BY HANK REICHMAN
With high school students and their supporters across the country planning walkouts from class this spring to demand common sense gun control measures, it may be useful to look back on, commemorate, and learn from events that occurred 50 years ago this week. Among the many anniversaries from the remarkable year 1968, we shouldn’t overlook that of the East Los Angeles Blowouts, a series of school walkouts by thousands of Mexican-American students in East Los Angeles in support of such goals as bilingual and bicultural education, more Latino teachers and administrators, smaller class sizes, better facilities, and textbooks that cover Mexican-American history.
Here is how a retrospective on the walkouts published this past weekend by the Los Angeles Times, begins:
Teachers at Garfield High School were winding down classes for the approaching lunch break when they heard the startling sound of people — they were not sure who — running through the halls, pounding on classroom doors. “Walkout!” they were shouting. “Walkout!”
They looked on in disbelief as hundreds of students streamed out of classrooms and assembled before the school entrance, their clenched fists held high. “Viva la revolución!” they called out. “Education, not eradication!” Soon, sheriff’s deputies were rumbling in.
It was just past noon on a sunny Tuesday, March 5, 1968 — the day a Mexican American revolution began. Soon came walkouts at two more Eastside high schools, Roosevelt and Lincoln, in protest of run-down campuses, lack of college prep courses, and teachers who were poorly trained, indifferent or racist.
By the time the “blowouts” peaked about a week later, 22,000 students had stormed out of class, delivered impassioned speeches and clashed with police. Scenes of rebellion filled newspapers and television screens. School trustees held emergency meetings to try to quell the crisis; Mayor Sam Yorty suggested students had fallen under the influence of “communist agitators.”
In 1968 the Los Angeles Mexican-American community had the highest dropout rate and the lowest college attendance among any Los Angeles ethnic group. Schools were rundown and overcrowded, and the community had little power. The dropout rate was 57% at Garfield, 45% at Roosevelt High, and 39% at Lincoln, the three largest high schools serving East Los Angeles. By 1960, nearly 85 percent of the Mexican-American community were citizens by birth, with about half the community’s population under the age of 20. There were, however, no Mexican-Americans on the City Council or Board of Supervisors and just one, Julian Nava — Professor of History at California State University, Northridge from 1957 until his retirement in 2000 — on the Board of Education.
The walkouts may have surprised the city’s political and educational establishments, but they did not take place without preparation. Student organizers had originally planned to present a series of demands, backed by the threat of a walkout, in Fall 1967, but plans fell through. Then, on March 1, 1968, Wilson High principal Donald Skinner canceled a student production of Neil Simon’s light comedy “Barefoot in the Park,” claiming it was too risqué. (I know, if you’ve seen this play or the movie based on it, this is just about totally unbelievable.) Although Wilson was not one of the original schools intending to demonstrate, 300 students walked out in protest, pushing through barriers and confronting police.
Students walkout at Lincoln High, 1968
On March 5, another 2,000 walked out of Garfield, the number increasing the next day to 2,700 despite confrontations with administrators and police. As planned, Roosevelt High walked out on March 6. Although the principal locked the gate, students climbed a fence, only to be beaten by police. On March 8, Belmont High students attempted a walkout, but the school was occupied by police, who arrested and beat students. Also on March 8, some 10-15,000 students from five high schools held a rally in a city park. The unrest extended to two junior highs.
After a week, the Board of Education set a meeting for March 11. Students, parents, teachers, professors, and community representatives formed the Educational Issues Coordinating Committee (EICC), which at the meeting asked for amnesty for all students involved and called for a community meeting. The board agreed and the students returned to school.
The community meeting was held on March 28, with 1,200 people attending. The EICC presented the list of 36 demands originally raised by the students, which ranged from things like burritos in the cafeteria and student lounges with jukeboxes to new libraries and more teachers and counselors. The board agreed to two of the demands — bilingual personnel and smaller classes — but claimed the others could not be met for lack of funding.
The unrest reflected years of social activism in the community. There was the Social Action Training Center, run out of a church by an Episcopal priest who supported Cesar Chavez. Four young activists opened the La Piranya Coffee Shop in 1967 as headquarters for their organization, Chicano Youths for Community Action. Chicano had previously been a derogatory word, but in the 1960s and 1970s it was reclaimed by young people of Mexican ancestry as a symbol of pride. The La Piranya group was led by David Sanchez, then just 18, who was president of Mayor Yorty’s youth advisory commission, and Vickie Castro, a Cal State Los Angeles student, who would later become a teacher, school principal and the second Latino ever elected to the L.A. Board of Education. After Sanchez purchased some brown berets for members of his group, they became known as the Brown Berets. They would soon take up farmworker rights, police brutality, and opposition to the Vietnam War as key issues.
Police handcuff a Brown Beret and a Free Press photographer, 1968
“We caught the entire nation by surprise,” Sanchez later recalled. “Before the walkouts, no one cared that substandard schools made it all but impossible for Chicano youths to find strength and pride in their culture, language and history — or to make the most of their lives,” he said. “After the walkouts, no one could deny that we were ready to go to prison if necessary for what we believed, which was this: With better education, the Chicano community could control its own destiny.”
