Did you know September 17 is Citizenship Day? In this moment of re-segregation, English-only mandates, exclusion, cultural erasure, I think it’s fitting to honor three women who said “no” back in their day: Zitkála-Šá, recruited off the Yankton reservation at eight and later an outspoken opponent of the boarding school system; Sylvia Mendez, eight when a school clerk in Orange County excluded her, seeding a federal case; and Mary Tape, whose 1885 California Supreme Court victory was swiftly nullified by a new segregation statute.

If they said no in the 19^th and early 20^th century, what are we prepared to say no to today?

Zitkála-Šá (1876–1938) ─ Red Bird Decries the Land of “Red Apples”

Gertrude Simmons was born on February 22, 1876, on the Yankton Reservation in what is now South Dakota, to a Yankton Dakota mother, Ellen Taté Iyóhiwiŋ Simmons—(Dakota name: “Reaches for the Wind”)—and a white father who left before she knew him. She lived with her mother and extended community, speaking Dakota, until Quaker missionaries recruited her for a school in Indiana by describing a land of red apples where she could pick as many as she wanted. She begged to go. Her mother, despite having herself endured forced relocation, agreed, and Gertrude was sent to White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute, a Quaker boarding school in Wabash, Indiana.

One of the first indignities imposed on Indigenous schoolchildren was the cutting of their hair. In Dakota culture, as she would later write, this was a profoundly shameful act: captured warriors had their hair shingled by enemies, mourners wore it that way, and cowards could be marked by it. Trying to resist, she crawled under a bed, was dragged out kicking and scratching, carried downstairs, and tied to a chair. As one of her thick braids was cut, she later wrote: “Now I was only one of many little animals driven by a herder.”

A Contradiction, or a Bigger Plan?

After three years, at age eleven, she returned home. At fifteen, however, she chose to return to White’s Manual Labor Institute in Indiana, drawn by the education it offered even after experiencing its harsh assimilationist discipline. In time, she would turn the literacy, musical training, and knowledge of the dominant culture she gained there into tools for defending her people. Her potency was already apparent at her 1895 graduation, where she gave a women’s-rights speech before entering Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, on a scholarship.

Gertrude was a fiercely intelligent young woman, winning the Indiana state oratorical contest in 1896, even as a group of brash turn-of-the-century "bros" threw a white flag at her feet bearing a crude drawing of an “Indian girl” with a slur printed underneath. Unfortunately, she ran out of money and her health declined, a combined misfortune that forced her to withdraw from Earlham College just six weeks short of graduation. Rather than return home, Gertrude followed the musical training she had begun as a girl, moving to Boston to study violin at the New England Conservatory of Music.

Music became her route into paid work. In 1897, she took a position as a music instructor at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, the flagship of the federal boarding-school system. Founded by Richard Henry Pratt—the man associated with the phrase “Kill the Indian, save the man”—Carlisle was designed to assimilate Native children by suppressing their languages, cultures, and family connections. She went there to teach, but the work also made her a witness to the institution’s daily harms.

In August 1897, Carlisle sent her back to Yankton on a recruiting trip. Frankly, it is baffling to imagine the scenario: she had been sent away from this same community as a child, returned forever changed by the boarding-school system, and was now being asked to persuade other Dakota families to entrust their children to the same path. Her own writing suggests that she felt caught between worlds—educated in white institutions but increasingly clear-eyed about what assimilation demanded of Native children and their families. That tension, familiar to many children of color propelled into white and elite environments as “first gen,” would become the engine of her writing.

By December 1898, Gertrude Simmons had left Carlisle.

Her path would utilize the English essay and Western concert music as testimony. Around 1900, as she began publishing for a national audience, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin adopted the Dakota pen name Zitkála-Šá—“Red Bird.” Her choice to publish under that name was itself an act of cultural and political self-definition.

