America’s history is laden with stories of various groups vying for a spot at “the table when company comes.” The history of legal struggle against school segregation in the United States provides an example of how communities respond when confronted with the beauty of the ever-growing and ever-strengthening darker brother who laughs in the face of rejection. But who represents the “darker brother”? Is he Latiné, Asian American, or Indigenous?1 Is he a she? Is this person rooted solely in the South or making a presence felt through all of America?
Brown v. Board of Education, the case that legally dismantled the “separate but equal” doctrine established by Plessy v. Ferguson, has earned its place at the proverbial table. As an example of its eminence, it has been the subject of at least 10 documentaries, more than 150 books or book chapters, and more than 450 peer-reviewed articles or law review articles. The players in this public battle for equality are equally as esteemed. Thurgood Marshall, Robert Carter, Chief Justice Earl Warren, Oliver Brown, and little Linda Brown were all individuals responsible for helping overturn years of established oppressive legal precedents and beginning what became known as the Black Civil Rights Movement. Brown is, in a word, iconic and has been covered by equally iconic works such as Simple Justice by Richard Kluger, “Brown v. Board of Education” and the Civil Rights Movement by Michael J. Klarman, and Silent Covenants by Derrick Bell.
Icons, however, cast a very long and wide shadow that can obscure historic contributions, render a myopic view of race without considering the role of gender and class, and deliver a narrative that is linear and uncomplicated. The recent work of Black scholars on those obscured contributions not only adds a critical analysis of class and gender to the discussion of race, but also helps explore how far, deep, and wide the struggle for Black liberation extends. Just as Martin Luther King Jr.’s charismatic presence once overshadowed the critical work of Black women in organizing the Montgomery Bus Boycott, rendered invisible the role of Bayard Rustin in organizing the March on D.C., and limited Rosa Parks’s position to a seat on the bus, Brown unwittingly conceals many of the legal struggles that occurred before 1954.2
Challenging this narrative does not lessen the value of the Black Civil Rights Movement. It expands it, revealing the complexity of the movement. Knowing, for example, of Rosa Parks’s role investigating rape cases in the South does not destroy the image and narrative of her standing up for justice by sitting down because she was “tired” that day. It reveals that she had been tired for a very long time and was, as Fannie Lou Hamer put it so plainly, “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Knowing that Claudette Colvin, a young, accomplished Black teenager, was tapped to be “the face” of the movement until she became pregnant out of wedlock does not lessen the work of the NAACP. Instead, it indicates the need for a critical analysis of the influence of middle-class respectability in shaping the deliberate strategy of civil rights organizations.3 Recognizing the role of these individuals does not diminish the work or memory of the Black Civil Rights Movement, but it reveals that even the most inspiring story is not immune to the effects of patriarchy, homophobia, and classism.
What I have discovered is that the road to Brown is lined with “bricks” representing at least one hundred other families who legally challenged segregated schooling in state and federal courts across the country, eleven of which involved Chinese American, Native American, and Mexican American plaintiffs.4 School desegregation in the United States is filled with the faceless and nameless testimonies of families representing the full racial spectrum of the country. While I describe all eleven cases, this book focuses on three families in California who, across time, contribute to what historians now call the “long civil rights movement.”5
Those individuals include the Tapes, a Chinese American family in San Francisco who, in 1885, sued the city schools for refusing entry to their eldest daughter, Mamie. There are also the Pipers, a Paiute family from the small town of Big Pine who, in 1924, fought for their daughter Alice to be admitted to the local White school. Finally, there are the Mendezes, a Mexican American family in Los Angeles who, in 1947, almost prompted a Supreme Court case when they sued the school district for refusing entry to their daughter Sylvia.
The Tape, Piper, and Mendez families represent a much more nuanced addition to the grand narrative of segregated schooling in the United States. It is not a story that lines up perfectly with the Black experience. It is a circuitous route that, at times, both challenges and reinforces White supremacy, highlights the role of fathers while obscuring the critical contributions of powerful mothers, and invests in the politics of middle-class respectability as a strategy for success that might have been necessary. Most importantly, these cases reveal that the battle for educational equality requires understanding that its construction began earlier than the 1950s, its boundaries extend beyond the Jim Crow South, and its design was not limited to Black and White.
Adding Tape, Piper, and Mendez to the grand narrative of the Black Civil Rights Movement only enhances the significance of Brown in academic as well as personal ways. Academically, these cases reimagine the Black Civil Rights Movement by expanding its boundaries to include the narratives of those similarly oppressed by White supremacist institutions. By including their stories, I am not claiming that the experiences of African Americans, Latinés, Native Americans, and Chinese Americans are the same. I am arguing, however, that White supremacy is so efficient in its transmission that there are tremendous similarities among them.
