Alvarez v. Lemon Grove (1931): Making Lemonade out of the Lemons of Segregation

If you live in the United States and are familiar with only one decision handed down by a court of law, it’s probably the U.S. Supreme Court case known as Brown v. Board of Education. Specifically, that would be young Linda Brown, only nine years old when she sued her local Board of Education for sending her to an all-black school a mile and a half from her house, when there was a perfectly good white school right around the corner. But did you know this racial discrimination did not occur in the Deep South? It occurred in Topeka, Kansas, out on the Great Plains, halfway to California. And guess what? Race-based school segregation extended the rest of the way to California, as well. In fact, it was in 1931 that another young student, 12-year-old Roberto Álvarez, sued the Lemon Grove, California, Board of School Trustees for trying to separate him and 74 of his Mexican-American classmates from their Anglo classmates and send them instead to a “new” school that they and their parents considered no better than a caballeriza, or horse stables. Roberto won that case in San Diego County Superior Court, making it the first successful school desegregation case in U.S. history. In fact, it served as the earliest precedent for the Brown decision 23 years later. Listen as we tell the story of Álvarez v. Lemon Grove, one of the most important court cases in U.S. history that most people have never heard of.