The following day he went to the Westminster School Board, where he was equally unsuccessful. Eventually he went to the Orange County school board, again to no avail,” Strum writes.

Henry Rivera, who worked for the Mendezes, told Gonzalo about lawyer David C. Marcus, who had worked for the Mexican consulates in Los Angeles and San Diego.

Marcus, the son of immigrants himself, had experienced anti-Semitism in his life. He was married to Maria Yrma Davila, a Mexican immigrant.

The Mendezes joined with other families in Garden Grove, Santa Ana, and El Modena and brought a class action suit against the four school districts, their superintendents, and all the members of the school boards on behalf of “some 5,000 persons of Mexican and Latin descent,” all of them citizens and residents of the four districts.

The petitioners were Mendez and his children Sylvia, Gonzalo Jr, and Jerome; William Guzman and his son Billy; Frank Palomino and his children Arthur and Sally; Thomas Estrada and his children Clara, Roberto, Francisco, Sylvia, Daniel, and Evalina; and Lorenzo Ramirez and his sons Ignacio, Silverio, and Jose. 

Marcus argued that the segregation of Mexican students deprived them of their federal right to equal treatment by the state, as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. He also argued that Orange County was violating California law which at the time allowed segregation only of Asian and Indian children. Mexicans were considered “white.”

Marcus used the wording “Mexican or Latin descent or extraction” rather than “race.”

In 1945, segregation on the basis of race was officially legal–this was before Brown v. Board of Education.

The case was assigned to Judge Paul J. McCormick.

The lawyers for the school districts argued that the segregation of Mexican-American students was appropriate and for their benefit because the children “were unfamiliar with and unable to speak the English language” when they began school.

Their responses sometimes relied on stereotypes of Mexican-Americans.

The Garden Grove response stated that “a large percentage of said persons [Mexican-Americans] residing in said communities have not been instructed in or are familiar with the proper rules of personal hygiene.”

They also argued that segregation was merely the result of where the students lived, often in segregated neighborhoods.

The thrust of the district’s defense was “that the segregation was based on lack of language proficiency rather than ethnicity.”

The Trial Begins

Early in the trial, Marcus showed that the Mendez children spoke English.

As the trial began, Judge McCormick stated, “The claim here is that they have just taken the Mexican people, their children, en masse, and drawn a line around where they live and said to them, ‘Now you have to go to a school in this place here. You can’t go to a school here where the others who aren’t of this origin go.’

He quoted from Meyer v. Nebraska: “The protection of the Constitution extends to those who speak other languages as well as to those born with English on the tongue.”

Manuela Ochoa was the first witness on the stand, stating that her children had been denied entry to Lincoln school.

“Marcus wanted to attack segregation itself, and to do so, he first had to demonstrate that the school districts were systematically segregating the students on the basis of ethnicity, without reference to their language or other academic abilities,” Strum writes. “That would knock out the districts’ claim of language facility as the basis for the separation. As Mrs. Ochoa indicated, the children were given no tests before being assigned to ‘Mexican’ schools.”

Garden Grove superintendent James L. Kent, who had written his master’s thesis (called “Segregation of Mexican School Children in Southern California”) argued that all “Mexican” students should be segregated.

“He believed Mexicans constituted a separate and nonwhite race,” Strum writes. “He wrote that Mexicans were ‘an alien race that should be segregated socially’ and this had been accomplished in Southern California ‘by designating certain sections where they might live and restricting these sections to them…Segregation into separate schools seems to be the ideal situation for both parties concerned.’”

Marcus, who had read Kent’s thesis, sought to show the court that Kent’s views, “were based on racism rather than on legitimate pedagogic considerations.”

Kent admitted that there was no special training of the teachers at the “Mexican schools,” and that the teachers there did not speak Spanish. He “admitted that the Garden Grove District intentionally segregated its Mexican American students, regardless of their English proficiency.”

Kent also, stunningly, “admitted that he believed Mexican children were inferior to white children in their educational ability, and that he did not believe Mexican children were white.”

Kent stated that the Mexican child, on average, “is lower intellectually than the child of Anglo-Saxon descent.”

Marcus asked Santa Ana Superintendent of Schools Frank Henderson how the district determined which children were Mexican American. 

“By their names,” Henderson replied.

Felicitas Mendez testified: “We always tell our children they are Americans, and I feel I am an American myself, and so is my husband, and we thought that they shouldn’t be segregated like that, they shouldn’t be treated the way they are . So we thought we were doing the right thing and just asking for the right thing to put our children together with the rest of the children there.”

Professor Ralph L. Beals, chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of UCLA testified that “Segregation defeats the purpose of teaching English, certainly, to the Spanish-speaking child.”

Beals said that segregation also impeded “the assimilation of the child to American customs and ways…a feeling of antagonism is built up in children, when they are segregated in this fashion…The disadvantage of segregation, it would seem to me, would come primarily from the reinforcing of stereotypes of inferiority-superiority, which exists in the population as a whole. The advantages [of desegregation], properly handled, would come, then, in the breaking down of those stereotypes and in the broadening of understanding of people of different cultural background and the understanding of different cultures.”