She began working out the ironies of her forced education in three autobiographical essays published in The Atlantic Monthly—the same magazine that published Charlotte Forten Grimké’s Sea Island chronicles: “Impressions of an Indian Childhood” in January 1900, “The School Days of an Indian Girl” in February, and “An Indian Teacher Among Indians” in March. Together, they became among the first widely read first-person accounts by a Native woman of what boarding schools did to children.

Carlisle’s school newspaper conceded that their former instructor's pieces showed “considerable power of imagination,” but also accused her of dramatizing rather than reporting.

In December 1902, the same year she married Raymond Talephause Bonnin, Zitkála-Šá published “Why I Am a Pagan” in The Atlantic Monthly, a clear-eyed defense of Dakota spirituality. The essay was later reprinted as “The Great Spirit.” She also published Old Indian Legends in 1901, a collection of Dakota stories illustrated by Angel De Cora, a Ho-Chunk artist—that’s a pretty cool duo: a Native woman writer illustrated by a Native woman artist. It appeared 23 years before the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 granted U.S. citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States.

The Opera She Wrote But Didn’t Own

Around 1910, while living on the Uintah-Ouray Reservation in Utah with her husband, Zitkála-Šá met William F. Hanson, a white music professor at Brigham Young University. Together they collaborated on The Sun Dance Opera, which is generally regarded as the first "American Indian opera."

It drew on Ute and Sioux traditions, including the Sun Dance, a sacred ceremony practiced across several Plains Indigenous nations. The federal government had banned or restricted Sun Dance observances in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as part of its broader campaign to suppress Indigenous religious life.

Zitkála-Šá wrote the libretto and songs; Hanson composed the score. She participated in developing the production and appeared in the first performance, alongside her husband and Ute performers. The opera premiered in February 1913 at Orpheus Hall in Vernal, Utah.

Hanson registered the copyright in his name alone, leaving Zitkála-Šá out of the official record entirely. And when in 1938, the New York City Light Opera staged the work at the Broadway Theatre, there was no credit of her contribution. As one scholarly essay put it (see citation below) Zitkala-Ša supplied the sacred Sioux melodies, libretto, and songs, yet William F. Hanson flattened her music into Western notation, cast non-Native performers in redface, and eventually fully erased her name from the work.

Now, when I first started researching this Brave Foremother, I didn't even realize the degree of this cultural appropriation, because I was so focused on how cool it was that Zitkála-Šá bounced back from the career calamity to become an artist. But an article I read in The Modernist Review essay frames The Sun Dance Opera as a stark case of "artistic colonialism," and it is infuriating because this kind of erasure (theft as "tribute") is still very common. I invite you to view "multicultural homages," by people outside of the given culture, with this sharper lens.

Oklahoma, Citizenship, and a Long Second Act

Mrs. Bonnin's other tool was the pen, and she wielded it in service of, and alongside, advocacy. In 1916, she moved to Washington, D.C., after being appointed national secretary of the Society of American Indians, one of the first national organizations run by and for Native people. She worked closely with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and later edited the organization’s American Indian Magazine from 1918 to 1919, using both roles to advocate for Native citizenship, self-representation, and the protection of Native communities from federal abuse. PBS’s profile provides a useful overview of this phase of her life.

Zitkála-Šá’s advocacy widened in 1921, when she addressed the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and persuaded the organization to create an Indian Welfare Committee. Established in 1924, with her as chair, the committee sought to educate its national membership about federal Indian policy, mobilize public pressure for Native citizenship and voting rights, investigate abuses, and advocate for the protection of Native land, resources, and self-determination.

In late 1923, as a research agent for that committee, Zitkála-Šá spent five weeks in eastern Oklahoma with investigators from the Indian Rights Association and other advocates. Together, they investigated the guardianship and probate system controlling the estates of oil-rich members of the Five Civilized Tribes and the Osage.

