What do the plucky Museum of Teaching and Learning, an internationally acclaimed film festival and the landmark Mendez v. Westminster School District case of 1946 have in common?
All three could learn you something.
The Fullerton-based Museum of Teaching and Learning (MOTAL) is struggling to survive amid the economic mess we find ourselves in. It's pinning its hopes on its annual summer social–which this year features selected short films from the Adventure Film Festival–to generate enough money to fund a new exhibit about the case that ended school segregation in California.
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Themed “A Night of Adventure,” the summer social will feature film producer Mark Reiner introducing clips and talking about the travels of the late Jonathan Copp,
who created the Adventure Film Festival five years ago. Copp was killed
in June by an avalanche on Mt. Edgar in southwestern China while taping
a National Geographic special.
“A Night of Adventure”–which will also
include food, wine, beer, a silent auction and music from the jazz
band Elnora and Sumpthin' Cookin–is set to run from 4:30 to 9 p.m.
Sunday, Aug. 30, in Cal State Fullerton Titan Student Union's Pavilions
A and B. Tickets are $50 for general admission, $35 for students.
Greta Nagel, professor emeriti from the Department of Teacher Education
at Cal State Long Beach, created MOTAL in 2002 to promote how people learn by providing interactive exhibits and activities that explore
achievements and methods of education from the past, present and
future. So far, these exhibits have been displayed at loaned or rented facilities, generally on the Cal State Fullerton campus. But
donors and volunteers are being sought to help establish a permanent museum space.
Such a place will not be on line by the fall of 2010, when MOTAL's free Mendez v. Westminster exhibit is scheduled to occupy the Old Courthouse
Museum in Santa Ana.
Five Mexican-American fathers–Thomas Estrada, William Guzman, Gonzalo
Mendez, Frank Palomino and Lorenzo Ramirez–filed suit against the Westminster School District on March 2, 1945, in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, claiming their children and 5,000 others of
“Mexican” ancestry were victims of unconstitutional discrimination by
being forced to attend separate “schools for Mexicans” in the El Modena, Santa Ana, Westminster and Garden Grove school districts.
Senior District Judge Paul J. McCormick, who
presided at trial, ruled in favor of Mendez and his
co-plaintiffs on Feb. 18, 1946, ruling that segregated schools are an unconstitutional denial of equal
protection. The school districts appealed to the Ninth Federal District
Court of Appeals in San Francisco, which upheld McCormick's
decision, finding that the segregation practices violated the
Fourteenth Amendment. Governor Earl Warren,
who would later preside over Brown v. Board of Education as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, signed into law the repeal
of remaining segregationist provisions in the California statutes.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.