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Board of Trustees meet
The Lemon Grove Board of Trustees met to discuss a plan to build a new school for the Mexican students at Lemon Grove which received support from the Chamber of Commerce. -
Board members meet again
Board members held a "special meeting" because they believed that the Mexican students were the cause of sanitary and moral mess at the school and also to discuss the "overcrowding" at the school. -
Jerome T. Green blocks doors of Lemon Grove
The principal of Lemon Grove stood in front of the doors of the school to greet the White students and to tell the Mexican students that their belongings had been moved to their new school. The new school was a two room building that the students called, "caballeriza" which means barnyard. Parents were not notified of the transfer and were outraged when they found out that their children were moved out of Lemon Grove Grammar School because they are Mexican or of Mexican descent. -
Parents fight back
The parents tried to fight back but didn't have a voice so they enlisted the help of Mexican Counsel Enrique Ferreira who brought on 2 attorneys, Fred C. Noon and A.C. Brinkley. Parents told their children not to go to school because of the new transfer but later on, students would be expelled for missing more than 20 days from the new school. 70 students refused to attend the school and only 3 students did attend. -
Assembly Bill of Carpinteria
The Assemblyman Bliss of Carpinteria introduced a bill so that Mexican and Mexican-American students would be classified as "Indians" The California Education Code did allow schools be segregated for Japanese, Indians, Chinese, and Mongolian students. This was changed after the Mendez appeal in the 1940s. -
Trial
The case was heard in Superior Court of San Diego County with Claude Chambers as the judge. Judge Chambers indicted the members of the board and each member of the board denied the allegations. They argued that Mexican students' language, Spanish, was a handicap and that they just wanted to keep them separate from White students to avoid competition. The board said that they were also looking out for the safety and welfare of students by placing the school in the Mexican community. -
Judge rules in favor of Mexican community
Judge Chambers ruled in favor of the plaintiff and all claims made by the board members were disproved. Students returned to Lemon Grove Grammar School and the "barnyard" was later demolished and became a parking lot. Lemon Grove School is now a middle school. -
80th Anniversary
March 2011 marked the 80th anniversary of the Lemon Grove Incident. This video makes a lot of good points about the Mexican community and how significant this case was for Latinos. Parents didn't give up on their children's education and fought for equal education. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=182&v=92DiTCecPlk -
Significance
This event was significant in history because it was the first recorded case of desegregation in a school. The parents of the Mexican students didn't give and they fought for their children. They didn't have much of a voice but they didn't give up. They immigrated from Mexico after the Mexican Revolution and came together as a community to fight for equal education. -
Quote
I really liked this quote because not only did it point out a very real topic about ELLs language proficiency but also that the board members could not answer Judge Chamber question. It's important for ELLs to be in classrooms with native English speakers because they pick up survival language and their native speaking peers are there to help them. Source
