‘Lemon Grove Incident’ Remembered 80 Years Later

It’s been 80 years since Mexican immigrant families in Lemon Grove fought an attempt by an all-white school board to segregate their children and won in a San Diego court.

Nearly forgotten until a 1985 film about the case was shown nationwide, the Lemon Grove Incident, as it came to be known, continues to be remembered.

Over the weekend, the San Diego Museum of Man hosted a screening of the acclaimed KPBS film The Lemon Grove Incident as part of its new exhibit, “Race: Are We So Different?,” which runs until May 15. Robert Alvarez, a UCSD ethnic studies professor, whose research was the basis for the film, led the discussion that followed.

The Lemon Grove Oral History Project Team will screen a short documentary on the Lemon Grove community in the 1930s on March 26, also at the museum. The documentary was shown to students at Palm Middle School on March 11, the 80th anniversary of the court decision, Palomar College professor John Valdez said.

In 2007, Lemon Grove Middle School’s auditorium was dedicated in memory of Alvarez’s father, the late Roberto Alvarez, who was a child when he was named the lead plaintiff in the 1931 lawsuit against the Lemon Grove board of trustees.

The middle school is on the site of Lemon Grove’s original grammar school, which Mexican-American students were barred from attending in January 1931. The school board wanted to send them to an “Americanization” school that the district had hastily built for them. Most of the students were U.S. citizens. The board also did not notify their parents about the change.

Their parents refused to send them to the school, which they likened to a stable. With help from the Mexican consulate, they filed a lawsuit against the Lemon Grove School Board, claiming it was racially segregating Mexican students.

On March 11, 1931, San Diego Superior Court Judge Claude Chambers ruled that the school district did not have authority to segregate Mexican children. California allowed the segregation of blacks, Asians and American Indians but not Mexicans, who were considered Caucasians.

“I understand that you can separate a few children to improve their education if they need special instruction. But to separate all the Mexicans in one group can only be done by infringing the laws of the state of California,” he said in the ruling.

Although Mexicans were considered Caucasians, they were still the targets of discrimination and had to defend themselves, Robert Alvarez said.

“Lot of folks say they won the case because they were white,” Alvarez told a group of 50 at the Irving Gill Auditorium. “They won the case because they stood up and fought for their rights.”

The case today is considered the first successful school desegregation court decision in the nation, but it did not get much attention after it happened largely because the Lemon Grove School Board decided not to appeal the ruling and complied with the order to allow students of Mexican origin to return to their school. The segregation of Mexican-Americans outside Lemon Grove continued, however.

Americanization schools were abolished in California by landmark court rulings in the late 1940s. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1954's Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka declared state laws establishing separate public schools for blacks and whites was unconstitutional, paving the way for integration and the civil rights movement.

Alvarez said the Lemon Grove Incident remains a significant piece of history of relations between Mexicans and Anglos during the Great Depression in the Southwest. During the 1930s, more than 500,000 Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were deported or pressured to leave the country in an effort to free up jobs. Many of those who left were legal residents, including U.S. citizens.

“These were not isolated incidents. These were things that were occurring throughout the United States,” Alvarez said. “Separate but equal was also part of the entire Southwest, part of the entire United States.”