Our History of School Segregation
Several years ago, I helped research Menlo Park’s history of housing segregation, which reflected a national pattern of redlining, racially restrictive housing policies, and discriminatory lending and real estate practices that divided our communities by race.
One example is how city planning reinforced racial segregation under the banner of “preserving city character,” reserving neighborhoods for single-family homes largely accessible to white families while concentrating apartments and denser housing in areas where people of color were more likely to live.
Our local schools have a parallel history: neighborhood segregation drove school segregation, which reinforced neighborhood divisions. Voters and elected school board members often failed to break this cycle, and the boundaries they drew shaped educational opportunity, determining not only which schools students attended, but also the opportunities available within them.
But this is also a story of people working together to fight for more equal educational opportunities. The lawsuit behind the Tinsley program was only one chapter. |
Today, Menlo Park is served by four school districts: three elementary districts (Ravenswood, which serves Menlo Park's Belle Haven neighborhood; Menlo Park; and Las Lomitas), and one high school district, Sequoia Union (SUHSD).
For roughly 75 years, these districts have remained largely segregated by race and ethnicity.
In 1957, a decision about where to send high school students set the stage for the Tinsley lawsuit.
With the suburban boom pushing Menlo-Atherton High School to its enrollment limits, SUHSD needed a second high school to serve students in Menlo Park and East Palo Alto. The central question was where to draw the attendance boundaries.
The school board trustees, all of whom lived west of Highway 101, faced intense pressure from residents on both sides of the freeway. Many Ravenswood residents favored a Willow Road boundary, which would have created two integrated schools. Instead, the trustees chose Highway 101 as the primary dividing line.
The final boundaries may look like a compromise, but their effects were predictable, given how quickly the neighborhoods’ demographics were changing. Within a few years, students who had attended M-A were split between two schools, one mostly white and the other mostly Black.
One Black student at M-A told The Palo Alto Times in 1968, "White students act as if they own the place and are just letting us use it as a favor." With most of their neighborhood peers at Ravenswood, and no Black teachers at M-A, many Black students felt unwelcome and underrepresented at the school.
“A lot of minority kids felt like they weren’t being directed towards academics, and they wanted to be able to choose...Students felt that they were not being fairly treated, and so they wanted change.” - Pamela Wimberly, Retired M-A Teacher Recalling the late 1960s to M-A student reporter Alana Hartsell in 2020 |
Tensions culminated in a 1968 riot at Menlo-Atherton High School, which prompted a National Guard response and arrests of both Black and white students. The school reopened three days later with 60 sheriff's deputies in riot gear. Police patrolled the campus for the next two years.
Hoping that earlier contact would help students understand one another, a group of M-A parents organized an elementary classroom exchange and a federally funded interdistrict education center to help students build relationships before high school.
The parent group also pursued a more sweeping solution: merging SUHSD with its elementary feeder districts. In 1971, it formed the Mid-Peninsula Task Force for Integrated Education and spent several years working with the county office of education and local district leaders to advance the proposal. When asked where he stood on the issue, SUHSD trustee Timothy Wellings said he didn’t “know enough about it to take a position,” prompting fellow trustee Jack Robertson to reply, “That’s a cop out.”
Ultimately, local school boards rejected the plan.
Frustrated by their lack of progress, the task force then recruited a multiracial group of more than 30 parents from across SUHSD’s feeder districts to file the Tinsley lawsuit. SUHSD Trustee Robertson, an attorney and Ladera resident, represented the plaintiffs pro bono.
Meanwhile, Menlo Park’s school districts became even more segregated. Between 1975 and 2012, several neighborhoods west of the highway transferred from Ravenswood to Menlo Park City School District. Proposals to transfer additional neighborhoods, including one as recently as 2018, raised renewed concerns about segregation and the loss of resources for Ravenswood.
In 2021, while I was serving on the board, Las Lomitas received a transfer petition from 25 residents in the Redwood City School District. Both our board and the county committee denied the petition. Under state law, the county committee must weigh transfer petitions against specific criteria, one of which is whether a transfer could perpetuate racial or ethnic segregation.
In 1976, Ravenswood High School closed following years of unsuccessful efforts to integrate the schools. For the next four decades, East Palo Alto students were bused to high schools in Redwood City and San Carlos (commutes of up to an hour each way) instead of attending nearby Menlo-Atherton, which was within walking distance.
The high school district didn’t add East Palo Alto to Menlo-Atherton’s attendance boundaries until 2015, after a civil rights group threatened to sue.
In 1986, a decade after the Tinsley lawsuit was filed, a court settlement established the Tinsley transfer program, allowing Ravenswood students classified as minorities under state law to transfer to eight local school districts, including Las Lomitas. Today, about 135 new Ravenswood students transfer each year, including 12 new students to Las Lomitas.
Looking back, I’m struck by how often efforts to expand educational opportunity have relied on litigation, state laws, or court intervention rather than voluntary action by voters or school boards.
Generations of incremental decisions created our segregated schools and neighborhoods. What choices can we make today to change that trajectory? Some may be on your ballot. |
SOURCES Palo Alto Times: July 16 and 23, 1957; May 27 and June 8, 1966; Sept 19, 1967; June 11, Aug 5, and Oct 28, 1976; Redwood City Tribune: July 10, 25, and 27, 1957; May 12, 1966; The Almanac: Feb 7, 2007; May 11, 2011; July 17, 2013; Sept 19, 2017. The Peninsula Times Tribune: Dec 23, 1984; San Francisco Chronicle, Mar 24, 1974; Marshall, Rachelle. “Concrete Curtain: The East Palo Alto Story.” The Crisis, NAACP, Nov 1957; Hartsell, Alana. “Menlo-Atherton’s Race Riots.” The M-A Mark, 2020; Robertson, Jack. The Conscience of a Community: Integrating Mid-Peninsula Schools, 2002; Jones, Bayinaah R. “The Tinsley Case Decision.” Doctoral dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2006; Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, Pushing the Line: Addressing the Inequities in Sequoia Union High School District’s Student Assignment Plan, 2013; Gavin, Gomperts, and Hall, eds. Ravenswood: An Impressionistic Tribute to Ravenswood. Woodside, CA: Pressed for Time Press, 1976; “The Racist History of Single-Family Home Zoning.” KQED. |
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