B ackstory: a1908 act of Congress had transferred jurisdiction over many Indian probate matters from the Interior Department to local county courts. Then, in July 1923, the Oklahoma Supreme Court annulled procedural rules intended to offer even limited protection. Their 1924 report, Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes, Legalized Robbery, named the network: “county judges, guardians, attorneys, bankers, merchants—not even overlooking the undertaker.” Estates, the report concluded, were being “shamelessly and openly robbed in a scientific and ruthless manner.”

The report documented horrifying examples of exploitation, including guardians controlling Native children’s money while the children suffered neglect and hunger. Its findings were part of a growing public record of fraud, neglect, and federal failure that contributed to national pressure for the 1928 Meriam Report and later reforms in federal Indian policy.

Zitkála-Šá advocated constantly for Native citizenship and voting rights, sometimes wearing buckskin to draw a crowd before delivering a modern political speech that stopped audiences in their exoticizing tracks. Her argument was straightforward: thousands of Native men, including her husband, had fought in World War I and still remained legal wards without citizenship. “There was never a time more opportune than now,” she wrote in 1919, “for America to enfranchise the Red man!”

The Indian Citizenship Act passed in 1924. Zitkála-Šá was among the advocates whose sustained organizing helped make Native citizenship and voting rights a national issue. Nevertheless, citizenship did not guarantee access to the ballot: states continued to use literacy tests, poll taxes, residency rules, and claims about trust land to exclude Native voters for decades—in what some have dubbed "Red Jim Crow."

In her final decade, Zitkála-Šá did not slow down; she shifted from exposing injustice to building national political power. In 1926, she and her husband, Raymond founded the National Council of American Indians, an intertribal organization created to coordinate Native advocacy across the country. As its president, fundraiser, and public voice, she fought for voting rights, health care, education, land and treaty protections, cultural survival, and tribal self-governance. She remained in the fight the rest of her life.

Zitkála-Šá died on January 26, 1938, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery beside her husband, whose military service made the burial possible. Their headstone names her “Zitkala-Ša” and includes a carved tipi on its reverse.

Her work fell into relative obscurity before Red Power activists and scholars revived attention to it in the 1960s and 1970s. Recognition has continued to grow: Arlington County renamed a park for her in 2020; Google honored her with a Doodle in 2021; and she appeared on the U.S. Mint’s American Women Quarters in 2024, recognized as an author, activist, and composer.

Reflection: Sometimes two contradictory forces run through a person at the same time. Any contradictions you’d like to reflect upon?

Sylvia Méndez (b. 1936) — Little Girl, Big Fight

Born on June 7, 1936, in Santa Ana, California, Sylvia Méndez is a living Foremother, now 90, and still advocating for justice. Her father, Gonzalo Méndez, was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1913, and came to the United States as a child, later becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen. Her mother, Felicitas Méndez, was born in Juncos, Puerto Rico, and was therefore a U.S. citizen by birth. Together, they farmed asparagus in Orange County; Gonzalo worked the fields while Felicitas managed the business and household.

In 1944, the Méndez family leased a 40-acre asparagus farm in Westminster from the Munemitsu family, Japanese Americans who had been forcibly incarcerated and stripped of their holdings during World War II. The Munemitsus were among approximately 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry imprisoned by the U.S. government; about two-thirds were U.S. citizens.

In a county where opportunity depended on your address and ancestry, Sylvia’s family lived between 17th Street School, a well-resourced neighborhood school, and Hoover Elementary, the “Mexican school”—a two-room wooden building with no proper playground and discarded textbooks. Hoover stood beside a dairy and a cow pasture, behind an electrified fence.

Wanting the best for all the children, Sylvia’s aunt Soledad Vidaurri took Sylvia, her brothers, and the Vidaurri cousins to enroll at 17th Street. The school clerk accepted the lighter-skinned Vidaurri children, whose surname sounded European, but rejected the Méndez children. Incensed, Aunt Soledad marched all six children back home.

Sylvia later described Hoover Elementary as a “terrible little shack.”

