Eighty years before Brown

It doesn't happen often, but on occasion politicians and editors are slightly ahead of the crowd.

Such was the case in 1874, when a bill to integrate California's public schools suddenly aroused the state. As we commemorate this month the 50th anniversary of the Warren Court's unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education, banning educational segregation, let's remember that liberal Californians, led by San Franciscans, made the argument for that 1954 decision eight decades earlier.

In 1874 the state Supreme Court, in Ward v. Flood, had just upheld a California law authorizing racial segregation in public schools.

Eleven-year-old Mary Ward's attorneys had asked the court to rule that San Francisco's separate school for blacks violated the 14th Amendment's equal-protection clause.

Without dissent, the justices decided that equality only meant that all children were entitled to a public education. Since the city provided a school for blacks, they said, it met the amendment's intent.

In an impassioned speech, San Francisco Assemblyman Jabez Cowdery urged fellow legislators to ban racial segregation in the state's public schools:

"In this state we have 139,596 white children, and it seems absurd to say that 944 colored children, if admitted to the schools with them, will destroy our schools. I would ask any opponent of this measure to inquire of himself if he would decline a seat in Congress because he was compelled to meet negroes there on terms of equality? Would any of the lawyers on this floor, who will oppose this measure, decline a seat upon the bench of the Supreme Court of South Carolina because a negro is chief justice? Would you, sir, decline a seat in the U. S. Senate because a negro senator was at your side?"

He continued, "If gentlemen are determined to oppose this measure, ... say truly that you oppose it because you cannot dispossess your minds of the old prejudice that should have died out when the negro ceased to be a chattel and became a man."

Joining Cowdery in support of integration was editor James Ayers, then of the Los Angeles Evening Express but formerly editor of several San Francisco papers.

Anticipating Chief Justice Earl Warren's opinion in the Brown case, Ayers wrote:

"The admission that colored children are entitled to equal education privileges with white children would practically admit them to the schools set apart for the whites; for no separate system of schools can be maintained for the small fraction of the pupils of a district which would be so efficient as the system devoted to the education of nearly the entire school community. Hence, if the colored children have an equal education right with the whites it follows that they are entitled to the best school facilities as well as to the worst."

But Ayers, noting that the Legislature faced a budget crisis in 1874, went further:

"To keep up separate schools for negro children involves an expenditure altogether disproportioned to the cost of education of the same number of white children. We have admitted the black man to citizenship and he is eligible to every office in the country, from President down to that of township constable. Yet we deny him equal facilities with his white brethren to educate his children who may one day become leaders in public life."

Rejecting the reasoning of Ayers and Cowdery, the Legislature narrowly defeated the bill banning segregated schools. Six years later the politicians relented, and for a moment integrated schools were the rule in California -- until the "yellow menace" brought segregation back in 1885 with legislation allowing districts to create separate schools for Asian-Americans.

That barrier would not fall until 1947. Following a successful suit against several Orange County school districts, the Legislature voted to end school segregation. Earl Warren, then the state's governor, signed the law ending California's separate-but-equal charade.

Ralph E. Shaffer is professor emeritus in history at Cal Poly Pomona and co-author of "California and the Coming of the Fifteenth Amendment." He may be reached at reshaffer@csupomona.edu.