Putting my Mind and Heart to Educational Equity

Memoirs of an Advocate

Peter Roos

• Publisher: Center for Applied Linguistics
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781648718595
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Law

F rom the Foreword by Kenji Hakuta and Diana Mercado-Garcia:

"As a civil rights lawyer, Peter Roos has been something of an artist, painting on this canvas with the lawyerly instruments available to him, getting involved in key interpretations of the equal protection clauses of the Constitution and civil rights laws, especially in how meaningful access is granted through instruction in a language that students can understand. But with the sensitivity of an artist, he has worked the complex environment with an understanding of the power and limitations of his tools combined with a fine sense of whom to push, when, and how.
"Roos’s awareness of the context and attention to nuance constitute the basis of his effectiveness, and the lessons he shares will benefit those in every field, not just law or education. His heart and intellect together helped him to understand the perspective of the court, the defendant, and the broader society in order to win justice for the underserved. The book at times overflows with his joy for the work and reveals Roos’s ample gusto for life. His life has been an adventure full of love for his wife, Emma, and for his many close colleagues, particularly Roger Rice (of Rice/Roos and Roos/Rice fame). Roos is living proof of the difference that one person can make within this complex world. This memoir shows us how he did it. "

A Personal Awakening:

The Birth of the California
Rural Legal Assistance

In the spring of 1966, I was a second-year student at the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. At the time, an organization known as the Law Students Civil Rights Research Council matched up interested law students with lawyers in the trenches, fighting primarily for racial equality. I applied for a summer position, fully expecting to be in service to those bravely battling discrimination in the Deep South, whose stories were chronicled almost daily in the press.

Instead, a letter arrived from O’Melveny and Myers, a blue-blood law firm in Los Angeles, offering me a summer position with an organization that had yet to see the light of day, but which had been awarded a substantial federal grant. Jim Lorenz, a young member of the firm, had parlayed a budding consciousness of farmworker misery to establish a novelty: The California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), a statewide law firm that battled rural poverty through the courts. National awareness on this topic had been sparked by Harvest of Shame (Friendly, Lowe, & Murrow, 1960), a television documentary presented by broadcast journalist Edward Murrow, and by reports from Delano, California, of a farmworker’s strike led by César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and Larry Itliong. That job offer changed my life as much as CRLA changed the mission of government-funded legal services.

By mid June of 1966, I joined 20 other law students from around the country in a dormitory at the University of Southern California. We were given several weeks of training in civil rights law, rural poverty, the farmworker movement, and other things long forgotten. The faculty was barely more experienced than the students, with the exception of Gary Bellow, who ran a legal aid clinic at Harvard Law School and was treated as a superstar upon his arrival. In addition to Jim Lorenz, who was energetic and smart but who had no experience delivering legal services to the rural poor, we also had Bob Gnaizda, who would go on to become a disability rights advocate and the founder of Public Advocates, Inc., a public interest nonprofit law firm in San Francisco; Don Kates, who would become better known as a vehement gun rights advocate; Michael “Mickey” Bennett, a CRLA administrator; and Dan Lund, who added a Christian overlay to a Yale legal education.

The University of Southern California presence was all that consisted of CRLA that summer. My job and that of a number of the other students was to go into the field to determine where in California CRLA should place offices. And, relatedly, we were tasked to determine friends, foes, and conditions CRLA might encounter in different locales. It was the most exciting experience of my young life, trying to tie political science and sociological principles to change America through legal advocacy. Whether our youthful research was of any value to the rural poor in general or to CRLA in particular, it nevertheless turned on my light bulb and laid the foundation for a lifetime of law reform work.

CRLA became a beacon of light for legal services around the country. Before CRLA, legal aid organizations helped the poor with divorces, rental disputes, and similar small recurring problems. CRLA, with a nudge from its funders, the directors of the Office of Economic Opportunity, saw its mission as affirmatively challenging underlying conditions that kept the poor and minorities “in their place.” Predictably, it angered the political establishment that benefited from the status quo; its fights for survival with Governor Ronald Reagan are well chronicled (Bennett & Reynoso, 1972). CRLA also served as the role model for a number of other Office of Economic Opportunity programs, several of which I had the good fortune of being a part of.

Like most government-funded entities, CRLA and the groups that emulated its aggressiveness were highly dependent on the political winds for maintaining their commitment to change. In 1968, the Nixon administration replaced the Johnson administration. While it was difficult to completely put the law reform genie back in the bottle, government-funded legal programs became increasingly tamer. There was an effort to shield reforms from political shifts by establishing the Legal Services Corporation, which was helpful. But, in general, the most aggressive law reform efforts shifted to privately funded programs in subsequent years, such as the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Education Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, and other organizations. Multicultural Education, Training and Advocacy, which I was to join in the early 1980s, was one of these, albeit smaller and more specialized than those named above.

Los Angeles, 1968–1970

In December of 1968, word came that I had passed the California bar exam. At the time, I was en route from Miami to New York on a bus after banging around the East Coast following the exam. After Christmas, I headed to Los Angeles to seek my first legal position. Despite family entreaties to look for a good-paying law firm, legal services work of the sort that I had tasted at the California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA) was what I set my sights on.