Méndez v. Westminster

On March 2, 1945, five fathers—Gonzalo Méndez, William Guzman, Frank Palomino, Thomas Estrada, and Lorenzo Ramirez—filed a federal class-action lawsuit on behalf of roughly 5,000 children of Mexican descent against four Orange County school districts: Westminster, Santa Ana, Garden Grove, and El Modena.

Gonzalo Méndez turned the farm’s daily management over to his wife while he organized the case and paid their lawyer, David C. Marcus, from his own pocket. Marcus made a strategically precise argument. California law did not authorize the segregation of Mexican American children.

Rather than asking the court immediately to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson—the 1896 Supreme Court decision establishing the federal “separate but equal” doctrine—Marcus argued that the school districts’ separation of students of Mexican descent was unauthorized by state law and violated the Equal Protection Clause. He showed that the supposed “language deficiency” rationale was a pretext for ancestry-based discrimination.

Marcus also did something unusual for a school-desegregation case in 1945: he brought social-science experts to explain the educational, social, and psychological harms of segregation. Dr. Ralph L. Beals, chair of UCLA’s anthropology department, testified that segregation imposed inferiority and hostility on Mexican American children and defeated the claimed purpose of helping students learn English.

The trial ran for roughly two weeks in July 1945 before Senior U.S. District Judge Paul J. McCormick. James L. Kent, Garden Grove’s superintendent, offered testimony that did not help the defendants: he acknowledged that Mexican children were placed in segregated schools “regardless of their ability to speak the English language,” and testified that he believed Mexicans were inferior in “economic outlook,” clothing, and their ability to participate in school activities.

Santa Ana Superintendent Frank Henderson, asked how his district identified Mexican American students, answered under oath: “By their names”—acknowledging that the district did not use language testing. Nine-year-old Sylvia also testified, demonstrating that she spoke English and challenging the district’s rationale for exclusion.

On February 18, 1946, McCormick ruled for the families, finding that the districts had conspired to segregate students on the basis of Mexican lineage in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. He found the language tests “generally hasty, superficial and not reliable,” and concluded that segregation delayed, rather than improved, English acquisition. “A paramount requisite in the American system of public education is social equality,” he wrote. “It must be open to all children by unified school association regardless of lineage.”

But the school districts appealed, so the families’ victory was not yet secure.

Early racial coalition

As the appeal gained national attention, six organizations filed amicus curiae—“friend of the court”—briefs supporting the Méndez families. They urged the appellate court not merely to preserve the families’ win, but to declare school segregation itself unconstitutional. The NAACP’s brief, co-authored by Thurgood Marshall and Robert L. Carter, made that argument directly—the position the organization would later advance in Brown v. Board of Education. The ACLU, American Jewish Congress, Japanese American Citizens League, National Lawyers Guild, League of United Latin American Citizens, and California’s attorney general also participated. Black, Jewish, Japanese American, and Latino advocates were building a powerful coalition back in 1947.

On April 14, 1947, the full Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals—sitting en banc, meaning the full court heard the case rather than its usual three-judge panel—affirmed the families’ victory. But it chose a narrower route than the one the families and their allies had urged. California’s Education Code expressly authorized segregating children of Chinese, Japanese, or “Mongolian” parentage and Indian children, but said nothing about Mexican children.

The court held that the school districts therefore lacked legal authority to segregate Mexican American students. It did not rule that segregation itself violated the Fourteenth Amendment, leaving Plessy v. Ferguson intact. That larger constitutional breakthrough would not arrive until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

The families had nevertheless won a binding victory: the four defendant Orange County districts could no longer segregate Mexican American children, and their schools had to integrate. On June 14, 1947, Governor Earl Warren signed the Anderson Bill, repealing California’s remaining school-segregation provisions. California thereby became one of first states to end school segregation by statute.

Méndez is often called a precursor to Brown, but the relationship is nuanced. The NAACP’s amicus brief in Méndez urged a constitutional attack on segregation; the Ninth Circuit did not take that route. Because it ruled on a limited question of California statutory authority, Méndez did not overturn Plessy or establish a nationwide constitutional rule. Nevertheless, it offered a critical early example of multiracial coalition-building, social-science testimony about the harms of segregation, and litigation aimed at dismantling segregated public education.

