It is as much a part of King’s and Parks’ legacies as mainstream public education’s “I Have a Dream” bromides.Sikivu Hutchinson is the founder of the Women’s Leadership Project and author of Thank you for reminding me as a teacher how powerful it can be to interrupt the sanitized stories of social change!Thank you for reminding me as a teacher how powerful it can be to interrupt the sanitized stories of social change!Thank you for reminding me as a teacher how powerful it can be to interrupt the sanitized stories of social change!Thank you for reminding me as a teacher how powerful it can be to interrupt the sanitized stories of social change!All Content ©2016 The Feminist Wire By standing up when the adults did not, just as we did. CityLab spoke with her on the day of the Parkland walkouts.I was one of the organizers and leaders. When I saw the principals were making those changes the following semester, I started to feel like “Hey, we may have done something here.” And when the statistics came out of how many students from our community had applied to colleges and were going to go to college, that was really encouraging.My mother was very supportive, and my father was not. Students from Garfield, Roosevelt, Lincoln, and Wilson were gathered to discuss about inequalities from their school.
I think our strength came from each other, and from knowing that we weren’t asking for anything crazy.
For many of them, civil rights activism is something that outsized icons like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks “did” long ago in a galaxy far far away. And with no Mexican-Americans on the district’s Board of Supervisors, the families of L.A.’s East side felt they had no advocates.Knowing that their public schools would lose money for each student not attending class, the organizers decided to plan a walkout. I felt like I didn’t have any other choice.I had a geometry teacher—we were supposed to be working quietly at our desks, and I got up to ask him a question. Paula Crisostomo's Reputation Profile. We were politically unsophisticated—we were high school kids, what did we know?But over the course of several years things changed, and parts of the larger demands that we made have been implemented because of the walkouts, for sure. They also serve as a clear demand. He was mostly concerned about my safety, and he thought I would not be able to graduate because of it. So when the parents and community saw that—and again, it was a peaceful protest, we were not violent but we were met with violence—when the parents heard about or saw that, they knew that it was more serious than they had imagined.And a lot of them felt guilty, because the walkout was not our first step: It was our absolute last. We had to get a special hall pass: We had to respect them. You’re not going to go to college, you and your girlfriends are going to be pregnant by the end of the summer. On March 6, 1968, a new round of walkouts began in earnest, and by the end of that week the protest had spread across the city: more than 15,000 students in Los Angeles had marched out of their classrooms.Paula Crisostomo was a 17-year-old high school student at the time, and one of the walkout’s organizers. Background details that you might want to know about Paula include: ethnicity is Asian American, whose political affiliation is currently a registered Democrat; and religious views are listed as Christian. As my twelfth grade students prepare for the next phase of their lives, many of them express outrage over “just having learned” that women like them, from communities like theirs, organized against white supremacist patriarchal systems of so-called democratic “opportunity.” They are better able to make connections between the constant sexual harassment that they experience and the tokenization of women of color in American history.
Students, both in Parkland and nationally, are speaking out—on Twitter, in town hall meetings, at rallies—for stricter gun control laws.They did much of their mobilizing online. There were about 15 other [schools] across the city that walked out also in our support, and that was part of the meetings and face-to-face educating and raising awareness.Not at the time. The suspension is part of broader restrictions on Ethnic Studies programs that supposedly foment the “overthrow of the U.S. government” and “resentment” against other racial groups. “[That Parkland is] a predominantly white community, whereas we were, in East L.A., predominantly Mexican, is a huge difference, especially as far as how the rest of the country … The police started using their batons and beating students. They certainly have fresher ideas, and more time to devote to these causes.
The high schools—all of which had populations of more than 75 percent Latino students—were overcrowded and in a state of disrepair. That entailed lots of meetings [and] free community newspapers we wrote for.