Personally, the book identifies an opportunity for an increasingly diverse America to be invested in the grand narrative of the Black Civil Rights Movement by revealing the place of other non-White peoples in it as well. This generation of students is inspired to protest in response to the racial divisions that have always existed but were amplified and manipulated during and after the 2016 election, the COVID pandemic, and the murder of George Floyd. Today’s students want to make history, and their fervent desires can only be enhanced by understanding their own history. The diversification of America, for them, is not limited to Black and White. The Latiné student in Chicago, the Vietnamese student in Atlanta, and the Indigenous student in Oklahoma want to see themselves or members of their groups in books.6 They are hungry to learn that they are not relegated to the sidelines of social movements but, in fact, have their own place and purpose on the field of racial change in America.
Connecting Tape, Piper, and Mendez to the school desegregation narrative and one another is an intellectually rewarding venture. To fully understand the history of Black segregated schooling, one must also learn the history of Mexican, Chinese, and Indian schools in the United States. To fully understand the racial politics of the Black Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s, one must also study and analyze the racial circumstances of the Chinese in the late 1800s, Native Americans in the 1920s, and Mexican Americans in the 1940s. Traversing two centuries and three racial realities, the ensuing chapters delve into three separate but interconnected disciplinary lenses: law, history, and sociology. All three are necessary for the analysis of school desegregation. Sociology students are often taught that race, class, and gender are social constructs. I contend, and these cases support an understanding, that race, class, and gender are, more accurately, social, legal, and historical constructs.
In chapter 1, I describe the blended theoretical scaffolding required to situate the Tape, Piper, and Mendez cases generally in the scholarship of race and ethnicity and specifically in the school desegregation movement. Before delving into the specific theories involved, I honor the work of the Black scholars who laid the foundation that makes this kind of scholarly inquiry possible. Framing this intertwined understanding calls for an introduction to two critical theoretical frameworks rooted in intersectionality. The first is a more complicated understanding of CRT and what I refer to as its branches, specifically AsianCrit, TribalCrit, and LatCrit. The second is a blend of the theory of controlling images put forth by Dr. Patricia Hill Collins in her groundbreaking contribution to sociology Black Feminist Thought, and the role of the politics of respectability outlined by Evelyn Higginbotham in Righteous Discontent. Foregrounding theory invites the reader to embrace the inclusive, intersectional, and interdisciplinary nature of the work, fashioning a comprehensive lens for inquiry that recognizes connections rather than stand-alone stories.
Chapter 2 outlines the legal and historical background of school desegregation efforts since 1849. In providing a rich landscape of the case law, I deliver descriptive statistics of 105 cases discovered through legal research. I identify where and when they took place and generate a map to visualize the school desegregation efforts around the United States. I also summarize eight other Chinese, Native, and Mexican American cases to demonstrate why Tape, Piper, and Mendez represent the ideal proceedings for in-depth study.7 An examination of the social and legal circumstances surrounding these cases reveals the genesis of, and connections among, these communities’ efforts to achieve educational parity with their White counterparts. Doing so helps to reframe the Black Civil Rights Movement more broadly to represent an increasingly diverse America.
This overarching legal history is followed by chapters 3, 4, and 5, where I introduce the reader to the Tape, Piper, and Mendez families and provide a sociological analysis for each case. The Tapes, whose contributions are often omitted from the school desegregation narrative, are introduced in chapter 3. Progressing from steerage passengers on an ocean liner to individuals leading a lavish lifestyle of wealth, limited influence, and guided assimilation, Joseph and Mary Tape fashioned an extraordinary life for themselves and their children, Mamie, Frank, and Emily, at the height of the country’s anti-Chinese sentiment. So thorough was their Americanization that they had not even considered being rejected by the San Francisco school board, sparking a controversy that culminated in the creation of segregated Chinese public schools. As a precursor to Plessy, Tape v. Hurley represents the foundation on which the separate but equal doctrine was built. In the Tapes, readers meet a determined father, outraged mother, and exceptionally talented daughter who, according to the literature on Asian Americans and their racial positionality, are threats to labor, model minorities, or racial “middlemen.” However, applying the AsianCrit tenets of Asianization and transnational context, I posit that the family’s story cannot fit neatly into one or all three of these racial characterizations. Furthermore, using the controlling images, I show how the only middling position taken by Chinese American child Mamie Tape was in between pagans, prostitutes, and poor creatures.
The case of the Pipers, whose contributions have been reduced to a mere remnant of America’s racial past, is recounted in chapter 4. Demonstrating the need to decolonize traditional historical methodologies, the family offers a bifurcated narrative comprising two competing stories: The Pipers v. The People. One story, told through legal documents and newspapers, paints the Pipers as willing to sacrifice culture and community in order to be granted citizenship. This citizenship would qualify daughter Alice Piper for entry into White schools. The other story, as told by the Paiute people of Big Pine, bestows a narrative describing the Pipers’ deep and abiding connections to the Paiute Nation.
Using the TribalCrit tenets of liminality, assimilation, and autonomy, I show that the Pipers were far from sellouts. Instead, they were subversives manipulating the legal process in order to achieve educational equality. Furthermore, theirs is a story of a community fighting to keep the memory of Piper v. Big Pine alive. In 2014, the Big Pine Unified School District and the Paiute Tribe of the Owens Valley erected a life-sized memorial of Alice Piper, the girl who changed history, and not the savage, squaw, or sacrificial maiden she could have become in the U.S. imagination.
