Rand Quinn. Class Action

Following the US Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), San Francisco, California, served as one of the first large cities outside the South to face court-ordered school desegregation. Conflict over race and schooling was not new in San Francisco, however. As Rand Quinn explains in his recent book, Class Action: Desegregation and Diversity in San Francisco Schools, the city’s residents had struggled to address racial issues since at least 1854, when a former slave, Reverend John Moore, opened the first “colored school” for the city’s Black students. In the years that followed, white Californians created laws that required children of African American, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, Indian, or “Mongolian” heritage to attend schools that were separate from those for white children. Federal district court judge Paul McCormick overturned this discriminatory system on Fourteenth Amendment equal protection grounds in Mendez v. Westminster (1946). The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld McCormick’s decision, while the California legislature and Governor Earl Warren removed all provisions for school segregation in the state’s education code in 1947.

Affirmative action · Desegregation · Diversity (politics) · Equal Protection Clause · Legislature · Ninth · Political science · Separate but equal · Sociology · State (computer science) · Supreme court · White (mutation) · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies