Fragmented Diversity: School Desegregation, Student Activism, and Busing in Los Angeles, 1963 - 1982.

Abstract

From 1963 when it was filed to 1982 when the United States Supreme Court ruled on it, the important but understudied, civil rights and equal educational opportunity case of Crawford v. Los Angeles City Board of Education encapsulated and propelled the legal and political framework of an era. This dissertation is the first full scale history of the case and the political, social, and legal discourse around it since 1991. In this dissertation I argue that what began as a school desegregation lawsuit under the framework of a straightforward black-white binary, transformed dramatically over nearly two decades due to demographic and economic shifts in the city, as well the decision-making processes within two powerful institutional contexts at the Los Angeles City Board of Education and the courts. These contexts, in turn, generated new political identities, ideologies, and actors through the process of various forms of decision-making during the struggle over school desegregation. Los Angeles’ racial politics changed markedly by 1982 because racial and ethnic groups managed to carve out political spaces and concessions from these two institutions, but the political coalitions in the city were characterized by a condition of fragmented diversity, marked by racial coalitions that emanated out of political fissures among and within racial and ethnic communities. However, these influential political and legal institutions created the context and the parameters under which these new actors could operate, delineating who would participate in the political and legal arenas over education policy generally, and Crawford specifically. For example, as the case progressed through the courts, these institutions would legitimize the participation of individuals and groups – as members of official committees or intervenors – over others. On the ideological front, these institutions shaped the debate over the meaning of equal educational opportunity, compensatory education, bilingual/bicultural education, and de jure/de facto segregation. These institutions also dictated and in some cases co-opted many transformative events and circumstances, including the student demonstrations of 1968 and the rise of the anti-busing coalition