Putting my Mind and Heart to Educational Equity: Memoirs of an Advocate

By Peter Roos

From the Foreword by Kenji Hakuta and Diana Mercado-Garcia:  

"As a civil rights lawyer, Peter Roos has been something of an artist, painting on this canvas with the lawyerly instruments available to him, getting involved in key interpretations of the equal protection clauses of the Constitution and civil rights

• Language: English
• Publisher: Center for Applied Linguistics
• Release date: Feb 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781648718595

Book preview

Introduction

Looking for a panacea—that is how it was when I started in 1967. Desegregation and integration were finally coming to America. Earl Warren was chief justice of the United States, and the federally funded Legal Services Corporation, a nonprofit organization established by the U.S. Congress, had a mandate to change the country.

Historical shackles were being broken. Urban riots in Watts, Detroit, and elsewhere were awakening the country to the need for change. Legal tools enacted in 1964 and 1965 provided vehicles for redress,¹ which, when joined with more peaceful avenues of demonstration, seemed destined to change America for the better. In California, the farmworker battles stimulated a broader awareness of discrimination against Chicanos. In Los Angeles, an urban counterpoint in the form of school walkouts awakened a generation.

More generally, university students were on the march—mostly against the Vietnam War, but also against racial injustice. It seemed like the establishment would fall to the historically underserved. The young could be warriors in effecting that fall, especially those who could leverage the legal system. I was privileged to be in that army.

We were incited to think big and to take on issues that could transform. Some went after the welfare system, hoping to change a process that trapped people in poverty and treated people as though they were at fault for their very own poverty. Others took on consumer abuses, which allowed unscrupulous sellers to prey on individuals. Some dealt with housing or voting. To me, a just educational system seemed foundational. One only had to look to the school segregation battles that dominated the press of the day to realize that a just educational system was not what we had.² While intentional segregation was an obvious wrong, it was only one of a plethora of discriminatory practices that created an unjust system and assured that children of color would rarely be able to achieve to their capabilities.

While the story told here is in many ways a story of a personal journey, its value is in bearing witness to important historical events. It is a journey that traversed more than 40 years of identifying and battling many of the central barriers that kept Latinos and other children of color from realizing their full potential through the public schools of America. The battles described here were of paramount concern to a community that was emerging from the shadows in the time frame described (1966–2010), and I was privileged to be intimately involved in those battles. It is a history that deserves to be told for whatever lessons can be carried forward.

Carrying forward and updating those lessons will no doubt be a need for a long time to come. We are reminded that Latino and Black segregation is in many ways worse than it was in the 1960s.³ Whether or not one believes that the cure for segregation should be forced integration, it is hard to deny that today, as in the time of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), separate is rarely equal for minority students. Now, as then, lower-income Latino and Black students are usually served by less skilled teachers in inferior schools, granted lesser resources, and achieve at much lower levels than their middle-class cohorts. They are expelled at a higher rate, deemed intellectually disabled at a higher rate, and consequently are incarcerated more often—much more often.⁴

The continual need to fight against practices that inevitably flow from segregated schools is apparent to me. Furthermore, hard-won victories invite backlash and efforts to repeal gains made. For example, the battles for linguistically and culturally relevant education for immigrant children need to be fought again, and while it seems legally settled that undocumented students have the right to a core education,⁵ vigilantes directly and indirectly thwart that right almost daily somewhere in America. The rights of these students, usually long-term residents of the United States, need be extended so that the youth and indeed all society benefits.

This story is at times chronological, following my personal journey, and at times focuses on substantive areas. At all times it is told from first-hand experiences. While scholars from the solitude of their libraries may drill down deeper and draw highly valuable conclusions from dispassionate observation, this story takes a different track. It attempts to reconstruct battles, and the strategy and context that informed them, from the perspective of someone who was there, who participated in the strategies and who lived the context. Hopefully, this can shed a different light on history as well as provide some insights for those who address educational inequalities in the future.

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¹42 U.S.C. §2000d prohibited discrimination by any entity receiving federal funds, and 52 U.S.C. §10101 established voting rights.

² Following Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), which held intentional segregation in schools unconstitutional, lawsuits were filed against virtually every major school district in the country. The pace picked up in the 1960s as it became evident that administrative enforcement was not up to the task of integration.

³ As of 2013, Black and Latino students were less likely to be in classrooms with White students than in the 1970s and 1980s (Wagner, 2017).

⁴ African Americans are incarcerated in state prisons across the country at more than five times the rate for Whites; furthermore, Latinos are imprisoned at a rate that is 1.4 times the rate of Whites (Nellis, 2016, p. 3).

⁵ This right was established by Plyler v. Doe (1982).

A Personal Awakening:

The Birth of the California

Rural Legal Assistance

In the spring of 1966, I was a second-year student at the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. At the time, an organization known as the Law Students Civil Rights Research Council matched up interested law students with lawyers in the trenches, fighting primarily for racial equality. I applied for a summer position, fully expecting to be in service to those bravely battling discrimination in the Deep South, whose stories were chronicled almost daily in the press.

Instead, a letter arrived from O’Melveny and Myers, a blue-blood law firm in Los Angeles, offering me a summer position with an organization that had yet to see the light of day, but which had been awarded a substantial federal grant. Jim Lorenz, a young member of the firm, had parlayed a budding consciousness of farmworker misery to establish a novelty: The California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), a statewide law firm that battled rural poverty through the courts. National awareness on this topic had been sparked by Harvest of Shame (Friendly, Lowe, & Murrow, 1960), a television documentary presented by broadcast journalist Edward Murrow, and by reports from Delano, California, of a farmworker’s strike led by César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and Larry Itliong. That job offer changed my life as much as CRLA changed the mission of government-funded legal services.

By mid June of 1966, I joined 20 other law students from around the country in a dormitory at the University of Southern California. We were given several weeks of training in civil rights law, rural poverty, the farmworker movement, and other things long forgotten. The faculty was barely more experienced than the students, with the exception of Gary Bellow, who ran a legal aid clinic at Harvard Law School and was treated as a superstar upon his arrival. In addition to Jim Lorenz, who was energetic and smart but who had no experience delivering legal services to the rural poor, we also had Bob Gnaizda, who would go on to become a disability rights advocate and the founder of Public Advocates, Inc., a public interest nonprofit law firm in San Francisco; Don Kates, who would become better known as a vehement gun rights advocate; Michael Mickey Bennett, a CRLA administrator; and Dan Lund, who added a Christian overlay to a Yale legal education.

The University of Southern California presence was all that consisted of CRLA that summer. My job and that of a number of the other students was to go into the field to determine where in California CRLA should place offices. And, relatedly, we were tasked to determine friends, foes, and conditions CRLA might encounter in different locales. It was the most exciting experience of my young life, trying to tie political science and sociological principles to change America through legal advocacy. Whether our youthful research was of any value to the rural poor in general or to CRLA in particular, it nevertheless turned on my light bulb and laid the foundation for a lifetime of law reform