One unusual but critically important source of the movement was located not in the Los Angeles barrio but a 90-minute drive away in, of all places, the wealthy Malibu Mountains. This was Camp Hess Kramer, a Jewish summer camp, which hosted annual programs for outstanding East Los Angeles students. As Gustavo Arrellano recounts in a fascinating piece in Tablet magazine, the camp was administered by Rabbi Alfred Wolf for the Wilshire Boulevard Temple. Rabbi Wolf and his congregation were longtime supporters of the Los Angeles Mexican-American community, once allowing protestors to use the Temple as a base for a protest. In 1963, in his capacity as chair of the County Commission on Human Relations, Wolf helped organize the first of what became the annual Chicano Youth Leadership Conferences. Here’s how Arrellano describes that initial endeavor:
Wolf provided Hess Kramer; major financial sponsorship came from Tobias Kotzin, a Jewish trouser manufacturer who employed hundreds of Mexican-American women at his Los Angeles factory.
About 150 students got on buses from East Los Angeles on Friday and returned home on Palm Sunday. The conference ostensibly operated like any other Jewish youth camp. Boys and girls slept in separate cabins, with college-age counselors and adult administrators to watch over them. There was an opening dinner, a Saturday night sock hop, and time for meals and games in between lectures and workshops. “We wanted to not only keep the kids busy throughout the day,” remembered Sal Castro, a Los Angeles social science teacher who served as a counselor at the inaugural CYLC, “but also to even exhaust them in order to keep in check their hormones.”
And in this safe space, the future of the Chicano movement began to get discussed. Topics at that first conference included “Are Mexican-Americans timid and hesitant in aspiring to advance?” and “Should agencies other than those existing be set up to help these people?”
“It was a great experience and a beautiful setting,” said Gloria Arellanes, who attended the first one and went on to become an influential Chicana feminist, in the 2015 book The Chicano Generation: Testimonios of the Movement. “For the first time, I met many other Chicanos from the Greater LA area and had an opportunity in the organized discussion sessions and outside of them to learn the conditions of Chicano students in other schools.”
The Hess Kramer retreat proved such a success that adults quickly organized their own. That fall, 150 educators, politicians, and businesspeople attended a three-day conference keynoted by L.A. human relations commission member Julius M. Klein. “You must rid yourselves of this sense of defeatism and sense of inferiority,” the Los Angeles Times quoted him as telling his Mexican-American audience. “I was impressed by the quality of people attending this conference. Don’t underestimate your people…you are ready.”
The retreats would continue for decades at the camp, with Sal Castro the main organizer, officially ending in 2009 when funding ran out, although they have been held intermittently since by the Sal Castro Foundation, including after the death of its namesake in 2013. Alums of the retreats include former Los Angeles mayor and current gubernatorial candidate Antonio Villaraigosa, retired California Supreme Court Justice Carlos Moreno, and Hollywood producer Moctezuma Esparza, who had helped organize the blowouts as a UCLA student and in 2006 produced an HBO movie on these events. “The conferences served to politicize a new generation of Chicano students who participated not only in the blowouts, but in the Chicano Movement as a whole,” wrote Sal Castro’s biographer, UC Santa Barbara professor Mario T. Garcia, for a 2006 one-day conference held at UCLA to celebrate the CYLC. “Indeed, one might say that the cradle of the Chicano Movement in L.A. was to be, ironically, found here in the Malibu mountains.”
“We were all products of Camp Kramer and Church of the Epiphany and, therefore, aspired to remake society,” Sal Castro would recall. “At La Piranya, we organized strategies for doing just that, and shared outrage over things like a Time magazine article that described East L.A. as ‘reeking of garbage and wine.’” Sal Castro and other sympathetic teachers were key to the movement’s success. “We were secretly guided behind the scenes by sympathetic teachers and administrators who used us, in a way, as their own vehicles for change,” Vickie Castro recalled. “They even helped me write speeches I gave after the blowouts during meetings with school officials.”
Sal Castro Talks to Students at Lincoln High, 1968
On May 31, 13 walkout organizers were indicted on conspiracy charges. Each faced 66 years in prison. Included were Sal Castro, Sanchez and Esparza. On June 2, over 2,000 supporters rallied at Central Police station as Castro was released on bail. But the school board refused to allow him to teach until he was cleared. For eight days 35 of Castro’s supporters sat in at the board office until they were arrested on October 2. On October 3, however, Castro was reinstated. Nevertheless, he was moved from school to school and made a substitute before landing at Belmont Middle School as a permanent teacher. In 1970, an appeals court struck down the indictments of the “Eastside 13.” In 2010, Belmont Middle School was renamed Salvador B. Castro Middle School.
