Transcription
The memorable images from the nation's Civil Rights Movement show the public struggles in the streets and outside the marble monuments and its renowned leaders, black and brown. But it was the small skirmishes fought each day beyond the reach of the cameras, in the fields and in the schools, that fueled a cause that became a crusade.
In the classrooms of East Los Angeles, an urban protest was about to begin. Thousands of young brown people were about to be reborn as Chicanos and Chicanas in what were called the blowouts. "Uh, our struggle was to get an education. We're human beings. We have potential. We want to have a life that, uh, you know, is part of the American dream."
Back then, the Supreme Court had ordered an end to desegregation, but nothing had ended the discrimination that schools still practiced routinely. Where were the brown faces in colleges, on the honor rolls? How could there be any when three out of four Chicano students didn't even finish high school? "I have no memory of anyone ever sitting me down and telling me what college was or what I needed to do or giving me an application."
The girls were nudged into secretarial courses. The boys were funneled into industrial arts. And speaking Spanish was forbidden. A student who spoke it was punished, just like the student who smoked or ditched class, with swats.
"When I started asking, you know, why this neglect, I started getting some real bogus answers, you know. 'Mr. Castro, you're overly concerned. The kids, Mexican kids, have a charming passivity and, and you don't want to, you know, you don't want to change that.'"
To him, it was dispiriting enough that the parents had not known any better, had accepted that they would never see the titles "Doctor" or "Professor" in front of their children's names. But teachers, who were supposed to trade in the potential of youth, presumed that their brown students were predestined to work with their hands, not with their minds. And so, they had no expectations of us. They didn't push us. They didn't demand that we learn.
One man knew better, and he wanted better for his students. Sal Castro, a teacher at Lincoln High School, became the students' advisor and friend, and a strategic thinker in the campaign that none of them knew was coming, but which would engage all of them. "We trusted him. I trusted him, literally, with my life at the time."
He brought to East LA the principles and practices of King and Chavez. Castro organized the Mexican-American Youth Leadership Conference with high school and college students. They formed a Chicano coalition and presented the school with demands for a broader curriculum. Castro knew he was putting his job at risk, and perhaps even his life. "It was constant harassment. I used to get phone calls, 'You're go—you'll be dead by, by tomorrow.' I was on, uh, a list called the 'Yankee Crier,' people that, there was a bounty on my head."
It was Castro's guidance, but the students' demands. They included small things, like more ethnic food, but larger matters too: more Mexican-American history courses, more Mexican-American teachers and counselors, and more schools. They pleaded and made speeches, and they got exactly nada. "They just literally just patted us on, on the back and said, 'Okay, fine,' and nothing ever happened."
Frustrating as that was for Castro, the last straw came in a Time magazine description of life in East LA. Stereotypes that went unchallenged, even by Latino leaders: "Ring cantinas with the rat-tat-tat of lowrider cars cruising the boulevard and the smell of cheap red wine and, and greasy tacos."
"Okay, now that is insulting, like a son of a [ __ ]! I said, 'God damn! Hey, we're, we're in bad shape.' So I think I'll have to take the upper hand real fast."
By early March of 1968, the groups had exhausted all the usual remedies. Their recourse was direct action. The students were threatened with expulsion, with the withholding of scholarships, and some scholarships were indeed withheld. Nonetheless, more than 20,000 students in five East LA schools—Lincoln, Wilson, Garfield, Belmont, and Roosevelt—walked out. It was the first major mass protest against racism by Mexican-Americans in the history of the United States.
"The Friday walk-on, I cried. I mean, you see these little kids, wave upon wave of kids coming out, fearing whatever, and, and, and doing it for, to change things for people they didn't even know."
"The educational process of Mexican-Americans for over 20 years in East Los Angeles and throughout the Southwest has been disrupted by its failure to communicate with the Mexican-American. That is the disruption. When 57% of the students at Garfield drop out year after year, there has to be a problem. We're not operating in a vacuum. There's social injustice."
What they did was brave beyond their years. Teenagers taking adult risks. Once passive students making themselves formidable, taking risks now to reap the rewards of equality in their futures. Those little kids, many of them thought they might actually die. In their minds, they were out to do something. "Start moving from here."
Unfortunately, the next few days saw the peaceful protests become violent, and the police just went in and started beating them viciously. "It was ugly. You know, they were just yelling at us, 'You dirty spicks! Dirty Mexicans! Who do you think you are?'"
Few knew then that police in riot gear also beat up on students inside Belmont and Roosevelt High after teachers trapped them behind locked doors. "This was the most gutless act the LA City Schools has ever been involved in." It was this dirty little secret. The newspapers and TV stations showed up, but Castro said the footage, as well as written accounts of the beatings, never saw the light of day in print or on the air. "And they were hoping that, as the police, and I'm sure the school board and, uh, the mayor, that this was going to stop us, that this was going to scare us. But it really just motivated everybody more."
