Photos Courtesy Sonny Peña’S Collection Tolleson Grammar School, Class of 1947

Two Mexican-American families from Tolleson fought for desegregating public schools and won, helping to inspire ‘Brown v. Board of Education.’


A picture usually tells a story, but Sonny Peña’s photographs tell a few of them.

Two elementary school photographs from Tolleson Grammar School’s class of 1947 show students in neat rows, wearing their best clothing and smiles. But the shots are distinctly different: in one, all the kids are white; in the other, they’re all Mexican-American.
 
It had been that way for years in the town. But a fed-up teenager and a group of locals changed all that with a grassroots fight, a few bucks in donations (including a hush-hush contribution from a white business owner), some high-profile lawyers and a class-action lawsuit in 1950 that affirmed what activists claimed all along: Putting one group of kids in a “Mexican school” was wrong.
 
The case, Gonzales v. Sheely, did more than just force change in the town’s school system, where roughly 300 Mexican-American children endured segregation. Historians and scholars acknowledge that Tolleson’s Gonzales case helped set the stage for Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark case in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down racial segregation in public schools.

In 1999, as the 50th anniversary of the Gonzales ruling approached, a flurry of news stories revisited the case, and Tolleson school officials decided to name an elementary school after one of the two plaintiffs, Porfirio H. Gonzales.
 
Because the spotlight shone mostly on Gonzales during that time, rather than the entire group of activists, much of the historic story was left untold.
 
Today, just two of the original Tolleson activists are alive: the former teen who started it all, John “Juan’’ Camacho, and Manuel “Lito’’ Peña Jr.
 
Sonny Peña, whose brother Manuel Jr. and father Manuel Sr. were part of the activist group, is writing a book about the story to ensure it doesn’t get lost. He interviewed several activists over two decades, including his brother, who is now seriously ill.

“All of them had the same philosophy… they (school children) should be mingled,” Sonny Peña says. “They just felt that it was the right thing to do.”

Long before the national civil rights movement took hold, civil rights groups in Arizona battled injustices on behalf of Mexican Americans and Mexicans. They acted as vehicles for social and political change to fight segregation in public facilities as early as 1900, says Christine Marin, an archivist and historian at Arizona State University’s Chicano Research Collection.
 
But what makes the Tolleson case stand out is that the activists were simply a group of locals who decided to take a stand.
 
At the time, other Arizona cities also segregated students by race. In Tolleson, all elementary students initially attended one school but were put into segregated classrooms. By 1943, segregation got worse when students were put into separate buildings.
 
Tolleson Grammar School’s then Principal Kenneth Dyer defended segregating students up to the eighth grade in a newspaper article titled “Elementary School Mexican Problem.” Dyer asserted that separating the Mexican children would ease overcrowding. He wrote that the children in the new Mexican school were “happier, learning more and cause less disciplinary trouble.” He also wrote that the children, thanks to segregation, weren’t constantly reminded of their “language handicap.”