Mendez v. Westminster

Mexican Americans, who were historically considered to be white, were unaffected by legal segregation and normally attended segregated white schools in California. The Mendez family, who previously went to white schools without problems, suddenly found their children forced into separate "Schools for Mexicans" when they came to Westminster, even though that was not the norm and it was not legally sanctioned by the state. Starting in the 1940s, some school districts began to establish separate language-based remedial education, arguing that Mexican children had special needs because they were Spanish speakers. The schools existed only for elementary children (K-4) and were intended to prepare them for mainstream English-speaking schools with Anglo-American children. But since many districts began arbitrarily forcing Mexican elementary school children into "Mexican Schools" irrespective of language ability, it became a form of unlawful discrimination that was superficially similar to legalized racial segregation. Five Mexican American fathers (Thomas Estrada, William Guzman, Gonzalo Mendez, Frank Palomino, and Lorenzo Ramirez) challenged the practice of Mexican school segregation in the United States District Court for the Central District of California, in Los Angeles. They claimed that their children, along with 5,000 other children of "Mexican" ancestry, were victims of unconstitutional discrimination by being forced to attend separate "schools for Mexicans" in the Westminster, Garden Grove, Santa Ana, and El Modena school districts of Orange County. Mexicans were not in separate schools elsewhere in California. Soledad Vidaurri went to the Westminster Elementary School District to enroll her children and those of her brother Gonzalo Mendez: Gonzalo, Geronimo, and Sylvia. The Westminster School informed Vidaurri that her children could be admitted to the school. However, Gonzalo, Geronimo, and Sylvia could not be admitted on the basis of their skin color. (Vidaurri's children had light complexions and Basque surnames and so would not be segregated into a different school.) Upon hearing the news, Vidaurri refused to admit her children to the school if her brother's children were not admitted as well. The parents, Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez, tried to arrange for Geronimo, Gonzalo, and Sylvia to attend the school by talking to the school administration, but both parties were not able to reach an agreement. Gonzalo Mendez dedicated time to organizing affected parents to challenge segregation in the Westminster School District of Orange County by persuading the school board to put forth a proposal for a new integrated school.' The parents asked that all students of Mexican descent be allowed to transfer out of the "Mexican" schools if they wished. The board refused their requests and, in turn, lowered the amount of available transfer tokens.' With no remedy, the group proceeded with taking legal action. Gonzalo Mendez and William Guzman brought the case to the court as individuals with no counsel before hiring Los Angeles civil rights lawyer David Marcus. He argued that the segregation of Mexican and Latin descent children violated the rights granted by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. The school district appealed to the Ninth Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, which upheld Judge McCormick's decision, finding that the segregation practices violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Although the case was a victory for the families affected, it was narrowly focused on the small number of Mexican remedial schools in Orange County and did not challenge legal segregation in California or elsewhere. Mendez was not framed as a racial equality case, it centered on the fact that Mexicans were white and the segregation was not legal. The decision preserved legal segregation for non-white minorities. == Aftermath ==

Several organizations joined the appellate case as amicus curiae, including the NAACP, represented by Thurgood Marshall and Robert L. Carter and the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL). More than a year later, on April 14, 1947, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court's ruling but not on equal protection grounds. It did not challenge the "separate but equal" interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that had been announced by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Instead, the Ninth Circuit held that the segregation was not racially based, but it had been implemented by the school districts without being specifically authorized by state law, and it was thus impermissible irrespective of Plessy v Ferguson. Governor Earl Warren, who would later become Chief Justice of the United States, signed the Anderson Bill (AB 1375) in 1947 outlawing segregation for Native Americans and Asians. But its relation to Mendez is disputed. There is no documented link between the Mendez case and the Anderson Bill, which doesn't cite Mendez in its text or legislative record. Some historians argue that it was "influenced" by the Mendez decision since it occurred two months after. But the California state legislature acted on the bill before the Mendez appeals court decision. A working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research by Francisca M. Antman and Kalena Cortes, illustrates that Mexican American students who started schooling after the case went into effect were in school an average of 0.9 years longer, and were 19.4% more likely to graduate high school than those students who started schooling pre-Mendez. Suggesting that placing students in these separate "Mexican Schools" was having a major effect on their graduation rate, and the decision in the case of Mendez v. Westminster made a positive change. == Disputed Link to Brown v. Board ==

