(image by Donnaphoto via flickr)

The men and women who participated in the African-American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s confronted the outrages of segregation in the South with courage, hope and countless sacrifices. Eventually, they achieved significant legal and political victories for not just African-Americans but all Americans.

As the movement expanded, it shed light on the segregation of Mexican-Americans in the Southwest and West, including the children of Mexican migrant workers who are often born and/or raised as Americans.

In 1962, Rev. Harold Lundgren gave the following testimony to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in Phoenix, Arizona:

The children of seasonal farmworkers are living in communities where buses come…Yet we discover that there is almost invariably a situation in which the children of migratory farmworkers are behind, maybe 2 years behind, or 3 years behind, other children in school… I remember a girl who was supposed to be in the ninth grade. We arranged for her to get to school. She was many weeks late. Then we found her out in the onions, and we said, "How come?" She said, "I was sent home from school." We went to the principal and he said, "Indeed, we did send her home from school, because we had no way of taking care of this kind of a child. She came 4 weeks late. She was behind the other pupils anyway, and we have no facilities, no way in which we can take care of this child. She would be sitting there, would be embarrassed, and it would be better for her to be out in the fields."

Tomorrow, two children of migrant farm workers, Liliana Ibarra and Pedro Limas, both honors students, will be attending the inauguration of America's first African-American president.

Listen to their stories at NPR.org.