Santa Ana segregated Mexican students amid 1918 pandemic

Before influenza cases ravaged Orange County in the fall of 1918, a battle brewed at the Santa Ana Board of Education over Mexican students.

Trustees reneged on their promise to build a Mexican school in time for the new academic year. Meanwhile, the number of Mexican students at Lincoln School had grown by more than 100, an untenable situation for segregationists there who led the charge.

According to Board of Education minutes, the board looked at possible sites for a Mexican school as early as July and moved to purchase two lots but ultimately found construction to be too costly.

Supt. J.A. Cranston considered moving two Mexican classes into a Lincoln Elementary “shack” previously used as a changing room for student athletes.

Lincoln’s PTA pushed back. Its president noted that segregation of Mexican students at Washington School had ended in 1913 and presented a resolution before an Aug. 9, 1918, school board meeting.

“We protest vigorously against any plan that will mean the location of any Mexican classes upon the Lincoln school grounds, whether in the main school building or in any other building,” it read. “The placing of a Mexican makeshift school upon the Lincoln grounds would be a rank injustice to our school, our teachers and our children.” The resolution passed. Trustees directed staff to open bids on materials to build a Mexican school and vowed by vote to segregate “sub-normal pupils in the grammar schools.”

But the opportunity to do so wouldn’t present itself until November, when influenza cases surged during the 1918 pandemic’s deadly second wave, according to historical records.

By then, Santa Ana became one of the last Southern California cities to shut down gatherings at churches, pool halls, theaters and libraries by way of an Oct. 19 public health order; Cranston closed the schools for a month.

The Mexican question remained, especially as trustees considered how to safely reopen classes before Christmas.

Dr. J. I. Clark, Santa Ana’s health officer, joined various PTA groups in urging that Mexican students be segregated on account of influenza.

The board ceased sewing, cooking and manual training classes at a building on Church Street, which is now Civic Center Drive, in favor of repurposing it as a makeshift Mexican school.

On Nov. 18, 1918, classes resumed, but Mexican students largely stayed home.

“It is very likely that a vast majority of the Mexicans were not aware of the reopening this morning,” the Santa Ana Register reported.

Segregation continued in Santa Ana from that morning until an appellate court ruling in Mendez vs. Westminster School District of Orange County, 75 years ago this month, drove a final legal stake through the heart of the state’s Mexican schools.

The board did consider the legality of segregation during a Jan. 13, 1919, meeting after classes had resumed the week before. Trustees invited Santa Ana City Atty. George H. Scott to offer an opinion on the matter.

He noted that state law allowed Native American, Chinese and “people of Mongolian descent” to be segregated from their white counterparts at school.

“There seems to be no provision empowering Boards of Education to maintain separate schools for Mexicans or other nationalities,” Scott, a former judge, opined. “It is entirely proper and legal to classify [students] according to the regularity of attendance, ability to understand the English language and their aptness to advance in the grades to which they shall be assigned.”

Long before the Mendez case, Mexican Americans belonging to the Pro Patria Club had opposed the segregation of their children and filed a petition against it as an unlawful act.

Armed with the city attorney’s opinion, the board dismissed the Pro Patria Club’s petition and voted to continue working on permanent Mexican schools “especially for the great benefit to the Mexican children.”

Some parents refused to send their children to the Mexican school on Church Street.

Venecio Ramirez and Francisco Bielman were given suspended sentences for their children’s truancy. A Pro Patria Club official presented a signed statement urging compliance in the community. Three more warrants were issued against Mexican parents, but their children reported to school before being arrested.

Later that year, the board purchased two sites for future Mexican schools — one at Stafford and Logan streets and one at Second and Santa Fe streets.

In June, trustees accepted the bid of E.W. Smith to construct a permanent Mexican school; he would build the Southwest-style Floral Park home of Ralph Smedley, the founder of Toastmasters, in 1925.

Santa Ana expected its white schools to open on Sept. 10, while construction of Mexican school buildings was completed by Oct. 1.

The late Virginia Guzman was one of many students who attended Fremont, a Mexican school in Santa Ana. She and her husband, William, didn’t want the same for their son, but the district denied their request that he be allowed to attend Franklin School with white students.

In 1945, William Guzman joined the Mendez case alongside Gonzalo Mendez, Thomas Estrada, Frank Palomino and Lorenzo Ramirez. The class-action suit represented 5,000 Mexican school students in the Santa Ana, Garden Grove, Westminster and El Modena school districts.

Mendez and Palomino’s children had, at one time, also attended Fremont.

U.S. District Court Judge Paul J. McCormick found Mexican schools to be illegal in siding with the plaintiffs. Santa Ana was one of three districts to appeal, but on April 14, 1947, an appellate court unanimously upheld McCormick’s ruling.

In June of that year, the Santa Ana Board of Education voted to discontinue its legal fight.