“You’re Equal to That White Boy”

All the children entered 17th Street School in January 1948. And of course, they were bullied. When Sylvia came home crying one afternoon, Felicitas roused her: “Sylvia, you were in court every day. Don’t you know what we were fighting? We weren’t fighting so you could go to that beautiful white school. We were fighting because you’re equal to that white boy.”

After elementary school, Sylvia attended Santa Ana High School and Santa Ana College. She trained as a nurse, earning an associate degree in nursing at Orange Coast Community College and later a bachelor’s degree in nursing, plus a public-health certificate, from California State University, Los Angeles. She worked for 33 years at Los Angeles County–USC Medical Center and eventually became assistant nursing director of its pediatric pavilion.

When Felicitas died in 1998, Sylvia promised her mother she would continue telling the family’s story—and she has. Schools bearing the Méndez name now stand in Santa Ana, Boyle Heights, and Berkeley, California. The U.S. Postal Service commemorated the case with a stamp in 2007, and President Barack Obama awarded Sylvia the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.

A monument park opened in Westminster in 2022, and the Felicitas and Gonzalo Méndez U.S. Courthouse in Los Angeles was established by federal law in January 2025. It is the first federal courthouse named for a Latina. The official courthouse naming ceremony occurred in May 2026.

In April 2026, Westminster and the Orange County Department of Education dedicated the two-mile Méndez Freedom Trail along Hoover Street—an interactive outdoor classroom honoring the families behind Méndez v. Westminster. With interpretive learning stations, augmented-reality prompts, and material available in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese, the trail makes the story of California school desegregation accessible to students, families, and visitors in the very community where the struggle unfolded. A protected bikeway runs alongside it, tying civil-rights memory to safe, everyday movement through the neighborhood.

The bigger legacy of this family’s fight is that no child’s surname, skin tone, language, or family history should determine the quality of education they receive. Theirs is an example of how local action can make a big difference.

Reflection: What fight did your family or other adults take on that shaped the life you’re living now?

Mary Tape (c. 1857–1934) — She Fought the Law, But…

The woman we call Mary Tape was born around 1857 in or near Shanghai, China; her birth date and original name are unrecorded. In 1868, at roughly age eleven, she arrived in San Francisco, all alone. Accounts of her early life vary—some say she was rescued from a brothel, which would not have been an uncommon scenario—but sources agree that she lived at the Ladies’ Protection and Relief Society children’s home, where she learned English and took the name Mary McGladery.

In 1875, Mary married Jeu Dip, later known as Joseph Tape. He had arrived in San Francisco as a child in 1864 and worked his way up from domestic and delivery jobs. He founded a Chinese-run drayage company and later worked as a broker and interpreter for the Chinese consulate.

Assimilation, or Trying at Least

The couple had four children and lived at 1769 Green Street in upscale Cow Hollow—not Chinatown. They spoke English at home, attended a Presbyterian church, and lived a middle-class life that reflected the family’s particular blend of Chinese American belonging and Americanization. But no amount of Westernization could shield them from discrimination in the era of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred Chinese immigrants from naturalization and fueled aggressive racial exclusion.

It was two years into that abhorrent federal law, in the fall of 1884, when Joseph and Mary tried to enroll their eight-year-old daughter Mamie at Spring Valley Primary School in Cow Hollow. Principal Jennie M. A. Hurley refused to admit her, citing school-board policy. Joseph filed a formal complaint with the Board of Education on October 4.

The response was rapid and chilling: on October 21, the board decreed that principals must exclude “Mongolian (Chinese) Children” from all schools. In November, board members argued in court that California’s Constitution treated Chinese people as “dangerous to the well-being of the State.”