It is hard to describe the magnetizing effect of such work without taking into consideration its temporal context. In the several years since my student exposure to CRLA, that organization and other like-minded federally funded legal services programs had found allies in the Washington bureaucracy and in the courts for transformative litigation. Young CRLA lawyers had successfully battled California welfare restrictions that historically would have gone unchallenged (Morris v. Williams, 1967). The U.S. Supreme Court had struck down a number of state laws that had been passed to disadvantage consumers (Sniadach v. Family Finance Corp, 1969). The fairly dormant commands that no one, including debtors, should be denied due process of the law or equal protection awoke to provide protection for those who lacked political clout. Young, ideologically driven lawyers had led the charge against the sort of overreaching that was commonplace and previously unchallenged. All of this was done with the encouragement of those who oversaw the Legal Services Corporation programs. It was to this environment that many young law school graduates were drawn.

Los Angeles turned out to be a great environment for those wishing to be part of this legal movement. The Watts riots had cast a harsh light on the conditions of African Americans in the city. It came as a surprise to many that a city such as Los Angeles, in which most African Americans lived in single-family houses with grassy front lawns, could contain such a high level of discrimination and misery—a fact that was documented by postriot studies and exposés.⁶

Similarly, it surprised many who drove through the green farmlands of California that the supposed “paradise” masked the serious misery of those who tended the fields. The conditions exposed by César Chávez and the farmworkers led to an awareness that these ills existed in Los Angeles, the location of the largest concentration of Mexican Americans in the country.

However, the Los Angeles basin was peppered with a number of newly created or energized Legal Services Corporation programs poised to address the ills suffered by African Americans, Latinos, and low-income Whites. Several months after passing the bar exam, I was offered a position as a staff attorney with one of those programs, the Southeast Neighborhood Legal Services (SNLS) program, which had offices in Compton and Norwalk. Compton was adjacent to Watts; the neighborhood was poor and African American, and it was beginning to house an increasing population of Chicanos.

Like many other programs at the time, SNLS was newly minted and predominantly staffed by young, inexperienced White lawyers from some of the better law schools. This was an outgrowth of the fact that minority lawyers were virtually nonexistent at the time, and the salaries would not have attracted minority lawyers who were further along in their careers. Within weeks of my hiring, we would hire Joe Ortega, a slightly older lawyer with a similar level of legal experience as me, to direct the office in Norwalk.

Although we barely knew how to find the courthouse, the Office of Economic Opportunity pressured SNLS to carry out the law reform mission. With help from the Western Center, which I was to join several years later, Ron Sievers, another young lawyer at SNLS, brought a case which led to a Supreme Court of California ruling that determined prejudgment attachments of property to be unconstitutional.⁷

The School Walkouts

While I tackled a home foreclosure with both litigation and newspaper publicity—thus learning about the value of bringing multiple pressures to bear on a wrongdoer—my most significant initiative requiring legal skills involved schools. It concerned a student strike, which had become a potent tool for educational change in Los Angeles.

It is important to know a little about school finance to understand why student strikes or walkouts became an early strategy to push change. Virtually all school districts in the country receive substantial state funding based upon the number of students they serve. Numbers are computed on a daily head count, typically referred to as average daily attendance. The lower the daily count, the lower the income for school districts. If a district has projected a certain count and opened schools, hired teachers, and otherwise responded to that count, it cannot quickly reduce those costs when the count is suddenly lowered. Thus, a walkout has the potential to get the attention of those who set policy for the schools. It is also good fodder for the press, which similarly can assist with exposing wrongs.

Students protest during a walkout at Roosevelt High School, 1968. From the La Raza Photograph Collection, courtesy of the photographer,

Devra Weber, and the Chicano Studies Research Center.

In the late 1960s, Chicano students from East Los Angeles, supported by sympathetic teachers and community leaders, initiated a number of walkouts. The Compton variation landed at my doorstep, a development I welcomed. The issues in Los Angeles often involved discriminatory educational policies, such as placement of non–English-speaking students into classes for the intellectually disabled. However, the issue in Compton was much more straightforward: students at a predominantly Chicano middle school found themselves as punching bags for high school students who were African American. When some of the high school students got out of school, they would float over to the middle school, which released students a little later in the day. Daily beatings occurred; the middle school students were afraid to attend school and parents responded. With an eye cast toward Los Angeles, Chicano parents decided to withhold their children from school and to demonstrate daily. Compton Unified School District responded by threatening to prosecute parents for interfering with compulsory education laws.

After a weeklong standoff, a school leader invited a group of parents to sit down. Parents felt they needed any legal support I could give, possibly overestimating its value. They insisted that I be part of any negotiations. The school superintendent sought to divide the parents from me by sowing doubt about my commitment. But, the parents did not bite, and negotiations began in earnest. The end product of those negotiations provided lifelong learning: First, while one should search for a perfect solution, you will ruin your chances of obtaining a good solution if you act like a mule. Second, negotiations offer an opportunity for creative thinking; as such, they can be fun. Third, creative thinking ought to involve all of your colleagues. Encouragement should be given to those on the other side of the table to problem-solve. Once drawn in, school administrators can add an invaluable touch. They will know things, hidden to outsiders, that can make the end result more solid.

In the end, the school district agreed to hire and train Chicano staff to monitor the middle school at key hours and to change the release times. This disabled the older students from congregating at the front door of the middle school as it let out. We did not seek suspensions, nor was anyone suspended. The violence died down, kids returned to school, and several individuals who needed employment were put to work. All in all, it was a satisfactory ending. The experience showed me how lawyers can join with parents and activists to address school issues. As a lawyer, ...