One lesson of these events: activism works! A year after the walkouts UCLA’s enrollment of Mexican-Americans jumped from 100 to 1,900. Within a decade Chicano Studies programs were established at colleges and universities nationwide. Dropout rates at affected schools have improved dramatically — at Garfield it’s 13%, Roosevelt, 28% and Lincoln, 21%. But there’s a ways to go, of course: at Malibu High the rate is about 5%. “We’ve come a long way,” Vickie Castro said, “but there’s still a lot of work to do.”
In many respects, as the Los Angeles Times noted, “the walkouts’ greatest accomplishment was fostering in the Mexican American community a sense of possibility — the realization that a just cause sometimes requires speaking up.”
“Until that day, it never crossed my mind that Garfield High was run-down, overcrowded and lagging behind public schools in wealthier white neighborhoods,” said Joseph Rodriguez, a walkout participant who would become a prize-winning columnist at the San Jose Mercury News. “All that changed after the blowouts.”
Years later, Vickie Castro, now a school principal, was approached by some students and parents angry because the school cafeteria served too many burritos, with inadequate variety. “I had to turn around and stifle a chuckle,” she said. “Once upon a time, I fought hard for those burritos!”
This year L.A. Unified School District is remembering the walkouts with seminars, instructional materials and an arts festival. The Plaza de Cultura y Artes in downtown will host a major exhibition on the walkouts’ legacy. Many screenings are planned of Esparza’s film “Walkout.” Last week Garfield High’s current students took the stage to commemorate the events. As the Los Angeles Times reported, “One group performed a musical history of the so-called blowouts: “We’ve got to walk out, walk out for justice. We’ve got to walk out, walk out for brown rights.” A young man recited a poem he had written about what it means to be Chicano in East L.A. today.”
"We've got to walk out, walk out for justice. We've got to walk out, walk out for brown rights." These students wrote & performed a musical history of the 1968 walkouts pic.twitter.com/mb2RKlWlk8
— Sonali Kohli ?? (@Sonali_Kohli) March 1, 2018
Valeria Salazar Gamboa, 16, spoke about inequalities that still exist at Garfield. High-achieving students get the recognition and resources, she said, and the district’s supposedly random searches often feel targeted and foster an environment of fear and distrust. “There is still oppression,” she told the students. “It is about time we remove the blindfold and continue to fight for a real education.”
"It is about time we remove the blindfold and continue to fight for a real education." Students using 50th walkout anniversary to call out current problems they say they have with Garfield — preferential treatment/opportunities for higher-performing students, random searches. pic.twitter.com/AP2r3SBQog
— Sonali Kohli ?? (@Sonali_Kohli) March 1, 2018
While the district has been celebrating the power of the walkouts 50 years ago, it has sent a very different message about gun control walkouts planned for this month. At 10 a.m. March 14, students across the country have pledged to walk out of school for 17 minutes in memory of the 17 people killed in the Parkland shooting. The walkouts will push for stricter gun control. But L.A. Unified interim Supt. Vivian Ekchian issued a statement saying students should remain on their campuses.
“Students have the right to freedom of speech, and they may participate in peaceful dialogue and activities on campus during non-instructional periods, within parameters set by their administrators,” she wrote. “We ask that parents talk to their children and encourage them not to leave campus. Our goal is to provide students with opportunities to express themselves in a safe manner that respects the school environment and all perspectives.”
Yoli Rios, who walked out of Lincoln High School half a century ago, advised today’s students to get their parents and communities on board. That was key for some of the movement’s leaders in 1968, she said. Another 1968 walkout leader, John Ortiz, who graduated from Garfield in 1969 and came back for last week’s commemoration, said students need to make sure they’re educated. But he added that if they want to walk out he supports them. “At what point was LAUSD given the right to tell kids how to use their civil rights?” he asked.
Garfield history teacher Juan L. Garcia, who led the planning of last week’s commemorative event, called the ’68 walkouts a last resort. He said he hopes to create a forum on campus to help address student concerns before March 14. Still, he wants to leave it up to students to determine how best to use their voices. “If we stop the student voices now,” he said, “then it’s almost like we’re back in 1968.”
Sherriff’s Deputies At Garfield High, 1968
No less an authority than the late Dr. Paul Douglas, who served as Professor at the University of Chicago, U.S. Senator from Illinois (1948-1966), and Chairman of the National Commission on Urban Problems (appointed by President Lyndon Johnson), made statements in the Commission report Building the American City about “citizens taking to the streets”, which were totally in sync with students demonstrating in the 1960s, and which would be totally in sync with students of today in the U.S. getting out in front on matters which directly affect their well-being, with gun control being a lead concern. As a graduate student at Northwestern University I was invited to share aspects of my urban information research with the Commission, and to suggest topics to include in the Commission’s research agenda. Perhaps as a sign that he was totally attuned to changing times, Dr. Douglas did not miss a beat when he learned that I was Canadian, what was important to him was that I was a young person with considered thoughts, and he wanted the Commission to hear them. From what I have seen Paul Douglas would be very impressed by the young people involved in trying to bring sanity to gun access, and he would urge them to stay the course until the deed is done.