Fighting School Segregation in San Bernardino

March 12th, 1964 in a San Bernardino Board of Education Meeting, five members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) were arrested after refusing to leave a closed executive session. These activists were protesting the failure of the board to "take positive action to correct racial imbalance."

Rev. D. Lyle Johnson, pastor of Bethel Missionary Baptist church, Floyd “Buck” Wyatt (age 54), owner of Buck’s farm on the west side, and white CORE members Lloyd W. Honeycutt, Danny Joe Klein, and Ruby Ann Hamilton were all charged with disturbing the peace and failure to disperse at a lawful command and taken to jail. Lawyer Rufus Johnson represented them and they were ultimately acquitted.

This action was one step on a long fight for educational justice and racial equality in San Bernardino. Black and Mexican parents and organizers had long struggled against racial segregation and unequal education in the city. But throughout the 1960s, demands for change grew louder.

When we think of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, we most often think of the deep south. However, this fight for racial equality took place all across the nation, including in the Inland Empire in Southern California. While there were many different facets to this struggle, unequal education served as a flash point in many communities. In San Bernardino, parents, activist groups and teachers fought for high quality education across a deeply racially divided city. In California's cities, there may not have been legally segregated Jim Crow schools in the 1960s, but racially segregated neighborhoods produced deeply unequal and racially divided schools. We need to learn this local history of the civil rights movement, so we can acknowledge the mistakes of our past and create a better and more equal education system for all children in the future. 

Discriminatory housing practices were common in San Bernardino in the 1950 and 1960s. Starting in the 1920s, many homes had restrictive covenants written into their deeds that prohibited the sale or rental of homes to people who were not Caucasian. Even advertisements for new developments above Baseline St, like this one for a Shandin Hills development, sometimes included subtle cues to these practices saying "this tract is restricted." FHA practices of redlining before and after WWII reinforced racial exclusions practiced by real estate agents, banks and homeowners in neighborhoods throughout California (Rothstein 2017).

These practices helped to create racial boundaries in which minorities were concentrated in and restricted to only certain neighborhoods. The geography seen in the 1960 map below is not an accident. Slide the swipe map to see concentrated Black populations on the left and Hispanic populations on the right that are the direct result of these discriminatory housing practices.

This map shows how African American and Latino families were concentrated on the west side of San Bernardino and south San Bernardino, and were systematically excluded from housing north of Baseline Street and east of the train tracks and later the 215 freeway which residents of the west side sometimes described as like the Berlin Wall (Cheryl Brown, personal communication).

Since school boundaries were drawn by neighborhood, this systematic housing segregation produced segregation in schools (especially in elementary and middle schools). The maps below show this pattern clearly. By clicking on the different schools, you can see the racial composition of each school according to a report the Citizens Advisory Committee Report Board of Education from January 1966. They defined schools as Anglo if the school was over 85% White (purple points on the map). They classified schools that were 85% Black and Mexican as minority schools. On this map, we distinguish majority Black schools (burgundy points) from majority Mexican schools (blue points). The schools that were more multiracial, where no group so clearly predominated, are marked with the multiracial points.

Elementary schools were the most racially segregated, when compared junior highs and high schools, because they were neighborhood schools which drew from the smallest geography. For example, Mill Elementary School located in south San Bernardino in a primarily Black neighborhood had a racial composition of 86.9% Black students, 9.8% Mexican-American, and 3.3% White. On the other hand, Arrowhead Elementary school which was located in the restricted communities above Baseline in a almost completely white neighborhood had a racial composition of 0% Black students, 2.3% Mexican-American, and 97.3% White.

Mill School was a thriving school in a growing Black neighborhood in south San Bernardino known as the Valley Truck Farms. While this school and neighborhood was initially racially mixed, as the Black population in the neighborhood increased, White families began asking for transfers into other majority White San Bernardino schools. This White flight increased in the 1940s after the Mill School hired the first African American teacher in San Bernardino, Dorothy Inghram, and then promoted her to principal and ultimately superintendent. Dorothy Inghram hired other Black teachers and built a model school based on the newest educational philosophies (Hall 2019, p. 28).