Many popular narratives such as the 2002 documentary Mendez v. Westminster: For All the Children credit Mendez as the "blueprint" or "foundation" for Brown v. Board of Education , but contemporary legal actors did not think so in the time period. George L. Sanchez, pioneering Mexican-American educational scholar who served as an expert witness in the case, was asked if the Mendez decision could have any influence on Brown v. Board of Education, and he exclaimed "No, there could be no connection!". Unlike Brown, Mendez never sought to challenge legal segregation in itself. The overriding issue in Mendez was that Mexicans were white children who were being arbitrarily segregated from other whites in the absence of any state or federal law due to the language barrier. "Does the present case attack Negro segregation where there is no law decreeing such segregation? Only in such a case would we be concerned." Since segregation for African-American children was legal, that was not of their concern in Mendez, and made the cases ultimately unrelated. Robert L. Carter who contributed an amicus brief to test the NAACP's segregation 'per se' argument (which was first established in the 1931 Margold Report) later lamented that he and Thurgood Marshall considered the decision to be a legal failure and a threat to the organization's national goals. By centering the white racial status of Mexicans and the absence of state law, the decision reinforced legal segregation for minorities. In his 2005 Memoir Carter states, ''"The court's decision in the Mendez case was regressive. By ruling that the segregation was illegal only because it was not authorized by California law, the court was implicitly holding that segregation was valid when authorized by state law. This was the very principle we were trying to overturn."'' Calling the decision 'regressive', Carter and Marshall deliberately did not cite or mention Mendez in Brown v. Board of ed because they could not rely on it. ==Legacy==

On December 8, 1997, the Santa Ana Unified School District dedicated the Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez Intermediate Fundamental School in Santa Ana, California. In 2003, writer/producer Sandra Robbie received an Emmy Award for her documentary Mendez vs. Westminster: For All the Children / Para Todos los Niños. On September 14, 2007, the US Postal Service honored the 60th anniversary of the ruling with a 41-cent commemorative stamp. On November 15, 2007, it presented the Mendez v. Westminster stamp to the Mendez family, at a press conference at the Rose Center Theater in Westminster, California. In September 2009, Felicitas and Gonzalo Mendez High School opened in Boyle Heights. The school was named after Felicitas and Gonzalo Mendez, parents of American civil rights activist Sylvia Mendez, who played an instrumental role in the case. On October 14, 2009, Chapman University's Leatherby Libraries dedicated the Mendez et al v. Westminster et al Group Study Room and a collection of documents, video and other items relating to the landmark desegregation case. Chapman also owns the last standing Mexican school building from the segregation era in Orange County. On February 15, 2011, President Barack Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Sylvia Mendez, the daughter of Gonzalo Mendez, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit. She, along with her two brothers, Gonzalo, Jr. and Jerome, were some of the Mexican-American students who were denied admission to their local Westminster school, which formed the basis for the suit. Sylvia was awarded the honor for her many years of work encouraging students to stay in school and to ensure that the importance of Mendez v. Westminster in American history will not be forgotten. In September 2011, the Museum of Teaching and Learning (MOTAL), in partnership with a half-dozen government agencies and universities, opened a nine-month exhibition about the case at the Old Orange County Courthouse in Santa Ana, California. The exhibition, for which the team won a 2013 Award of Merit from the American Association for State and Local History, continues to travel to other locations to educate the public, both adults and students, about the details around this landmark case. ==See also==