It took seeing the school's manicured lawn, the palm trees that lined the street and, especially, the monkey bars in the playground.
It took comparing the well-kept brick building with the two-room wooden shack that she had attended. It took being very excited to be there and then being insulted by the white children and told she didn't belong there.
It was that day 60 years ago, that Sylvia Méndez, then 10, realized what her parents had been fighting for.
"I finally understood it," said Méndez, whose father - with four other Mexican parents - in 1946 sued four school districts in Orange County, Calif., on behalf of 5,000 Latino children who attended Mexican schools.
The landmark but little-known lawsuit - Mendez vs. Westminster - led to the desegregation of California schools seven years before Brown vs. Board of Education led the Supreme Court to mandate integration throughout the nation.
In their class-action suit, the Mexican parents said their children were being discriminated against, thus receiving an inferior education.
A local federal district court judge agreed with Méndez's father.
While the local school board appealed, Gonzalo Méndez, who was from Mexico, his wife Felicitas, from Puerto Rico, and their three young children, left the ranch in Westminster where they had grown tomatoes, chilies and asparagus and moved back to the Santa Ana barrio.
There, the senior Méndez made a point of sending his kids across town to the all-white school.
"I was so excited to be there, and everything was so pretty," recalls Sylvia Méndez, 70, who lives in Fullerton, Calif. "To this day, I still remember the monkey bars."
Everything went well until recess. Then came the shouts of "You are a dirty Mexican, you don't belong here."
"I started crying and I told my mother I didn't want to go there anymore. But then my father came over and they said to me, ‘You have to stay in this school. This is what we have been fighting for, because you are equal to them.'"
The trial attracted attention, and friends of the court briefs in favor of desegregation were filed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People - headed by Thurgood Marshall, who later used similar arguments when he became the lead attorney in the Brown case.
The American Civil Liberties Union, the American Jewish Congress and the Japanese American Citizens League also filed papers supporting Méndez.
The school board's main argument was that Latino children should be schooled separately because they were not proficient in English.
"They were saying Latinos could not speak English, but during the trial we were all there, ready to prove we could. My father had always insisted we learn English."
During the trial, Sylvia, 10, and her brothers Gonzalo, 9, and Jerome, 7, were at the Los Angeles courthouse everyday.
On April 14, 1947, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld the federal court ruling, and shortly thereafter California Gov. Earl Warren pushed the state Legislature into repealing laws that segregated schoolchildren.
By the time Brown vs. Board of Education appeared before the Supreme Court, Warren had become chief justice.
"That was the first time a federal court ever said segregation in schools is illegal, which was groundbreaking for the time," said Chris Arriola, 37, who has written several articles on Méndez and is deputy district attorney in San José, California.
Méndez, who is in New York City this week, has made it her personal quest to educate the public about her parents' struggle after making a promise to her late mother. Her goal is to have it included in school curricula alongside Brown.
In New York, Méndez will be joining filmmaker Sandra Robbie, who made an awardwinning documentary about the case after she read a newspaper article on it.
"I grew up in West Orange County and, until 10 years ago, I never knew that segregation happened in California, and not just in schools, but in theaters and other public places," said Robbie, 40.
To mark the 60th anniversary of the case - and the issuance in October of a commemorative U.S. Postal Offi ce stamp - Robbie recently embarked on a 20-day tour through 15 states.
Méndez and Robbie will be at the Puerto Rican Day Parade Sunday in the 1967 Wolkswagen bus that has been carrying Robbie around the country. They hope to meet with Mayor Bloomberg, and ask him to teach Mendez vs. Westminster in city schools.
They say teaching children about the case is overdue, and that the issue it raised 60 years ago has not been settled.
"It has come back full circle. We are more segregated than before, by poverty, by class, and by demographics," said Méndez. "It is de facto segregation, and it's especially bad in inner cities."
It was my understanding that these cases involved Mexican-American groups arguing that they Mexicans (as opposed to Latinos) were legally white and therefore the school system's segregating them was wrong. Can anyone confirm this? If this was the case, this instance of opposition to segregated schools was based on very different legal reasoning from Brown vs. Board of Education.
Joined: 03 Jun 2005 {Posts: 274 } Location: California
Posted: Mon 18 Jun 2007 22:59 Post subject:
G-Man wrote:
It was my understanding that these cases involved Mexican-American groups arguing that they Mexicans (as opposed to Latinos) were legally white and therefore the school system's segregating them was wrong. Can anyone confirm this? If this was the case, this instance of opposition to segregated schools was based on very different legal reasoning from Brown vs. Board of Education.
Mexican AMericans and all hispanics were defined legally as white, but still suffered from defacto segregation. I am not sure if it was dejure anywhere.
