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TI: So I'm going to shift gears again here. Because the Pasadena schools had their own issue about segregation or integration. And can you talk about that in terms of the Pasadena schools and some of their issues?

MS: Yes. We were the first northern, quote "northern schools" to be court-ordered to integrate. And my oldest son was going into first grade that year, that first year. So by that time, I had become a really strong proponent of public education. And so we formed a new chapter of the JACL so that we could move forward. There were a group of us who felt very strongly about this. So through this new JACL chapter, we were able to just move forward with the school district, administration, and over the years, try to develop a curriculum that integrated some of our experiences into the school curriculum. And we felt that doing it in the elementary schools would be the best thing. And we wanted to do it while our kids were in elementary school, so there was a little bit of urgency to that. So anyway, that was how we... and it was very discouraging because every year there would be more white children dropping out, more families that shared the same values that we shared, moving to Arcadia, to La Canada, to nearby cities that weren't court-ordered to integrate. So it was very discouraging at times, but we kept it up for, until we were, we felt that we did develop all kinds of new things that I thought was a good thing.

TI: So help me, explain again the court order and why there was a need to integrate. I mean, what was going on in Pasadena that forced the court order?

MS: Well, Pasadena has a corner of the older Pasadena called the Northwest. It was all mostly minority students. And the usual thing, they got the youngest and the least experienced teachers, they got, they were the last to get new textbooks, you know, the usual thing. And so a white family from one of the wealthier areas brought a lawsuit and won. So that's what brought the court-ordered integration order about. And...

TI: And so I'm not clear. So this one family, white family, brought a lawsuit to do what?

MS: To integrate the school so that all children in every school would be, have equal access to whatever was available.

TI: Because prior to that, could the non-white students attend the other schools? So they were prevented?

MS: No, because you went to school in the area that you lived.

TI: And tell me why the non-whites lived just in one part of town and not other parts.

MS: Well, Pasadena, you know, has always been a very wealthy community. But we've always had a minority segment of the community to service the upper-class whites. Which is not like Glendale, which is a middle-class white community. So they never had African American families living in Glendale, because they just never would allow it. Pasadena always did because they needed the services of Japanese to be gardeners and blacks to be domestics and so on and so forth. So that's why they were always relegated to this one section of town. And so we did have somewhat of a segregated system in those days.

TI: And in some communities, I'm not really clear about Pasadena, but in places like Seattle, I know there were sometimes restrictive covenants that prevented the non-whites from living certain places.

MS: That's true. And that was true in Pasadena. 'Cause the house that we live in now, when we first bought, when we were first married and ready to buy a house a few years later, we knew of a house that we wanted to look at, and the realtor would not show it to us. Instead, he diverted us to sort of a middle area of Pasadena that had a mixed neighborhood. But since then, then we moved to another house, and that house had a covenant on it that said that it could only be sold to white families. But that, of course, no longer applies.

TI: So the situation in Pasadena was the segregation happened more by where people lived, and there were certain parts of Pasadena that was all white because that's... and so those schools were all white, and then you had the other schools. And so the court order was to do things like bussing?

MS: Well, the court order was to find a way to equalize the educational system, and they did it by bussing. So that caused a whole outflux of white families, 'cause they didn't want to be, Pasadena is not big, but it's not like L.A., but it's still, it's a problem.

TI: Okay, so I understand this.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.