This White flight from Mill School shows how parents' choices often made school segregation even more extreme than residential segregation. By the early 1950s, the school district stopped allowing parents to transfer out of the Mill school district, but by this point the neighborhood was overwhelmingly Black both because of White flight and because it was one of the few neighborhoods where Black families could buy their own homes and fulfill the American dream of home ownership (Hall 2019, Inghram 1983).

Some of San Bernardino's 6 Junior high schools were more integrated since they drew students from across a larger geography. But two of the junior highs located north of Baseline were still over 90% White, while the other was 83% White. There were more diverse junior high schools below Baseline and in the city's north west. For example, Sturges Junior high was 8.9% Black students, 49% Mexican-American students, and 41.5% White students in 1966.

The city's growing Black population was increasingly crowded into the historic west side of the city, as well as the Valley Truck Farm area. Black parents grew increasingly dissatisfied with the quality of education particularly at Franklin Junior High, which was 59.4% Black, 38.2% Mexican and only 1.4% White. "SB Negro Residents Claim Junior High School Inferior” was the headline of the San Bernardino County Sun published on August 26th, 1965.  

“Negroes have been waiting 300 years for an equal break... they wanted an equal break in education now, today, in San Bernardino.” San Bernardino County Sun, August 26th, 1965. 

This article detailed African American residents complaints to the Human Relations Commission about the inferior education at Franklin Junior High School. The parents described the insults and threats made towards their children by both students and teachers as well as a tougher grading policy of their children’s work. Parents worried that the segregated and inferior education their children were receiving threatened their children’s future educational paths and job opportunities. Looking over the newer (and seemingly better) school of Arrowview Junior High, many began to campaign to have the chance to transfer their children to the majority White Arrowview Junior High School. The outcry over the unequal education began to feed the growing activism of groups like Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to fight for change and equality.

With only 3 high schools in San Bernardino in 1966, these schools drew from the largest geographic regions for their students and so were slightly less segregated. But two of the newest schools San Gregornio and Pacific High (above Baseline and furthest from the west side) were still over 90% white. San Bernardino High, the city's oldest high school, was more integrated, with 20.6% Black students, 25.5% Mexican-American students, and 53.4% White students.

San Bernardino High School, opened in 1891, was the first and only high school up until 1953 when Pacific High School opened. As the city's only high school, San Bernardino High School was formally integrated, but problems of equity still existed in these integrated spaces. Carl Clemmons who graduated in 1941, sheds light on the more subtle ways that African Americans and Mexican Americans faced discrimination even in formally integrated schools.

Clemmons was one among the three African American students who graduated from San Bernardino High School in 1941. Although the high school was integrated, counselors would often encourage minority students to take "terminal" or vocational courses. For girls, these courses focused around home economics, marriage, and family. Boys were often encouraged to take wood shop and auto shop classes on the assumption that once they graduated, these manual labor jobs would be the only jobs available to them (Clemmons Oral History 2003).

By not encouraging students of color to take classes that could lead to skilled labor or professional careers, schools were reinforcing existing patterns of discrimination in the labor force. Integration would not be enough to solve these persistent problems.

CORE organized alongside throughout the 1960s to push the school district to change the geographic boundaries for schools and to create opportunities for open enrollment to promote desegregation. They believed that changing geographic boundaries could help integrate schools and promote equal education across the school district. CORE staged sit ins during school board meetings, marched in protest, and made demands. The school board argued that San Bernardino schools weren't legally or intentionally segregated, and thus it was beyond their authority to act. They focused on the more integrated high schools, hoping to overshadow the segregation that was more visible in elementary and junior highs.

