While the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site in Topeka, Kansas, memorializes a single Supreme Court case, the National Trust for Historic Preservation is currently advocating for legislation to tell the stories of all the included court cases that made up Brown v. Board. Researching lesser-known cases such as Briggs v. Elliott or Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County sparked questions about other cases in the fight for school desegregation. How did other communities suffer from and challenge segregation in their schools?

I spent the summer as an intern for the National Trust focusing on research related to Brown v. Board of Education. As part of this work, I compiled a list of state and federal court cases regarding school desegregation for Latinx American, Native American, and Asian and Pacific Islander American populations. Totaling 35 cases across 12 states and spanning the years 1885 to 2006, the list shines light on important trends throughout legal history.

Hispanic and Latinx Americans faced unique challenges in their own battle for equality. In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, Mexican Americans were legally white by race, according to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican American War. However, according to legal scholar Arielle Gross, they were “treated by Anglos as a separate race” and suffered day-to-day discrimination. The legal classification of Mexican Americans as white made it difficult for them to claim that they were discriminated against because of race. Officials—such as those from the school districts in the following three cases—would simply argue that the white status of Mexican Americans made it impossible to discriminate against them.

Alamosa, Colorado

Alamosa, Colorado, is located in the San Luis Valley region that had been part of Mexico until the 1848 Mexican American War. Because of this, most of its Mexican American residents had long-standing connections to the land. Racial segregation was outlawed in Colorado in 1895; however, school officials still tried to segregate Mexican American students. In the early 1900s, the Alamosa Board of Education built what they called a "Mexican school"—the Willis School—and required all Mexican American children to attend it.

The Willis School was located further away from many students’ houses than their original schools. Some children, including Francisco Maestas’ son, crossed dangerous railroad tracks every day. Officials claimed they lacked language skills, but at least half of the students at the school spoke English. In 1913, Maestas, along with other parents, sued the school board in Maestas v. Shone, and eventually the judge decided in favor of the Mexican American families. However, the decision only allowed English-speaking Mexican Americans to attend closer schools. School boards were still allowed to segregate students based on language ability. The Willis School continued operating until at least the 1930s. Today, no trace of the building remains in Zapata Park.

According to historians Ruben Donato, Gonzalo Guzman, and Jarrod Hanson, this case stands out not only because of its location in the “Hispano homeland,” but also because the Mexican Americans involved rejected their legal white status.

Del Rio, Texas

Seventeen years later, another court case had a similar result. A large portion of Texas’ agriculture is supported by migrant workers who followed crop cycles annually. Their children often had to leave and join various classrooms outside of the regularly scheduled school year. In the town of Del Rio in southwestern Texas, the school district used this “disruption of the classroom” as one reason to segregate Mexican migrant children. Their white migrant peers, however, were not removed from the regular classrooms.

The school district also claimed that Mexican children had special language needs without testing them and attempted to build a separate school for all Mexican American children, but the district was sued in Del Rio ISD v. Salvatierra (1930) before this effort commenced. The Texas Court of Appeals eventually ruled that segregation based on nationality was unconstitutional. However, like in the Maestas decision, segregation based on language ability was permitted. As a result, schools could determine language ability however they wished so that they could continue to segregate Mexican children. Donato, Guzman, and Hanson point out that this was effectively a form of “intentionally, legally sanctioned segregation.”