After World War II, Mexican American veterans came home expecting the equality they had fought for. What they found were segregated schools, all-white juries, restaurants that refused to serve them, and neighborhoods banks would not lend in. This second book of the Chicano Civil Rights series tells how they fought back and how the national civil rights revolution changed America from 1945 to 1968.
It begins with Mendez v. Westminster, the 1947 case in which Mexican American parents in Orange County, California, ended legal school segregation years before Brown v. Board of Education. It follows the American G.I. Forum's fight to give Private Felix Longoria an honorable burial, the Mexican American heroes of the Korean War, and Hernandez v. Texas, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that recognized Mexican Americans as a group protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.
Inside you'll find:
- Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, and what their presidencies meant for Mexican Americans
- The Korean War and Medal of Honor recipients such as Eugene Obregón of Los Angeles
- Operation Wetback, the destruction of Chávez Ravine, and freeways cut through East Los Angeles
- Redlining, restrictive covenants, and the suburbs closed to Mexican American families
- "Bloody Christmas" 1951 and police abuse in Los Angeles
- Rosa Parks, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the Little Rock Nine
- Martin Luther King Jr., Viva Kennedy, and the Kennedys' last evening in Houston
- Lyndon Johnson's Mexican American students in Cotulla, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Great Society
- The 1965 Watts uprising and what it revealed about Los Angeles
Clear and carefully researched, Civil Rights and the Great Society shows how a generation of veterans, parents, lawyers, and organizers won landmark victories, and why those victories were only the beginning.