Judge McCormick asked what would happen if children with varying degrees of facility in English were mixed together. Wouldn’t that be better, in terms of Americanization, than segregation? Yes, Beals replied, “with regard to the Americanization program, the mixed group would become much more rapidly aware of the main trends in American life.”

Marcus’ closing statement was powerful: “Of what avail is our theory of democracy if the principles of equal rights, of equal protection and equal obligations are not practiced…of what avail are the thousands upon thousands of lives of Mexican-Americans who sacrificed their all for their country in this great ‘War of Freedom’ if freedom of education denies the equality of all?”

Judge McCormick handed down his opinion on February 18, 1946, seven months after the trial ended. The verdict was a resounding victory–one that upheld all the plaintiffs’ arguments–segregation violated the state’s own laws.

“The equal protection of the laws pertaining to the public school system in California,” he wrote, “is not provided by furnishing in separate schools the same technical facilities, text books and courses of instruction to children of Mexican ancestry that are available to the other public school children regardless of their ancestry.”

Their actions, he concluded, reflected “a clear purpose to arbitrarily discriminate against the pupils of Mexican ancestry and to deny them the equal protection of the laws.”

He wrote that Mexican-Americans as a group were protected by the Fourteenth Amendment and could not legitimately be discriminated against.

From the Court of Appeals to the State Legislature

The four school districts appealed the decision. 

Strum writes that the Mendez decision “had a marked impact on local Mexican-American organizing efforts.” In Ontario, Mexican-American protests led the town to desegregate its Grove School. Similar protests took place in Riverside.

“In Pomona, a group of 50 young Mexican-Americans, most off them WWII veterans, created a Unity League to help organize against discrimination and to push the candidacies of Mexican-americans running for office,” Strum writes.

The case also caused a strong reaction in the legal community.

The NAACP, the American Jewish Congress (AJC), the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), and the national office of the ACLU all supported the case at the appeals level with amicus briefs.

Robert Carter of the NAACP later said of his amicus brief, “I used it as a trial run for Brown.”

Robert W. Kenney, attorney general of California, submitted an amicus brief in support of the Mendez decision.

The Appeals court upheld McCormick’s decision that the school districts had violated California law. The districts would have to desegregate or carry their appeal to the US Supreme Court.

The school districts did not appeal the Ninth Circuit’s decision to the US Supreme Court.

“Because the case had been decided on the basis of California law rather than the Fourteenth Amendment, the case carried legal weight only in California,” Strum writes. “It had a substantial impact nonetheless.”

In 1947 the California state legislature passed a bill ending segregation based on race, repealing laws permitting the segregation of Indian and Asian children.

The Orange County school districts more or less complied with the ruling.

“Anglo parents in El Modena, however, continued to resist desegregation. Many transferred their children to other districts; later, they managed to have part of the district itself transferred to the nearby, all-white Tustin district,” Strum writes.

Conclusion

“The case got the Mendez children and other Mexican-American children in California the education that enabled so many of them to become lawyers, judges, doctors, nurses, teachers, and legislators,” Strum writes. “For them, Mendez made the American dream reality.”

When the war ended, the Munemitsu family returned to Westminster, and got their farm back from the Mendez family, as agreed.

The three Mendez children went to school at Westminster Man, which now housed all the district’s children in grades one through four.

“Sylvia went on to college and became a registered pediatric nurse. Jerome joined the armed forces and served as a Green Beret for many years; Gonzalo Jr became a master carpenter,” Strum writes.

Sylvia Mendez dedicated herself to educating the public about the case.

In 2007, the US Postal Service issued a stamp entitled “Mendez v. Westminster 1947: Toward Equality in Our Schools.”

Strum acknowledges that the struggle for school desegregation has not always been linear, noting the persistent fact of de facto segregation due to historic housing patterns: “As of the first decade of the 21st century, the majority of Mexican-Americans–like far too many African American students–were in [de facto] segregated urban schools.”

Gary Orfield and Chungmei Lee of UCLA’s Civil Rights Project reported that in 2006-2007, “Latino students across the country attended schools in which more than half the students were Latino. Ninety percent of Latino students in California were in such schools; 50 percent of them went to schools where Latinos made up 90 percent of the student body.”

In 2008 the California legislature passed a bill mandating the teaching of Mendez as part of the state’s social studies curriculum. Governor Schwartzenegger vetoed it.

There is a park and trail in Westminster dedicated to Mendez v. Westminster.

“The tale of what these people accomplished begins on land owned by Japanese-Americans and leased by Mexican-Americans. As it unfolds, the nation’s largest African-American civil rights organization becomes involved, and so do associations of Jewish-Americans and Japanese-Americans. It is not a melting pot story, but more like a kaleidoscope,” Strum writes.