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Mexican-American Civil Rights Activist Salvador Castro Dies

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Salvador Castro was a Mexican American civil rights activist and fervent education reformer. He died on Monday in Los Angeles at 79 years old. Castro was revered as a teacher and mentor, and for being one of the central figures in what would come to be known as the 1968 Walkouts. These were protests by Mexican-American students that helped spark what would soon become known as the Chicano movement.

NPR's Karen Grigsby Bates has this remembrance.

KAREN GRIGSBY BATES, BYLINE: Nineteen-sixty-eight was a turbulent year. There were black power demonstrations and anti-war protests in the streets and on college campuses. So in a way, it was natural that Mexican-American high school students in East Los Angeles became activists, too. After years of receiving an indifferent education that made no mention of their cultural history from educators that punished them for speaking their grandparents' language, they'd had enough.

And aided by the guidance of Sal Castro, a respected social studies teacher at Lincoln High School, the students in five high schools decided to walk out en masse to protest those conditions. In the 1996 documentary "Chicano!" Castro recalls what happened.

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BATES: Thousands of students were involved. But when the walkouts were over, important things had changed: Mexican-American history began to be taught. Smart students got college counseling instead of being automatically steered toward menial jobs. Speaking Spanish was no longer a punishable offense.

MONICA GARCIA: I think that's when Sal Castro first distinguished himself as a teacher and a counselor, in that he stood with the students who were making these demands of the school district.

BATES: Monica Garcia is president of the Los Angeles Unified School District Board.

GARCIA: He did put himself on the line. And he supported the belief that things could be better.

BATES: But, Garcia says, Castro paid a personal price for that. After the walkouts, he was arrested and charged with conspiracy to disrupt the schools and disturb the peace. He fought the charges and eventually they were dropped, but he lost his job for awhile before angry parents demanded he be reinstated.

Carlos Moreno says Sal Castro was a mentor. Castro encouraged him and other Chicano students to demand equality.

CARLOS MORENO: He really emphasized our own self-worth and that we were entitled to the same facilities and so forth, that the wealthy communities had.

BATES: Today, thanks in part from absorbing that lesson, Carlos Moreno is an alumnus of Yale and Stanford and a retired justice of the California Supreme Court.

Sal Castro's efforts didn't stop at the classroom. He established the Chicano Youth Leadership Conference at a camp in Malibu, where many Chicano students, for the first time, experienced their culture beyond painful stereotypes. The leadership skills they acquired there sent many into public service - like Justice Moreno, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and many now in state and local politics.

Their service honors him. And so does something else. In 2009, a new school opened on a downtown L.A. campus. Its name: Sal Castro Middle School.

Karen Grigsby Bates, NPR News.

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GREENE: You're listening to MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm David Greene.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

And I'm Steve Inskeep.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

Karen Grigsby Bates is the Senior Correspondent for Code Switch, a podcast that reports on race and ethnicity. A veteran NPR reporter, Bates covered race for the network for several years before becoming a founding member of the Code Switch team. She is especially interested in stories about the hidden history of race in America—and in the intersection of race and culture. She oversees much of Code Switch's coverage of books by and about people of color, as well as issues of race in the publishing industry. Bates is the co-author of a best-selling etiquette book (Basic Black: Home Training for Modern Times) and two mystery novels; she is also a contributor to several anthologies of essays. She lives in Los Angeles and reports from NPR West.

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