Delgado v. Bastrop ISD

DELGADO V. BASTROP ISD. Until the late 1940s the public education system in Texas for Mexican Americans offered segregated campuses with often minimal facilities and a curriculum frequently limited to vocational training. The 1950 United States census showed that the median educational attainment for persons over twenty-five was 3.5 years for those with Spanish surnames and, by comparison, 10.3 years for other white Americans; about 27 percent of persons over twenty-five with Spanish surnames had received no schooling at all. No substantive legal suit had been initiated since Del Rio ISD vs. Salvatierraqv (1930), in which Mexican Americans claimed they had been denied use of facilities used by "other white races" in the same school. In 1948 the League of United Latin American Citizens, joined by the American G.I. Forum of Texas, successfully challenged these inequities of the Texas public school system in Delgado vs. Bastrop ISD.