Abstract
Brown v. Board of Education (Brown) is known throughout U.S. history books, school curricula, and politics as the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case to dismantle racial segregation in public schools. Brown was a pillar of the Black Civil Rights Movement. In The Bricks Before Brown (Bricks), Martinez-Cola makes a compelling case to change U.S. historical narratives to include the hundreds of segregation cases prior to Brown and the Native American, Asian American, and Latine families who helped pave the way for Brown. Martinez-Cola draws on archival and interview data and critical theories to illustrate how these families and their supporters effectively laid the “bricks” for Brown but have been excluded from U.S. history.
Given current movements seeking to erase and censor the teaching of U.S. racial history in American schools and colleges, Martinez-Cola expertly unpacks the full, uncensored truths of educational segregation and dominant narratives simplifying and altering histories of racial exclusion and marginalization. Using an intersectional lens, Bricks uncovers especially the exclusion of Native American, Asian American, and Latine mothers and young girls. Martinez-Cola extensively covers and draws on Critical Race Theory and the theoretical branches of AsianCrit, LatCrit, and TribalCrit, along with Patricia Hill Collins’s controlling images and Evelyn Higginbotham’s politics of respectability frameworks. She pushes readers beyond the Black-White binary, which dominates discussions and studies of U.S. racial segregation.
Chapters 3 to 5 analyze three court cases—Tape v. Hurley (1885), Piper v. Big Pine (1924), and Mendez v. Westminster (1947)—to demonstrate differential processes of racialization, as well as intersectional marginalization, experienced by Asian American, Native American, and Latine plaintiffs and families. Using newspaper articles and court documents, Martinez-Cola first lays out Tape v. Hurley. Providing rich details, she illustrates how the Chinese American middle-class Tape family utilized extensive resources, time, and energy to fight for their daughter to gain access to San Francisco’s White schools while resisting the unequal treatment of Chinese Americans at that time. Despite winning their case against the San Francisco Board of Education at the Superior Court and California State Supreme Court levels, the school district created separate schools for Chinese students, which led the way for the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) decision. Next, Martinez-Cola uses decolonized methodologies, including interviews with tribal officers, to develop a rich understanding of Piper v. Big Pine, which involved a Native American family. In this case, the Pipers relied on youthful innocence and “middle-class respectability,” a sense of Americanization and worthiness, to win their case. Simultaneously, the Pipers did not distance themselves from their Indigenous heritage and community. In the final case, Mendez v. Westminster, a middle-class Mexican American farming family from California navigated the political climate and controlling images affecting those of Mexican descent as they advocated for educational opportunities for their children. In all three chapters, Martinez-Cola centers the families’ cultures and communities and highlights the importance of racial, gender, and class statuses.
Martinez-Cola advances conversations on race by exposing the many legal challenges against school segregation occurring outside the South, prior to the 1950s, and within a system where Asian, Indigenous, and Latine groups were situated below Whites but also in a position of “racial flexibility.” Thus, she challenges past literature on the fixed and binary nature of the U.S. racial hierarchy, demonstrating how these marginalized groups work against, but are also constrained by, racialization. She demonstrates how these families stood against a legal system designed, organized, and maintained by Whiteness, even as they also operated within the system to bring forth legal challenges and draw on their racial flexibility in ways that Black plaintiffs could never partake in at that time.
In reviewing the 105 pre-Brown legal challenges, Martinez-Cola documents the plaintiffs’ racial and gender statuses but does not present plaintiff families’ occupational statuses. These data may have been difficult to obtain but could have bolstered her discussion of intersectionality. Her focus on three young middle-class females as plaintiffs did allow Martinez-Cola to unpack different forms of racialization complicated by the plaintiffs’ age, gender, and middle-class statuses. She also details how mothers were silenced and fathers were uplifted while fighting for their “little girls’” rights. Her analysis shines when it compares and analyzes patterns across all three cases, providing a model for intersectional and interdisciplinary historical research. The three families negotiated complex, intersectional controlling images to work against educational exclusion and segregation but were also trapped in supporting “middle-class respectability” traits tied to anti-Blackness.
Research on racial segregation often occurs in siloed fields, such as in education, political science, or sociology of race and ethnicity. Bricks merges these fields to establish how intersecting identities impact struggles for educational rights. Bricks gives voice to Latine, Chinese, and Native American families left out of the Black/White racial binary and resistance movements countering U.S. racial inequality. Martinez-Cola’s numerous tables, figures, and appendices help to thoroughly detail, humanize, and document the plaintiffs and their cases and provide guides for readers to understand and follow her argument, theories, and methodologies. However, the standalone book will be difficult for introductory-level undergraduate students unless instructors create instructional guides and resources. Martinez-Cola often uses legal jargon and references laws and policies that may require expanded definition and context. With well-crafted instructional guides and tools, the individual chapters and cases within Bricks could be starting points for revised K–12 curriculum and lesson plans. After reading Bricks, we were amazed by the extent of anti-segregation cases and work prior to Brown, which we had learned nothing about while attending K–12 public schools in different states. We hope that Bricks helps generate new curricula and conversations. Alone it will be excellent in graduate courses on social movements, history, law/policy, women and gender studies, race, class, and gender, and courses showcasing intersectional and interdisciplinary research.
