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Historical Sketch

Civil Rights struggles after World War II created the climate for the landmark 1954 United States Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision that overturned nineteenth-century law. The court ruled that educational facilities "which separate Blacks from whites are inherently unequal." As a result, in 1963, a Black student in Los Angeles by the name of Mary Crawford, sued the Los Angeles School Board for segregating and denying her equal opportunity under this new law. Years of litigation followed as several L.A. boards of education appealed this high court decision.

In 1970, Judge Alfred Gitelson ordered the board to create a plan for integration. When the board came up with a scheme based entirely on voluntary busing, the Judge said it was "designed to show extremely high cost, create disruption, and was designed to fail- not a plan at all." Finally in 1976, the California Supreme Court ordered the board to desegregate, and a new Judge, Paul Egly, ordered that a new plan be submitted to him by December 1976.

Over that summer of 1976, about 40 teachers, parents, and community workers met informally in a crowded unpainted room in a building in central L.A. Appointed by the Los Angeles Board of Education to study the district and recommend a plan for desegregation, the group not only monitored the activities of the Citizen's Advisory Committee, but it also scheduled meetings with the public to provide for airing of opinions and grievances. Knowing that its suggestions could be readily rejected, the committee became cautious and tried not to advise anything too sweeping. Nevertheless, while it did produce a method and schedule whereby some schools could be desegregated, the board promptly put the committee's proposals aside and dismissed them.

Two methods of avoiding court ordered desegregation emerged right from the start: first, an integrated school was defined as one where as much as 80% of one race attended. Second, special permits (PWT) allowed students to travel voluntarily on school buses in order to integrate schools. Close to twenty-five million dollars would be spent on a nonplan that would place the weight for change on the students.

The study group took the name of the Integration Project and began attending public meetings, writing and circulating informational bulletins, and calling the attention of teachers and parents' to the board's failure to obey the law. The group's plan brought together the major ethnic groups in the city: Asian, Black, Latino, and white. They included suggestions for staff development, use of federal and state funds for human relations, training and updating of facilities and material. Most importantly, though, the group was able to clearly establish the need for multi-cultural and bilingual education.

The school board's position on integration emerged quite clearly: it was bad for education and it would create violence and a situation where minority students would not be able to compete and thereby develop inferiority complexes. So, after weeks of hearings and millions of dollars in expenses, Judge Egly rejected the Integration Project's plan for desegregation. He then appointed a monitor to oversee the creation of a new board plan who would desegregate the district. In June, Robert Doctor, a moderate pro-integrationist, lost his seat to Bobbi Fieldler, an ardent anti-integrationist.

Over the next year, 1977-1978, with the exception of the Hispanic Urban Center, an independent community group, Black and Hispanic leaders seemed opposed to desegregation, spoke against busing, or subtly supported segregation by supporting the court case decision as though it were just a squabble between white politicians and thus of no concern to them. Instead, they now called for "quality education and community decision-making."

Judge Egly gave tentative approval to a new board plan called Concept L that would raise the number of traveling students to 20,000, and exclude grades K-3 and 9-12 and the most racially isolated areas of the city- South Central and East Los Angeles. In October 1979, a new round of hearings began to expand Concept L. Integration Project activists continued to print informational bulletins with updates on court hearings. They warned that the imposition of "separate but equal" was becoming fixed in the budget under an item entitled "Racially Isolated Minority Schools" (RIMS). Under this designation, money appropriated for desegregation was instead being used to support segregation. When it became clear that Judge Egly would approve a RIMS package to upgrade segregated schools, the Integration Project decided it could not ignore its existence. Suggestions were written for "How To Improve Remaining Racially Isolated Schools."

Finally, in 1981 the case came to a close. The State Supreme Court refused to hear the merits of the constitutional amendment as it applied to the Los Angeles Crawford v. Board of Education case. Segregationists had brought an end to 18 years of litigation without desegregating one single minority school.