Mexican-American Students Protest in LA
Mexican-American students in Los Angeles, organized as the United Mexican American Students, protested discrimination in the Los Angeles public school system.
The protest on this day is believed to be the first such organized protest by Latino students in the city.
The following year, on August 1, 1968 the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) was established to work for the legal rights of Latinos in the U.S. MALDEF was deliberately modeled after the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (which is separate from the NAACP membership organization).
In one of the earliest court victories for Latino people, the Supreme Court on May 3, 1954 in Hernandez v. Texas ruled that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applied to all people and not just the categories of “white” and “negro.” Hernandez was charged with murder in Texas and argued that he could not receive a fair trial because Latinos were excluded the jury pools in the county where he was being prosecuted. The Supreme Court unanimously agreed. And the decision came exactly two weeks before the the Supreme Court ruled that racially segregated schools were unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment
Watch Latino student walk out in 1968: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3TKnj0fXZs
Learn more: Lisa Garcia Bedolla, Latino Power, Identity, and Politics in Los Angeles (2005)
Learn more at a timeline of Chicano history, 1962–1974: http://chicanomoratorium.org/html/history_timeline.html
Learn more: Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States (2014)