But the city also opposed any real challenge to residential segregation. The San Bernardino City Council and County Board of Supervisors voted to oppose the Rumsford Fair Housing Act of 1963, which prohibited discrimination by race in renting or selling homes. They voted to support the referendum to repeal this fair housing, prompting further protests by CORE (CORE SB Action Re. Rumsford Act). Ultimately in 1965, the California voters agreed with white local political leaders, when they passed Proposition 14 which overturned fair housing and made racial discrimination in home rentals and sales legal again. This practice was finally prohibited in 1968 by the Federal Fair Housing Act which passed in the wake of massive protests and riots after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King (HoSang 2010).

The School Board responded slowly to demands for change. Frustrated with the slow pace of change, in 1965, Frances Grice, Bonnie Johnson, and Valerie Pope formed the Community League of Mothers to expand protests. They accused the San Bernardino Board of Education of confining black students to overcrowded and substandard black schools that did not prepare students to achieve academic success and social mobility.

In September of 1965, they organized a brief boycott of the public schools and established Freedom Schools (Citizen's Advisory Committee 1966). They worked with CORE, NAACP and the Community Action Group to demand that the state investigate the school board's failure to address "discrimination and de-facto segregation."

In response, the school board created a Citizen's Advisory Committee to study the problem and propose solutions. They collected the data used in the maps displayed here to show that San Bernardino did indeed have de-facto segregated schools. They further argued that segregated schools were "a stumbling block in developing both a quality education program and healthy democratic attitudes" (p.10). They explained that segregation promoted racial fears and prejudices among white students and contributed to poor academic achievement among minority children, rejecting the school superintendent's argument that poor academic performance by minority students was only a problem of poor home environments.

The committee urged the School Board to act immediately:

"The Committee calls on the School Board to develop a plan for total desegregation and integration by January 1, 1967."

Despite this urgent call to action, the fight over how to integrate the schools would drag on for more than a decade. For the next 6 years, the School board first tried to use only voluntary open enrollment that would allow students to choose to transfer to schools only when space was available and if their transfer would address racial imbalances. By 1971, still 33 of San Bernardino's 41 schools were racial imbalanced (Timeline, SB Sun, 1984).

In 1972, the NAACP launched a lawsuit against the School district, calling for an immediate end to racial segregation. When the judge ordered the schools to immediately integrate, the school district repeatedly appealed his orders all the way to the California Supreme Court  (Timeline, SB Sun, 1984). By early 1977, the school district was still trying to achieve desegregation through voluntary open enrollment and by creating two week visits between white and minority elementary school students designed to improve racial attitudes. One researcher found that these efforts had "not resulted in any dramatic improvements in students' or teachers' racial attitudes" (Study Finds S.B. Integration Plans Has Not Had Dramatic Results, SB Telegram Feb 19, 1977).

When the San Bernardino School district lost the NAACP lawsuit in the California Supreme Court in August 1976, the city finally created a more systematic integration plan. But this plan still relied on voluntary busing and magnet schools to integrate segregated schools. Judge Paul Egly gave the city one year to achieve integration with voluntary busing before he would require mandatory busing (Mixed Reaction to School Desegregation Plans, SB Sun Sept 1, 1977). 

Reactions to the new desegregation plans from both parents, students and school board members were mixed. Some parents supported the push for integration and even the threat of mandatory busing as a catalyst for change. Other parents and many school board members opposed any possibility of mandatory busing and organized to defend the idea of neighborhood schools. School trustee Lawrence Niegel vociferously opposed mandatory busing, saying "We have to take a stand. Judges are ruling our country" (Mixed Reaction to School Desegregation Plans, SB Sun Sept 1, 1977). The first buses rolled out with the first 205 elementary school students voluntarily embracing busing in February 6, 1978. The city continued to build magnet programs to promote voluntary integration for the next decade, as the courts and political leaders retreated from pushing mandatory integration.