The Tapes pressed on. On January 9, 1885, Judge James Maguire of the San Francisco Superior Court ruled in the family’s favor, holding that denying a child born of Chinese parents access to public school violated state and federal law. But he also noted that the Board could establish separate schools—a caveat that would soon carry enormous consequences.

On March 3, 1885, the California Supreme Court affirmed Mamie’s legal right to attend public school. Writing for the court, Justice John R. Sharpstein held that because the Legislature had removed the word “white” from the school-admission law, the statute required the admission of “all children” not specifically barred by another law. As a San Francisco-born child of Chinese parents, Mamie was entitled to admission. The Court modified the order so that it ran against Principal Hurley rather than the whole Board of Education, but otherwise preserved the Tapes’ victory.

Wily, Unjust Jurisprudence

But Superintendent Andrew Jackson Moulder and his allies were already preparing their unjust workaround. Even before the Supreme Court ruled, Assemblyman W. S. May introduced Assembly Bill 268 on January 23, 1885. After the decision, Moulder wired Sacramento, warning that San Francisco schools would be “inundated with Mongolians” unless legislators acted. On March 12, the Legislature passed the measure authorizing separate schools for children of “Mongolian or Chinese descent” and barring them from other public schools once such schools existed.

So although the Tapes won the lawsuit, lawmakers simply and swiftly changed the statute. Mamie won a legal right to public education—but was then diverted into a separate, racially designated public school.

On April 7, the Tapes returned to Spring Valley, where Hurley refused Mamie again, offering the weak excuses of a missing vaccination certificate and crowded classrooms. Six days later, on April 13, the Chinese Primary School opened at Jackson and Stone streets, with Mamie and her brother Frank as its first pupils.

Newspapers remarked on their fluent English and American-style dress.

Mama Said

On April 8, 1885, an infuriated Mary Tape wrote a letter to the San Francisco Board of Education. The Daily Alta California published it eight days later under the headline “Chinese Mother’s Letter,” and it was reprinted across the country. We should reproduce it from the historical record, misspellings and all:

“Dear sirs, Will you please to tell me! Is it a disgrace to be Born a Chinese? Didn’t God make us all!!!”

Mary noted that the family attended church every Sunday and asked how anyone could call it Christian to force her children to attend a distant school created specifically for them. Mamie’s playmates, she wrote, “is all Caucasians ever since she could toddle around. If she is good enough to play with them! Then is she not good enough to be in the same room and studie with them?”

She closed:

“It seems no matter how a Chinese may live and dress so long as you know they Chinese. Then they are hated as one. There is not any right or justice for them.”

Mary declared: “Mamie Tape will never attend any of the Chinese schools of your making! Never!!!” She promised to let the world see what justice could be expected under “the Race prejudice men,” and wrote that her daughter “is more of a American then a good many of you that is going to prevent her being Educated.”

Berkeley to the Rescue?

In the mid-1890s, the Tape family moved across the Bay to Berkeley, where their younger children could attend schools without being assigned to San Francisco’s segregated Chinese Primary School. Mamie, now a teenager, continued her education in what we'd later call "The People's Republic of Berkeley", (my hometown from 2012-2022) although the historical record reveals frustratingly little about her adult life. (Shoutout to Berkeley: give this family a commemorative plaque!)

Mary Tape, meanwhile, flourished as a landscape painter, a serious amateur photographer who developed her own prints and made magic-lantern slides, a painter of decorative dishes, and a skilled telegrapher who tapped out Morse messages to Joseph at work. She died on October 9, 1934, at age 96, and is buried at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland.

Mary lived through decades in which anti-Chinese discrimination continued to receive legal sanction, including Wong Him v. Callahan (1902), which upheld San Francisco’s separate Chinese school. She also witnessed the U.S. Supreme Court’s notorious 1927 decision in Gong Lum v. Rice, a unanimous ruling that allowed Mississippi to classify Martha Lum—a U.S.-born child of Chinese descent—as “colored” and bar her from a whites-only public school.

