For most of its history, the museum building in Lakeport served as the administrative and judicial center of Lake County. Nearly a century worth of bureaucracy makes for a lot of paperwork. Minutes from the Superior Court, Birth Records, Marriage Records and even Pay Stubs—these priceless, one-of-a-kind pieces of history sit silently in the Courthouse Museum. One of the more significant pieces of history is found on page 191, in Book 10 of the Minutes of the Superior Court. Noreen Davis et al. vs. Middle Creek School District et al. is type-written about halfway down on the court docket for March 16, 1923.
The case in question involved several Pomo children and the officials of the Middle Creek School District, located near Upper Lake. In hindsight it was just one in a number of legal cases of the 1910s and 1920s that chipped away at the policy of white privilege in Lake County, but for the participants at the time it was an immensely personal struggle. Indeed nothing is more personal even today than a parent’s desire to see his or her children better off.
The issue at hand was segregation.
By the early 20th century, the issue of Native American education in California centered on one key question: whose responsibility was it? For decades Native Americans were seen as wards of the federal government, neither citizens of states nor the United States and therefore the concern of the feds, not local officials.
The Noreen Davis case directly challenged this perception.
Noreen and her family were part of roughly 300 Pomo men, women and children who lived near Upper Lake. In 1910, this community constituted the largest concentration of non-reservation Native Americans in all of Northern California. They, like other Native Americans around the state, desperately wanted proper education for their children. In response to this growing outcry, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) leased a building directly from the Pomo to use as a federally-funded day school. Although operating several Native American boarding schools around the state, the BIA primarily relied on these day schools to serve the Native Americans of Lake County. These day schools operated similarly to other public schools in that the students lived with their families at night and attended school during the day.
But sometimes no education is better than a poor one.
Conditions in BIA day schools were notoriously poor and became even worse as the 20th century ground onwards and the federal government had fewer and fewer funds to disburse to the Bureau. At around the same time the day school opened in Upper Lake, the Bureau began seeking alternative methods of educating Native American children. More out of a desire to cut costs than out of compassion, the BIA started to advocate for school integration in hopes of sharing the financial burden with local school districts.
Many in Lake County, however, firmly opposed this notion. The Kelseyville Sun best stated the position in February of 1923: “it has been generally understood that the objections to attendance of Indian children at the schools of the county … have not been racial, but more particularly from a sanitary point of view.” Put plainly: Indians were dirty and parents did not want their white children to get infected.
Within this racially-charged atmosphere entered several Pomo children and their parents from Upper Lake. Tired of the inadequate education their children were receiving from the day school, they ended their lease with the Bureau at the beginning of 1923, effectively kicking the federal government out of the area.
The Upper Lake Pomo had just masterfully forced the county’s hand.
You see, with no other government school within miles of Upper Lake, the nearby Middle Creek School District was forced to address the issue. After all, at the very least the law required that native children be educated by someone, and with the feds gone, it now fell to the county.
When the school district predictably denied Noreen Davis, J.C. Bateman, Fannie Tony and George Tony entrance into the white school, their guardians sued the district to gain access. On the morning of the preliminary hearing the Davis, Bateman and Tony families arrayed themselves against several school trustees in the courtroom—now the second floor of the Historic Courthouse Museum. The only records of what happened that day are the court clerk’s notes in the large leather-bound book of the Minutes of the Superior Court. Reading the type-written note, we learn that the cause was set for trial for the following week—Monday, March 26 1923 at 1:30 in the afternoon.
Monday arrived, the courtroom filled with the children’s families and school officials.
Judge Sayre solemnly intoned that a writ of mandate be ordered directing the trustees of the district to allow the Pomo children to enter the school with the white children next fall.
Unless, of course, the trustees could provide an all-Indian school instead.
The local newspapers recognized the facile ruling for what it was: a win-lose for the Pomo. While agreeing with the Pomo that the district was liable to furnish an education for their children (instead of the federal government), Sayre argued that the district could do so while maintaining a segregated school. The underlying assumption of this ruling was that separate was equal, as Plessy v. Ferguson had established three decades prior.
The Middle Creek School District did indeed allow 14 Pomo children to enter their all-white school in the fall of 1923. However, they were taught separately in a partitioned-off room by a separate teacher and were kept away from their white classmates during recess by a fenced-off playground. It would take roughly another decade before most Pomo children were integrated fully into Lake County schools.
Along with several other cases in Northern California, the Noreen Davis case forced the state to think about equal education for all its children. The cramped, type-written notes are all that remain of this landmark case for civil rights in Lake County.
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Tony Pierucci is Curator of Lake County Museums