Rounding out this historical part of the book is an introduction of the Mendez family, whose case preceded Brown to the Supreme Court by seven years. Discussion of the racial identities of Mexican Americans in the United States is often limited to describing Latinés, specifically Mexican Americans, as racial wedges, wearers of cloaks, and bearers of Whiteness. However, using LatCrit tenets of Latino/a essentialism, I attest that the Mendezes’ story is one of a Mexican father who went from farmworker to farmer, and of a Puerto Rican mother whose contributions are largely unreported in the historical record. It is also the tale of their daughter, the reluctant representative of a revolution who nevertheless promised to keep the memory of the five thousand families of Mendez v. Westminster alive. Far from the mamacita, malinche, or mentally inferior educational burden, Sylvia represents the very picture of possibility and promise.
Applying CRT collectively and its branches individually delineates a more robust picture of the complicated case that race constitutes across the different racial groups. The story of race in these instances is not a spotless representation of unity among marginalized groups. To the contrary, it demonstrates that a particular kind of “racial flexibility” was available to Asians, Native Americans, and Latinés in which Black plaintiffs could never partake.
For example, the school board in Tape argued that the Fourteenth Amendment was “meant for those of African descent.”8 This reveals the “racial ambiguity” of Chinese Americans in the eyes of the law. In Piper, the plaintiffs are referred to as “those of the Aboriginal Race” who had “adopted civilized habits” according to the Dawes Act. The Dawes Act was introduced to give Native Americans a route to U.S. citizenship that could only be achieved through complete assimilation. This circumstance provides insight into the complicated political relationship Native Americans have with the U.S. government because they are both a race and a sovereign nation. In the Mendez case, the attorney deployed a legal strategy to avoid being dismissed since Mexicans were classified as White in the Census yet still experienced unequal treatment. Together, these cases both challenge and uphold the U.S. racial hierarchy in ways that are as compelling as they are troubling.
By applying the theory of controlling images, this work explores how the sexual, criminal, and tragic stereotypes of their time both threatened and strengthened Mamie Tape’s, Alice Piper’s, and Sylvia Mendez’s position in the court of public opinion. These daughters were too young to be sexualized, too innocent to be criminalized, and too wealthy to be deemed pathetic. As their social histories will reveal, these families benefited immensely from their middle-class status and used it to secure “tumble proof” plaintiffs. On one hand, the Tapes, Pipers, and Mendezes were not individuals whose livelihood could be threatened. They were entrepreneurial representations of the bootstrap polemic so often attributed to these racial groups. As a result, the families’ adherence to “American” ideals could easily be mistaken for complete assimilation. But theirs is an assimilation of convenience, not cultural abandonment. For their cases to be heard, the plaintiffs had to use the language outlined in the laws of the time. Moreover, by centering the role of class, these families reveal that the politics of respectability has roots that are deep and wide, stretching into all racial communities and as far back as the late eighteenth century. Most importantly, the Tapes’, Pipers’, and Mendezes’ struggles demonstrate that resistance comes in various forms and is not always marked by marches and militancy.
Finally, in chapter 6, in addition to summarizing the findings, I suggest future directions for research that could use a comparative Critical Race Theory model. Critical race studies is primed to be pushed past siloed narratives to more meaningful connections among underrepresented communities. There exists a shared history shaped by discriminatory practices designed to subjugate and separate racial communities in the United States. The Bricks before “Brown” confirms that the damage to educational equality today is not limited to one racial community and offers people a unique opportunity to learn from one another.
By injecting these cases into the school desegregation grand narrative and treating gender, class, and age as symbiotic with race, I show that these plaintiffs were more than just Chinese American, Native American, and Mexican American. They were fathers and mothers who, like the plaintiffs in Brown, utilized their middle-class status to confront a system of inequality that refused to make space for their intelligent, capable, and eager daughters. The Tape, Piper, and Mendez families did not just sit on the side of the road as spectators. Indeed, they were legal agents who contributed to a multiracial, nearly one-hundred-year-long effort to dismantle segregated schooling.
Together, these cases represent an alternate approach to examining the flexibility of race within Latiné, Asian American, and Indigenous communities. From honorary Whiteness to Black Exceptionalism, LatCrit, AsianCrit, and TribalCrit scholars have attempted to carve out a place for non-Black racial groups to identify the issues unique to their communities without interpreting their merit through a Black/White lens. Instead of using “Black Exceptionalism” to describe the well-established field of race scholarship, I offer the phrase “Black Foundationalism” to recognize that the foundation for research regarding race has been built on the rich and varied work established by Black scholars.
Recognizing the foundation of research regarding non-Black racial groups does not preclude one from observing the inherent differences in that research. Indeed, it allows one to characterize new findings as a development of the scholarship rather than challenges to Blackness. This project, for example, began with the question “Since there is a Brown v. Board, wouldn’t there be a Mexican American, Asian American and Native American equivalent?” Comparing and discussing the meaning of Tape, Piper, and Mendez do not diminish the standing of Brown. If anything, these tasks reveal all the twists and turns inherent in the struggle for equality.