J.

gilberto Quezada
jgilbertoquezada@yahoo.com

Civil Rights--How Far We Have Come!

Hello Walter,

In keeping with my theme of Civil Rights, I would like to share with you the
poignant and personal life story of my good friend and neighbor Louis Cousins.
And I would also like to share my personal relationship with him. A few months
ago, I took my good friend, Louis Cousins, to visit St. Mary's University. We had a
very pleasant visit at our alma mater. Louis and his charming wife, Delores, live a
few blocks away from our house, in the same subdivision. We see each other
quite often and get together for breakfast to talk about literature. He is also an avid
reader, and so we share the latest books we have read. We are about the same age.
During the Vietnam War, he was a medic for the U.S. Army. Louis received his
B.A. degree in Chemistry in 1990, while he was working full time in the medical
field and supporting a family. He is an amazing person. And, he is also a national
celebrity.

According to a newspaper article in The Virginian-Pilot: "This 1959 photo shows

Louis Cousins in the Maury High School auditorium in Norfolk. In 1959, Cousins
was the only black student at Maury High School. When six public schools closed
50 years ago rather than accept black students, 10,000 white students in Norfolk
were locked out of classrooms during Virginia's last, desperate gasp to resist
integration."

Cousins spoke about his first day at his new school: "My mother and I walked up
those steps and people were calling us names," he said. " When my mother left me,
I was completely alone. I went to the auditorium along with all of the other new
students and picked a seat near the front." He said, "I was not going to sit in the
back anymore because I finally had an opportunity to be in the front."
A picture of Cousins sitting in the front of the auditorium alone with all of the
other students sitting in the back became a popularly used photo to describe the
integration period.

Louis Cousins, one of the Norfolk 17, waits to be assigned to a home room
at Maury High School
in the auditorium on Feb. 1, 1959. (The Virginian-Pilot file photo)
Louis Cousins speaks as a representative of the Norfolk 17, the students who
integrated city schools 50 years ago, during the Unity Program at Chrysler Hall
on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. (Mort Fryman | The Virginian-Pilot)
 A recent photograph of Louis Cousins and me at one of our breakfast get-togethers.

God bless America . . . Gilberto

On Thursday, November 30, 2017, 10:20:38 AM CST, Tejanos 2010 <tejanos2010@gmail.com> wrote:

GILBERTO, THANKS FOR YOUR RESPONSE ON THE

CIVIL RIGHTS CONFERENCE, VERY IMPRESSIVE
WRITE UP. WE WANT TO USE THE ARTICLE TO LET
OUR MEMBERS KNOW THE HISTORY OF THE CIVIL
RIGHTS ERA AFTER 50 YEARS LATER, YOU CAN
CALL ME AT 210-685-3571. IF WE CAN HAVE A
PICTURE OF YOU WE WOULD APPRECIATED IT. IT
WILL BE ATTACHED TO ARTICLE. YOU ALSO
WELCOME TO JOIN US, MAS LATER, WALTER.
On Fri, Nov 17, 2017 at 10:01 PM, J. gilberto Quezada <jgilbertoquezada@yahoo.com> wrote:
Hello Walter,
During the fall semester of my senior year at St. Mary's University, some of my
classmates asked me one day in the cafeteria if I had heard about the upcoming U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights hearing scheduled for the week of December 9-14, 1968, at
Our Lady of the Lake College. I did not know because I seldom watched the news on
T.V. or read the San Antonio newspapers. However, I made plans to attend and made
it a point to keep an eye on the news for more information. The Commission was
interested in five areas that affected the Mexican American community: employment,
education, justice, housing, and political representation. To insure that there was a
Mexican American on the Commission, President Lyndon B. Johnson named Dr. Hctor
P. Garca, founder of the G.I. Forum, a month before the San Antonio hearing. I found
out that the Commission had held hearings in Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Francisco
and that San Antonio was selected because of having the largest Mexican American
population in the state.

The hearings were held in Thiry Auditorium on the campus

of Our Lady of the Lake College, located in the deep West
Side of San Antonio, which is predominantly Mexican
American. Due to my class and work schedule, I was not
able to attend all six days. I did, however, managed to go
with my classmates when I could get away. The times
that I attended there were several hundred people, mostly
Mexican Americans, seated in the auditorium and on the
balcony, but not enough to fill the 1,000 seating capacity.

On Tuesday late in the afternoon, December 10, I

remember a high school student from San Antonio by the
name of Edgar Lozano, who was asked to testify if he ever
been punished in school for speaking Spanish. His
response was in the affirmative, when he was in
elementary, middle school, and high school. I could relate
to his experience while attending St. Augustine School in
Laredo, Texas. The nuns told us that to be good
Americans, we must not speak Spanish in school. But,
overall, I figured that speaking Spanish could not be all
that bad since my siblings, my parents, my grandparents,
and all the barrio kids from El Azteca spoke the forbidden
language. We were proud of our language and our
Spanish and Mexican historical and cultural heritage.

