Shortly after the May leak of the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe v. Wade, Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Tex.) wondered whether Plyler v. Doe — the landmark decision that requires states to offer public education free of charge to all children, including children of undocumented migrants — could be next.
In challenging Plyler, Abbott threatened to unravel more than a century’s worth of efforts to provide educational opportunity to the nation’s children and specifically those from Black, Latino and Indigenous communities. But rather than a new assault, Abbott’s remarks are part of a tradition of systemic racism designed to harm communities of color and undermine court rulings that have continually sided with parents fighting for educational justice.
From the earliest days of the country, there were debates about who was worthy of an education and what ends an education should serve. Race played a critical role in how those questions were answered, producing anti-literacy laws preventing free and enslaved Black people from learning to read and boarding schools that separated Indigenous children from their families, cultures and languages.
Where Latino children were concerned, fewer than 18 percent of children between 5 and 17 were enrolled in public schools during the early years of the 20th century, but by 1930, the number increased to 50 percent. Yet, enrolling in public schools did not mean attending the same schools as White children. In California, for example, increased immigration from Mexico and increased labor needs in the citrus industry resulted in most school districts placing Mexican schoolchildren into separate schools from their White counterparts. Such was the experience for many families, until a group of parents chose to fight back.
In 1944, the Mendez family moved to Orange County to lease a farm from a Japanese-American family who had been forced into an internment camp. Despite the proximity of the 17th Street School to their home, the White-dominated Westminster Elementary School district denied 9-year-old Sylvia Mendez and her brothers entrance to the school because of their Mexican appearance and ancestry. Instead, the district forced them, and others like them, into a separate and unequal school across town.
The Mendez kids were not alone: By the 1940s, as many as 80 percent of Spanish-speaking children in places such as Orange County attended intentionally segregated schools that were not only often far from their homes but also starved of resources.