Segregation is prohibited in California schools when a federal judge agrees with Gonzalo and Felicita Mendez that their daughter, Sylvia, was unfairly denied enrollment at an Orange County public school because she wasn’t “white.”
The 1946 case, Mendez v. Westminster, predates the US Supreme Court’s anti-segregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Educationby eight years.
“Mexicans are inferior in personal hygiene, ability, and in their economic outlook,” says one school official during the trial. Federal Judge Paul J. McCormick strongly disagrees and rules that the Westminster School District’s segregation of Mexican children violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution.
After the ruling is upheld on appeal, California lawmakers approve legislation eliminating the 1855 law that apportions school funding based on the number of white children, ages four to 18, in each county. The legislation is signed into law by Gov. Earl Warren in 1947. Warren, named US Supreme Court chief justice in 1953, is the author of the unanimous Brown v. Board of Education ruling.
Like other parts of California in the 1940s, Orange County’s public parks, swimming pools, restaurants and movie theaters are segregated. Students of Mexican heritage attend separate schools aimed at “Americanizing” them.
Sylvia Mendez’ parents are told that their children cannot attend the “whites only” local schools, including one that has accepted Sylvia’s cousins, whose last name doesn’t sound “Mexican,” and another school her father attended as a child.
Mendez remembers the bus dropping her in front of a “white” school, which had “manicured lawns” and a “beautiful playground,” and having to keep walking to the Mexican school — two wooden shacks on a dirt lot next to a cow pasture.
Civil rights lawyers convince Gonzalo and Felicita Mendez and other Orange County Latino parents to sue four local school districts, including Westminster, to prohibit the segregation of their children.
The amicus brief in support of the Mendez plaintiffs by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is written by Thurgood Marshall, appointed to the US Supreme Court in 1967. Also supporting the plaintiffs in Mendez is the Japanese American Citizens League. Japanese American children were discriminated against by the district until 1945.
The Sylvia Mendez School is located in Berkeley.
TOP Photo: Still image from “Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient: Sylvia Mendez”