Another person who testified was Texas State Senator

Joe Bernal. He told the Commission that schools were
linguistically and culturally indifferent to the needs of
Mexican American children. Aurelio Montemayor, a
teacher in the San Felipe High School in Del Ro, Texas,
reinforced the exclusion of the Mexican American heritage
from the school's curriculum. I was not aware that in the
town of Del Ro, there were two school districts. The
San Felipe ISD contained about 97% Mexican American
students, and the Del Ro ISD had about 50% Anglos and
49% Mexican Americans and was more affluent. Laughlin
Air Force Base was located in the San Felipe ISD, but
the base children were bused to the Del Ro ISD, which
was less Mexicanized.

On Thursday afternoon, December 12, I remember a man

by the name of Luis Chavez. He and his wife Olivia and
their nine children lived in a two-room shack in Edcouch,
Texas, located in the Lower Ro Grande Valley. He
worked as an agricultural worker and also the whole family
worked as migrant workers in Michigan. He described the
horrible working and living conditions and the negative
attitude by the school counselors towards migratory
children. Their eldest son, Jos, was nineteen years old
and when he was asked by the Commission what he
wanted to do after high school, his reply was that he
wanted to be a mathematics teacher, but that his
counselor never offered any encouragement. Later that
day, Father Ralph Ruiz, a Catholic priest, told the
Commission that there were too many poor and hungry
people in San Antonio, and that the welfare system
harassed and intimidated them.

The following afternoon, Dr. George I. Snchez, professor

at the University of Texas at Austin, told the Commission
that in Texas, Mexican American students were below the
blacks and much further below than the Anglo students in
years of educational attainment. A discussion ensued
over the disparity among the nine school districts in San
Antonio. For example, in the Northeast ISD
(predominantly Anglo), the per pupil expenditure was
$745.07, and in the Edgewood ISD (mostly Mexican
American), the per pupil expenditure was $465.44. Also, it
was revealed that 98% of all the non degreed teachers
were in the poor school districts. One student from the
Edgewood ISD told the Commission that a
teacher admitted to the class that he was not qualified to
teach the course and for the students to bear with him.
Another student from the same school district testified that
the counselors encouraged them into vocational training
and away from college.

On the last day of the hearing, Saturday, December 14,

Dr. Manuel Ramrez, an assistant professor of psychology
at Rice University in Houston, testified as to the conflicts of
cultures between the Anglo and the Mexican American
students. He posed the question, "How can we have our
children maintain as many of the Mexican American
values as possible and still be a success in the Anglo
world?" Homer Garca, a student at Sidney Lanier High
School in the San Antonio ISD (predominantly Mexican
American), informed the Commission how the students
and their parents fought for a change in the school's
curriculum to include chemistry, physics, algebra,
trigonometry, calculus, and computer programming. The
Commission praised the parents for supporting the
students' demands.

Dr. Jos Crdenas, a former director of Migrant Education

for the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory
and now the superintendent of the Edgewood ISD,
testified that the dropout rate for migrant children was
90%. Worse yet, he stated that one-fifth of migrants are
school dropouts at the preschool age because they are
never enrolled. The speaker who surprised me was
Harold C. Brantley, superintendent of the United
Consolidated School District in Webb County. The only
time I had heard the name of this school district was a few
years earlier when I was a high school basketball player
for the St. Augustine Knights and we played the United
High School Longhorns. I had no idea that, according to
Mr. Brantley, the school district had a very successful
bilingual program. His philosophy, as he explained to the
Commission, was that the ability for a student to speak
Spanish is not a detriment, but rather an asset. And, that
is the responsibility of educators--to turn this asset for the
benefit of all the students, including the "little blue-eyed,
blond-haired Anglo."

In retrospect, for the first time on a national platform, the

problems of the Mexican American community were
discussed, not only in a general sense, but also in specific,
concrete examples, and most importantly, the realization
that something needed to be done immediately to find
solutions to these problems. In the field of education, the
U.S. Office of Education created a national network to
keep an academic track on all migrant students called the
Migrant Student Record Transfer System (MSRTS). A
national bilingual and bicultural program was initiated. A
minimum wage law for farm migrant workers was enacted,
along with raising the ceiling for welfare recipients. A few
years later, in Texas, a bilingual education was
mandated. Another significant victory for farm workers
was Congress' refusal to extend the Bracero Program.

