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Sylvia Mendez was just like any other third grader in 1946. She liked to learn. She enjoyed recess. But her school was in terrible shape. She wanted to go to the 17th Street School. This was the school that the white children in her city of Westminster attended. But it had a whites-only policy that kept Mexican American children like Sylvia out. Sylvia and her family did not think this policy was fair, so they decided to sue the school district. Their willingness to stand up for equality in education paved the way for all California schools to become desegregated. The historic court case even played a role in the more famous Brown v. Board of Education, which made school segregation illegal in all 50 U.S. states. There's even more interesting information about this pioneer in education inside.
Nominated for a 34th annual Lambda Literary Award • An essential and revelatory coming-of-age novel from a thrilling new voice, Rainbow Milk follows nineteen-year-old Jesse McCarthy as he grapples with his racial and sexual identities against the backdrop of his Jehovah's Witness upbringing. In the 1950s, ex-boxer Norman Alonso has immigrated to Britain from Jamaica with his wife and children in order to secure a brighter future. Blighted with unexpected illness and racism, Norman and his family are resilient but are all too aware that their family will need more than just hope to survive in their new country. At the turn of the millennium, Jesse seeks a fresh start in London, escaping a broken immediate family, a repressive religious community, and his depressed hometown in the industrial Black Country. But once he arrives he finds himself at a loss for a new center of gravity and turns to sex work, music, and art to create his own notions of love, masculinity, and spirituality. A wholly original novel as tender as it is visceral, Rainbow Milk is a bold reckoning with race, class, sexuality, freedom, and religion across generations, time, and cultures.
While Brown v. Board of Education remains much more famous, Mendez v. Westminster School District (1947) was actually the first case in which segregation in education was successfully challenged in federal court. Finally giving Mendez its due, Philippa Strum provides a concise and compelling account of its legal issues and legacy, while retaining its essential human face: that of Mexican Americans unwilling to accept second-class citizenship. 1945 Gonzalo and Felcitas Mendez, California farmers, sent their children off to the local school, only to be told that the youngsters would have to attend a separate facility reserved for Mexican Americans. In response the Mendezes and other aggrieved ...
The author examines how political violence and new refugee spaces in Canada work together to create spaces of social relations which are constituted by a mix of ruptures, connections, yearning to return, denial of the past, new opportunities, concocted life stories, identity renegotiation and recognition.
Though Satchel Paige lived into the early 1980s, much of our information about his life and especially his career is the stuff of anecdote. He is nevertheless a central figure--arguably the central figure--in our reconstructions of Negro Leagues history. This collection of papers from the 9th Annual Jerry Malloy Negro League Conference focuses on the celebrity of Satchel Paige and the team he is most closely associated with, the Kansas City Monarchs. Accounts of Paige's exploits are scrutinized and the effects of his fame, on both the contemporary perception of black baseball and its depiction in the years since, are discussed.