Teacher Drawn Into ‘Dual Life’ as Scholar on Civil Rights in West

While other teachers may use their breaks for relaxation, schoolteacher Howard Shorr is one of those who hits the books. He usually can be found at the Huntington Library, researching yet another bit of local history.

It’s part of what Shorr, a 46-year-old Pasadena resident, calls his “double life.”

For 14 years, Shorr has toiled in Los Angeles’ inner-city schools, teaching ethnic pride as well as history to mostly Latino students, first in Boyle Heights and now at a magnet school downtown.

He also is a well-respected historian who earns fellowships, publishes scholarly articles, sits on an American Historical Assn. committee and travels to speak at universities. He is one of the few high school teachers with access to research files at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino.

“Most high school teachers don’t have time to do scholarship,” said Hal Charnofsky, Shorr’s friend and his former professor at Cal State, Dominguez Hills. “But Howard is a teacher who combines teaching with research.”

The dual role has kept alive Shorr’s 1960s idealism--he was involved in anti-Vietnam war demonstrations while in college--and has prevented him from getting teacher burnout, he said.

On Monday, the day Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday is observed, Shorr will be at the University of Kansas in Lawrence to present his original research on a 1939 lawsuit that integrated Pasadena’s Brookside Plunge.

Shorr, a specialist in the history of race relations, will lecture about a little-known episode in Pasadena’s history. It’s part of his ongoing research on the long-ignored civil rights movement west of the Mississippi River.

“When people talk about race relations, they always think about the South,” Shorr said. “Or here (in California), it’s the Watts riots or the Zoot Suit riots. But people didn’t riot every day.”

What minorities did in their everyday life, a mostly unwritten and unknown history, is what fascinates Shorr.

It prompted him to create a high school course on the history of Los Angeles’ Latino-dominated Boyle Heights, to write a scholarly paper about a museum exhibit in Los Angeles on racial equality--it sparked three years of conflict in the 1950s--and to research the Brookside Plunge lawsuit.

Now, University of Kansas historians want more: a book on Pasadena’s minorities and their struggles for equality.

Shorr says he has plenty to write about.

“This was a very Jim Crow town; it was very segregated,” he said.

For example, in his paper on the Brookside Plunge, he explains that the city permitted minorities to use the pool only one day a week--on “International Day.” After that day, the pool was reportedly drained and refilled for use by whites, Shorr said.

But in 1939, six African-American men, with the help of the local chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, challenged the city rules by filing a lawsuit against the city after they were refused admission on a regular day. The plaintiffs won the suit in 1942. But rather than open the pool to all and abide by the court decision, city officials closed the facility for five years, until another successful legal challenge by the NAACP finally forced them to open the pool to use by everyone.

Such stories give a view of Pasadena totally different from the typical historical boosterism touting the city’s Green and Green Craftsman-style homes and the annual Tournament of Roses Parade, Shorr said.

Shorr said he writes this history because “it’s legitimate; it happened.

“I want to be a social historian of all peoples, not just the great white males.”

Shorr and his research is just part of a wave of interest about civil rights in the West that has been growing over the last five years, said Noralee Frankel, an assistant director with the American Historical Assn. in Washington, D.C.

“It’s a very rich and productive field that has certainly not received the attention it deserves,” Frankel said.

Shorr’s fascination with history began early. As a boy growing up in Inglewood and Venice, he would sit for hours listening to tales of Lithuania spun by his grandfather, or stories about the Depression told by his parents.

“It was so romanticized,” he said.

The youthful Shorr also was thrilled when he saw for himself the places he heard about.

“My father and his brothers shared one bed, and I actually traveled to the house (in Brooklyn, N.Y.) he lived in and slept in his bed,” Shorr said on a recent afternoon at his west Pasadena home.

“It was as hard as this table, let me tell you,” he said, thumping his dining room table.

As an adult, he has kept the same youthful passion for historical sites and boasts of having sought them out in 43 states.

“I saw the Andersonville prison, the house where Franklin D. Roosevelt died and the courtroom where the Scopes trial was held,” he said. “I always find it fascinating to know about the past.”

Although his initial plan to become a historian was thwarted when he could not find a college job after getting his master’s degree in history from Cal State Los Angeles, he became a high school teacher and has tried to transfer his love of history to his students. He urges them to become, like him, historical researchers into the world around them.

“His big thing is, why?” said Rosa Serrano-Overstreet, 33, a former student who teaches elementary school in Los Angeles. “He would say, ‘It does you no good to memorize a bunch of dates if you don’t know why something happened.’ ”

After finding out the why of Boyle Heights, where he taught at Roosevelt High for eight years, Shorr is turning his attention to Pasadena, where he has lived for the last nine years with his wife and daughter.

“I think if you live in a community, you should know something about it,” he said. “I’m just a little more obsessive about it than most people.”