Some of my high school classmates are fond of describing us, the Class of 1970, as The Class That Walked Out. I have strong memories of that day and it comes up often for me. My short story, "The Sun Shone So Brightly," in my collection Stones from the Creek, is about a mine strike. But the scene in which all these underground miners stand celebrating their resistance under a sunny sky is drawn from my experience walking out of Livingston High School. The protagonist of that story, Joey Quintana, is threatened by a foreman: "You see all these men walking out? Every one of them is going to be fired. But if you walk out, you're a dead man." I wasn't threatened with death. The school administrator just told me that the other students who walked out would be suspended, but that I would be permanently expelled. There's more, but I think it just reinforces my self-aggrandizing view, and that's what I want to dispel here.
A few weeks ago I wrote a post here about becoming a teacher because of the frustrations of my schooling. On the subject of the walkout I wrote:
An eleventh-grade boy stood up in front of the cafeteria before class with a paper and said that he wanted to share some thoughts. Immediately every cafeteria door flew open and the male teachers ran in. (Who knows how long they had been waiting to put on this bully-boy display?) Some of them grabbed that junior boy and hustled him out, but most of them just started pushing everybody outside into the parking lot.
I promised to get back to that story someday, but this is not that day. Because even a cursory reading of this short quote tells you that the great LHS Walkout began as more of a push out by paranoid adults.
Compare our walkout to the East Los Angeles walkouts of 1968. I'll start with the issues. The East LA high schools - Garfield, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Wilson - were three-quarters Chicano and the issues were all about racism. The buildings themselves were inferior and so were the academic facilities, such as libraries, labs, and even textbooks. The teachers were mostly white and their expectations for the students were low. The shop classes had obsolete equipment. Students were paddled for speaking Spanish. And the disrespect of faculty for the kids was just notorious. One of those teachers had no problem publicly stating:
Most of the Chicanos have never had it so good. Before the Spanish came, he was an Indian grubbing in the soil, and after the Spaniards came he was a slave. It seems to me that America must be a very desirable place, witness the number of "wetbacks" and migrants both legal and illegal from Mexico.
Livingston High School was an overwhelmingly white school in an affluent suburb. I will not make any claims for the quality of the education, because I think it was lousy. But the expectations were that most of us would go to college and that many of us would enter the professions. Yes, the teachers disrespected us, but with the privilege of adulthood, not with the contempt of white supremacism. Yes, like the East LA high schools they frequently kept most of the bathrooms locked and rotated which ones were open. But our issues were issues of privilege: we wanted changes to final exam policy, a more relaxed dress code, and the right to circulate our own publications, independent of administrative censorship. As the joke from a few years ago had it, first world problems.
Then there is the preparation (or lack of it.) The leading students in East LA met together for months laying the groundwork for the protests with surveys, petitions, and presentations to the school board. Then they met for weeks preparing for the walkouts themselves. Some of us in Livingston had brought proposals to the principal, to be told the matters had to be brought to the school board, then sent back to the principal by the board. We ran a student candidate for the Board of Education.* We brought a suit against the superintendent of schools. But when it came to the walkout itself, well, we never planned one. We did plan and carry out a public meeting to report to the student body about the lack of progress with any of our proposals, and about the contempt with which they were received. But the walkout itself began with teachers shoving students out of the building when it merely looked as though another public meeting was beginning.
And, perhaps most important, there is the difference in official response. LAPD had undercover officers in the student leaders' planning meetings. When the students walked out they were met with absolutely massive violence, beatings, and arrests. Thirteen leaders were charged under sedition and conspiracy laws and faced 66 years in prison. And us? We were in the faculty parking lot next to the cafeteria listening to music and speeches when the chief of Livingston Police walked up from his headquarters across the park, about five minutes on foot. He was smoking a pipe, in a relaxed mood, and unaccompanied by any of his officers. I realized even that day that angry faculty and administrators - and even some parents - had undoubtedly demanded that he bust our heads and arrest us. But he was police chief in an affluent white suburb and you don't keep that job by beating the townspeople's precious children. He chatted with kids he knew, assessed the mood, and strolled back to his office.
The next school board meeting was moved from their public hearing room to a middle school auditorium, with the overflow crowd filling the cafeteria and listening over the PA. Sure, there were plenty of authoritarian types who were enraged that we had been allowed to get away with a display of defiance, but none of us were arrested. The suspensions we had been promised on the day of the "walkout" were quietly reduced to a single day - the day of the walkout itself - and then never heard of again, despite all the threats we heard every day in school about "your permanent record that will follow you for the rest of your life." I was proud to have been threatened with expulsion, as I mentioned above. It made me happy to be viewed as a menace by authoritarian assholes. But that was the last mumbling word I heard about it.
In fact the only police action at all was against my dad, at that big public school board meeting. One of the loudmouths libeled the secretary of the student government, and she rose to a point of personal privilege in order to respond. She had attended American Legion Girls' State and she knew that Robert's Rules gave her priority. The board, of course, ignored her so my outraged dad stood up and very loudly demanded that she be heard. The chairman of the board asked the officers to remove him, and they did.**
I hope I am adequately making a point about the privilege that encircled us, even as we protested a school regime that was disrespectful and antidemocratic, but that never tried to reduce us to super-exploited gardeners and chamber maids. The thing is that I was only partly aware of it at the time. Watching the HBO drama "Walkout!" about the East LA student protests and reading teacher Sal Castro's book Blowout! helped me appreciate the differences. Then, last year, I learned about the 1970 student walkout in Uvalde, Texas. Yes, that Uvalde, Texas that the whole world heard about last spring because of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School. But unlike our walkout that same spring, it lasted six weeks! Like the East LA students, the kids at the Uvalde high school were overwhelmingly Chicano. The immediate trigger for their walkout was the firing of Josue Garza, a fifth-grade teacher who was one of the very few bilingual Spanish speakers in the entire district. As in East LA they were demanding equal resources in the predominantly Chicano schools. They were protesting punitive disciplinary practices against Chicano kids that included frequent suspensions, paddling, and even fines. And, as in LA, they got extreme responses to their protests. Many of the participants were held back an entire school year. The valedictorian of the senior class was never allowed to graduate. And when they gathered near the school the Texas Rangers posted snipers on the roof.
My intention in writing this is not to disparage our protest at Livingston High School. As I wrote above, our education was authoritarian, antidemocratic, disrespectful, and - I believe - mediocre, too. The response to our protest was an attempt to reimpose the kind of strict control that we had been objecting to all along. But if you consider the differences you will see that Texas and California had been imposing a system of lifelong subordination on people of Mexican descent. And they were prepared to bring the full violence of the state apparatus against the students to maintain that system.
A final note: I mentioned above that we sued the school superintendent for the right to distribute independent literature.*** We brought that case late in 1968. It wasn't finally heard until I was a freshman in college, the fall of 1970. But consider the case the Uvalde students brought against their school system in 1970, for racial discrimination. It was eventually settled in 2008, thirty-eight years after it was brought. It wasn't settled until 2017, when the parties agreed that the terms of the settlement had been met. Do I really need to say more?
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* That candidate was me; again, a story for another day.
** A side note: My dad had known that man since we first moved to Livingston fourteen years earlier and we had been in one another's homes. To this day I don't know what to make of that.
*** I discuss this suit briefly in another context at the post linked above.
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