As an epilogue, Coincidentally, in 1971, my first job after

receiving my B.A. degree, and while working on my M.A.
degree from St. Mary's University, was in the Title VII
federally-funded bilingual/bicultural program in the South
San Antonio ISD. During my thirty-one years as a school
administrator for the same district, I had the honor and
pleasure of working very closely, both personally and
professionally, with Dr. Jos Crdenas, Aurelio
Montemayor, and Dr. Joe Bernal. In the mid-1970s, Dr.
Crdenas founded the Intercultural Development
Research Association (IDRA) and became its executive
director. Aurelio worked for IDRA and still does. I got the
school district involved with IDRA in many important
projects that greatly benefitted our students and their
parents. Our partnership between the school district and
IDRA was based on mutual respect, cooperation, and
support.

In the attached photograph, which was taken in 1997 in

Albuquerque, New Mexico, at the annual conference of
the National Association for Bilingual Education, I am
standing to your extreme left, from left to right. Standing in
the middle, donning a white dress, is Dr. Yvonne Katz,
Superintendent of the Harlandale ISD, and to her left is Dr.
Cuca Robledo Montecel, Executive Director of IDRA. I
was representing my school district, the South San
Antonio ISD, and together with Dr. Katz and IDRA, we
were honored with a national award for a very successful
educational program. Dr. Joe Bernal had an illustrious
career as a politician and later as an educator, where our
paths crossed many times. He became the
superintendent of the Harlandale ISD in San Antonio, and
our close personal relationship became cemented in a
lifelong friendship into our retirement years.

Two years later, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

published the findings of the hearings in a pamphlet
entitled, Stranger In One's Land, which I found in my
father-in-law's personal library that he had given me a few
years ago. In conclusion, the report stated that, "The
hearing can be described as a piece of a mosaic, and it
provided the groundwork for an even better understanding
by the Government of the Mexican American. The
information from the hearing was also extremely valuable
in the comprehensive studies on Mexican American
education and the administration of justice in the
Southwest undertaken by the Commission....Much of the
testimony showed how Mexican Americans have been
cheated of things most Americans take for granted: their
right to their language, their culture, their color....The
hearing showed that the Mexican American has been
made to feel negatively about his Mexican background--to
the point where even the word 'Mexican' has become a
liability....The hearing may have helped bring home an
obvious historical fact: Mexicans [Americans] are not
strangers to this land, especially in the Southwest. They
are indigenous to it."

May God continue to bless you and may God bless

America.

J. Gilberto Quezada

The front entrance of Thiry Auditorium

The inside of Thiry Auditorium
 img121.jpg

343kB

On Friday, November 17, 2017, 9:38:29 PM CST, Tejanos 2010 <tejanos2010@gmail.com> wrote:

PASS THIS AROUND! WALTER

Holding Up the Mirror
50th Anniversary of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission
Hearing on Mexican-Americans in the Southwest

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SAVE THE DATE

November 15-17, 2018

Holding Up The Mirror: 50th Anniversary of the U. S.
Civil Rights Commission Hearing on Mexican-
Americans in the Southwest
A conference to be held at Our Lady of the Lake University
in 2018.
Overview:
In 1968, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights held a six-
day hearing in San Antonio, Texas to examine civil
Rights issues facing Mexican-Americans in the U.S.
Southwest. The hearings, held at Our Lady of the Lake
University, examined education, employment,
administration of justice, and economic issues.
When the Commission came under severe criticism from
the established leadership in the local community, Rev.
Theodore Hesburgh, President of Notre Dame University
and Vice-Chairman of the Commission responded: We
are not an enforcement agency. We make reports to the
President and to Congress. All we do is hold up a mirror to
the community and let them tell us if there are any
problems, and thats what were doing here.
In November 2018, we return 50 years later to Our Lady of
the Lake University in San Antonio. Our goal is to examine
our past and progress since the landmark hearings in
Texas and explore the path forward for all Latinx
populations in the U. S. This conference will address
changing civil rights, demographics, education, the
administration of justice, economics, employment,
immigration, political participation and voting rights issues.
We will also celebrate Mexican American contributions to
arts and culture. We invite civil rights leaders, historians,
and representatives of academic, civic, social justice, civil
participation at a conference open to the public. Our
voices and yours will contribute to a better understanding
of our history, our progress, and our future.
[ ]
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To be removed just reply with REMOVE in SUBJECT
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TEJANOS2010 is managed and sustained by
Elsa Mendez Pea and Walter Centeno Herbeck Jr.
Our purpose is to share information in genealogy, historical, cultural, arts, music, entertainment and other Tejano issues.
To be removed just reply with REMOVE in SUBJECT
We are independent. Have a good day! Mas later

--
TEJANOS2010 is managed and sustained by
Elsa Mendez Pea and Walter Centeno Herbeck Jr.
Our purpose is to share information in genealogy, historical, cultural, arts, music, entertainment and other Tejano issues.
To be removed just reply with REMOVE in SUBJECT
We are independent. Have a good day! Mas later