Meanwhile, participants recall that the high school walkout committee, the Brown Berets, and other student groups were infiltrated and monitored by the FBI and police in hopes of stopping the growing movement. "Everyone was suspect. I, I still have visual memories of men up on, on top of roofs with long, long lenses, just taking pictures, taking pictures, taking pictures. So we were constantly harassed."
After five days of walkouts, tensions finally eased, and students returned to school. Several weeks later, the school board bowed to pressure and met with parents, students, and Sal Castro to review the demands. "At last, last, we have allowed our young people to get the short end of the stick for too long." But the board did nothing. No new classes, no new teachers, no new schools. The walkouts, to all appearances, had failed.
The feeling of failure was compounded two months later, on Prom Night. Sal Castro and 12 others were arrested for conspiring to incite the walkouts. Each faced 66 years in prison. "We knew that now we were targets. If they could arrest all of these fine people for trying to make our schools better, what else could they do to us?"
Another series of protests was staged by thousands of students, parents, and the Brown Berets in June 1968. The group that had become known as the East LA 13 was released on bail. When school opened again in the fall, Castro was not at his teaching post. The board refused to reinstate Castro at Lincoln High, where he had taught for six years, because he was an accused felon. "I walked in this morning and they told me I could not teach. That I would have to go downtown to Personnel. That I could not teach."
"Who told you?"
"Uh, the principal."
"And I saw it as, 'There goes the stupid school district again. Another dumb mistake.' They were going to deny students one of the proven best teachers. How, what sense did that make?"
The students took up their picket signs and launched yet another protest. Nothing happened. So the Chicano students staged a sit-in that became a sleep-in at the school board offices. Among their demands: that Sal Castro get his job back. "It's not so much Mr. Castro, it's the issue. What the man means to every teacher, academic freedom, shall we call it? To a Negro, to a Mexican, to an Anglo."
The sleep-in went on for a week and a day. 35 people were arrested for trespassing. But on the ninth day, the school board gave Castro his job back.
"Call, please."
"Mr. Gardner?"
"Yes, Dr. Rich."
"Yes, Dr. Rich."
"Dr. Rich."
"What?"
"No, re—"
"John?"
"Yes."
"I told you."
"They called you a troublemaker, a rabble-rouser, and everything else. Are you that?"
"No, I don't think so. I'm a reformer in education."
"What does that mean?"
"Uh, there are many changes that have to be made because, at this point, education is not relevant to kids in general, and Mexicans in particular."
As for the East LA 13, it would be two years more before a state appeals court exonerated them, throwing out all the charges. The First Amendment, the court said, protected them. To let the indictment stand would have a chilling effect on free speech.
A comparison of what the students demanded and what they got that seminal spring would show few results. But there were bigger victories afoot. The changes to the spirit. "Well, the one thing that changed completely and profoundly was how all of us viewed ourselves. So no matter what else was going to happen in the schools, the change was inside of us."
Within 18 months of the walkout, the number of Chicano students attending UCLA jumped from 40 to 1,500. Every college up and down the state had tripled and quadrupled and quintupled the amount of Chicano college students. And then the Ivy schools started recruiting Chicanos to go to the Ivy schools. This was unheard of before.
Over time, more Mexican Americans became school administrators and elected officials. There is a middle-class, professional, educated Chicano community today because of those walkouts. And their lives were transformed because they discovered that they could do what they wanted to do with their lives, and they could achieve. And they, in turn, unlocked academic doors for more teachers and students to come.
Generations who took it as a right and a duty to protest injustice. In Chicago, in Denver, and again here in Los Angeles, young Latinos and older ones too, used their numbers and their new voices to protest the war in Vietnam and the disproportionate number of Chicanos drafted and killed there. All this made possible, in part, by one man's leadership, his love of his community and his people, his culture and his country. "Sal is a true patriot. Uh, Sal is someone who believes in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and in the American dream, and demands that we have all of those same rights and opportunities as everybody else."
Sal Castro kept his job and finally retired from it, but not from the hallways and classrooms. He visits schools throughout the Southwest, educating students about equality and justice, regardless of color or station. And the most basic homework assignment of all: the simple math that there is only one race, the human one. "You are going to college, folks. You're going to be a doctor. You're going to find boy nurses to sit on your lap."
Of his many goals in life, the latest is raising the money for a monument to the students who walked out and changed the future for themselves and students not yet born. A monument to be placed in the park where the students marched nearly 40 years ago. "Yes, to this day, we don't have that, uh, that rock, that monument. But there should be. I even have what already from a grateful community."
The man who still questions, still wants to find the truth, still values higher education, says he'll never stop raising hell and moving heaven and earth to make it happen. "It's a, it's been a, it's been a, a long life and a long, long good life, you know. And I'd do it again a million times, and no regrets."