Mary did not live to see the rights-affirming Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, which rejected segregated public schooling. Her daughter did. Mamie died in 1972, at the age of 96. We really don't know much about her adult life, and it's not without significance in my opinion that the record has been more concerned with the tale of determined eight-year-old who helped make legal history more clearly than the life of the adult she became.

To me, this gap is a call for us to honor a person’s full life, not only the moment they are part of a news item. That's a bit of what all the reflection prompts inside Brave Sis Project's work invites you to do, all the time.

Reflection: When have you stood up for your child—or for your inner child?

Reflection and Action: Journal Prompts for Everyone

As you think about Zitkála-Šá: how do you reclaim your voice after being silenced? Write about a time you spoke up after being quieted, and what it cost you.

Celebrating Sylvia Mendez: how do you fight for equal access to education where you actually live? Write about a time you challenged something unfair at a school, yours or your child’s.

Remembering Mary Tape: write about a time you did everything right by somebody else’s rules and it still wasn’t enough. What did you do next?

HerStory / OurStory: Journal Prompts for Women of Color

In tribute to Zitkála-Šá: what parts of your identity have been split apart, and how do you stitch them back together? Share a traditional story or song from your culture with somebody this week.

Honoring Sylvia Mendez: when have you been told you don’t belong, and proved otherwise? Go find and support an education equity initiative near you.

Thinking of Mary Tape: what did your family teach you about dignity in the face of rejection? Write down the lesson, in their words if you can still hear them.

Activated Allies: Prompts and Actions for White Friends

In honor of Zitkála-Šá: read her essays. “The School Days of an Indian Girl” is free online, and is a much better template than mythologized Indigenous stories. If you want to go further, read the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative reports and find out where the nearest one was. The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition is doing this work.

To celebrate Sylvia Mendez: teach and talk about school segregation beyond the Black-white dyad. How will you begin?

For Mary Tape: learn Asian American legal history, including the cases cited here. The Chinese Historical Society of America has a curriculum guide on the Tape case.

P.S.: The Sad Irony of Jurisprudence

In 1885, after the Tape family won their case, California lawmakers passed a statute authorizing separate public schools for children of Chinese—or, in the law’s language, “Mongolian”—descent. Over the decades, that law evolved into Sections 8003 and 8004 of California’s Education Code, which authorized segregation of Chinese, Japanese, “Mongolian,” and Indian children.

Sixty-two years later, that specificity created an opening. When the Ninth Circuit decided Méndez v. Westminster in 1947, it noted that California law authorized segregation for those named groups—but said nothing about Mexican children. The court therefore held that Orange County school districts lacked legal authority to segregate Mexican American students.

On June 14, 1947, Governor Earl Warren signed legislation repealing those remaining segregation provisions. Seven years later, as Chief Justice of the United States, Warren wrote the unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring state-imposed school segregation unconstitutional.

What These Women Knew, and What We Must Remember

Zitkála-Šá was eight when strangers tied her to a chair and cut off her hair; she grew up to write about this treatment in a national magazine, and made fighting for her Indigenous people her life’s work. Mary Tape, who won at the California Supreme Court, watched the legislature rewrite the law out from under her in under three weeks, wrote one of the angriest letters a nineteenth-century mother ever published. Sylvia Mendez went from testifying in a federal courtroom at age nine to continuing to speak out for justice in her nineties.

History does not generally dole out storybook happy endings, but what these three women did help build a record and establish precedents, along with awareness, righteous indignation, and resilience. One step on top of the other ultimately shift laws, mindsets, and lives. So we would be well-advised to follow their lead and keep up the “good work.”

Thanks for reading this edition of #SistoryLessons, a biweekly newsletter that uses the lessons from Foremothers who led the way as encouragement and guide for these times of resilience. The series is based on stories from my award-winning book, Our Brave Foremothers: Celebrating 100 Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Women Who Changed the Course of History, and other, ongoing research. Visit our newly relaunched website for resources to help you Celebrate - Learn - Act.

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