By 1988, San Bernardino had 36 magnet programs in 22 elementary schools and a few junior high schools and had changed the boundaries of the high schools to promote racial integration. Though the voluntary magnet schools did increase integration in the schools through the 1980s, the city faced new barriers to integration. In the late 1980s, it became harder to create racially balanced schools as the number of Black and Latino students in San Bernardino increased, at the same time as many white families left the school district and the city (Magnet Schools the Key to Success of Voluntary Plan, LA Times Nov 28, 1988). Despite the actions taken by the school board to end the racial imbalance in San Bernardino schools, the lasting impacts of segregation still can be seen today.

In the experience of Daniela, one of the authors of this StoryMap, San Bernardino schools today do accept students from all racial backgrounds based on their academic strengths. Many students do apply to transfer across the city's geography to go to schools outside their neighborhoods, and the hills of San Bernardino are no longer all white like they were in the past. However, she believes that segregation continues through the home school rule today. Each student is still assigned to a home school, based on neighborhood boundaries, and that can reinforce racial and class divides. If a student attends a school outside of their neighborhood home school, and fails to meet the schools academic or social expectations, they are sent back to their home school. Housing segregation also still exists in San Bernardino in ways that influence the schools. But this housing and school segregation is now more created by class instead of strict racial boundaries. The past lives on in the present, however, because of the ways housing and schools have reproduced racial inequalities in poverty and wealth in our families and communities over time.

This project owes a special thanks to Sue Payne, volunteer at the Feldheym Library California Room, who helped us identify many of the original sources for this project.

“As Seen From Within.” City of San Bernardino - As Seen From Within, www.sbcity.org/about/history/pioneer_women/as_seen_from_within.asp.

" CORE SB Action re Rumsford Act " SB Sun, Jan 12, 1964 · Page 19 (Retrieved from Newspapers.com)

Diaz, Davin. “Belva Holder Oral History .” City of San Bernardino - Belva Holder, 9 May 2004, sbcity.org/cityhall/library/services/history/treasures/oral_history_project/holder_b.asp.

Carl Clemons Oral History, conducted by Joynce Hanson. Oct. 20, 2003  www.sbcity.org/cityhall/library/services/history/treasures/oral_history_project/cl  emons_c.asp.

HoSang, Daniel. 2010. Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California, UC California Press.

Inghram, Dorothy. 1983. Beyond All This. Feldheym Library California Room.

League of Women Voters. March 21, 1968. Statement to the Board of Education, San Bernardino City Schools, on the District's Plan for Desegregation and Integration. California Room, Feldheym Library, School Desegregation Vertical Folder.

Magnet Schools the Key to Success of Voluntary Plan, LA Times Nov 28, 1988. California Room, Feldheym Library, School Desegregation Vertical Folder.

 Minority Student Transfer Plan Heard, SB Sun, June 14, 1964  Retrieved from Newspapers.com

Racial Boundary Changes Rejected by SB School Board,  The San Bernardino County Sun, San Bernardino, California  11 Sep 1963, Wed • Page 19 (Retrieved from Newspapers.com)

Report of the Citizens Advisory Committee to the Board of Education of the San Bernardino City Unified School District. California Room, Feldheym Library, School Desegregation Vertical Folder.

Ruggles, Steven, Sarah Flood, Ronald Goeken, Megan Schouweiler and Matthew Sobek. IPUMS USA: Version 12.0 [dataset]. Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS, 2022. https://doi.org/10.18128/D010.V12.0 (1960 Census Map)

 SB School Segregation - complaints about Franklin Junior High  San Bernardino Sun, Thu, Aug 26, 1965 · Page 28

 SB Freedom School  San Bernardino Sun Tue, Sep 21, 1965 · Page 1

Study Finds S.B. Integration Plans Has Not Had Dramatic Results, SB Telegram Feb 19, 1977. California Room, Feldheym Library, School Desegregation Vertical Folder.

Rothstein, Richard. 2017. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Liverlight Publishers