May 2004, HISPANIC BUSINESS Magazine
Lisa Jennings
Sylvia Mendez, a 67-year-old Southern California retired nurse and grandmother of two, is not a lawyer, professor, or policy maker. But for many in the Hispanic community, her name is synonymous with the defeat of legal school segregation.
Ms. Mendez and others across the nation will mark the 50th anniversary this month of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, a landmark case that in 1954 sounded the death knell for an era in which White and non-White schoolchildren attended "separate but equal" schools.
But nearly a decade before the historic Brown ruling found such schools "inherently unequal," Ms. Mendez was on the front lines with those challenging the fairness of similar laws for Mexican-American schoolchildren in a case known as Mendez v. Westminster.
In 1944, Ms. Mendez was nine years old and her father, Gonzalo Mendez, a Mexican-American tenant farmer, had moved the family from a Hispanic neighborhood to the predominantly Anglo town of Westminster, California. Mr. Mendez tried to enroll his children in the neighborhood school. But that school district, he was told, didn't allow children who appeared to be Hispanic to integrate with Anglo students, so Ms. Mendez and her brothers were sent to a "Mexican school" nearby.
Infuriated, Mr. Mendez and four other Mexican-American families would eventually launch a legal battle March 2, 1945, against four Orange County school districts that would ultimately result in the dismantling of school segregation laws in California and throughout the Southwest. It was the first federal case to find that segregation based on national origin was a violation of the 14th Amendment's equal-protection clause, and it would be the catalyst for a ripple-effect that would open broad opportunities across the nation for U.S. Hispanics and other minority groups.
The precedent-setting Mendez case, which included work by Los Angeles attorney David Marcus, moved Earl Warren, as California's governor in 1947, to push a broader repeal of segregation laws through the legislature soon after the ruling. Mr. Warren would later become a prominent player in the Brown case: As chief justice of the Supreme Court, Mr. Warren wrote the Brown decision in 1954.
In California, the defeat of segregation laws not only ended the days of "Mexican schools" � allowing access to the significant benefits of quality education � it also lifted many of the barriers Hispanic families faced in myriad other areas, including buying homes. Combined with the Brown ruling years later, the moves would open a world of opportunity that has helped propel the growing affluence and influence of the U.S. Hispanic community today.
In the wake of the Brown ruling, coupled with the growing population, the number of Hispanic children in public schools across the U.S. has surged 305 percent � from an estimated 2 million in 1968 to more than 8 million in 2001. Educational access and attainment has helped boost labor force participation, with Hispanics now accounting for 1 of every 9 U.S. workers. With job opportunities has come rising income, increasing the community's estimated annual purchasing power to $575 billion.
R. Alex Acosta, who last year was named the first Hispanic assistant attorney general for the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, credits those achievements to the Brown ruling � as well as the Voting Rights Act, which will be 40 years old next year.
"It appears to me that, by all measures, Hispanics are rapidly achieving success in a whole range of areas," says Mr. Acosta, who co-chairs a Brown anniversary commission established by President Bush.
While the Brown case was about race, the Mendez case dealt with segregation based on national origin � the children were considered Caucasian but of Mexican descent, though their heritage was most likely a mix of Spanish and Native American. Both are seen as turning points, but the Mendez story is often unknown.
Christopher Arriola, deputy district attorney of Santa Clara County in Southern California, remembers that he was shocked when he discovered the Mendez case while studying at Stanford University.
"There were segregated schools four blocks from where I grew up and nobody ever told me about it," says Mr. Arriola. To increase awareness, Mr. Arriola established a Web site about the case, published articles in law journals, and created a collection of research materials at Stanford University.
Sandra Robbie, a third-generation Mexican American, also wants more people to be aware of the Mendez case. She produced an Emmy Award-winning documentary "Mendez v. Westminster: For All the Children, Para Todos los Ninos," which has been broadcast on California public television station KOCE. "We helped make Brown happen," she says. "I want to see Sylvia [Mendez] talking to Katie Couric and Oprah, and dancing with the President."
Today, Ms. Mendez, who tells her family's story at schools, notes, "My father often said, 'Nobody ever thanked us for it.' " He died in 1964 at the age of 51. But in 1998 � a few years before her mother, Felicitas Mendez, died � the Santa Ana school board named a new middle school the Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez Fundamental Intermediate School.
Ironically, however, the school's student body is 95 percent Hispanic. And it is such "de facto segregation" that must be addressed, says Ms. Mendez. She is troubled by the dropout rate among Hispanic students and says she aims to inspire them to take full advantage of the educational opportunities available today � opportunities that exist largely because of people who, like her father, helped pave the way for Hispanic families following the American dream.
"When I go to the schools, I tell them they have to get an education and a profession," says Ms. Mendez. "So they can buy a house anywhere they want. If you have money, they can't stop you."
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