The Fight to Go to School

Photo-Illustration by Bianca Alexis. Courtesy of the Mendez Family

Sylvia Mendez takes piano lessons at age 10.

Sylvia Mendez couldn’t have been happier. It was September 1944, and the 8-year-old was about to register for third grade at a new school in Westminster, California.

Just a few months before, Sylvia, her parents, and her younger brothers had moved to the town to run a local farm. Now her Aunt Soledad—who also lived on the farm with her husband and daughters—was taking all the kids to the Westminster Main School for the first time.

“My mother had bought us all new clothes. We were so excited to go to school,” Mendez, now 85, recalls. The children never expected their visit to help set in motion a series of events that would change education in America forever.

The official they met said the school would accept Aunt Soledad’s daughters, who were light-skinned, but Sylvia and her brothers, who had dark skin, hair, and eyes, would have to go to the town’s “Mexican school” a few blocks away.

Furious, Aunt Soledad marched the kids home, refusing to enroll any of them. Sylvia’s parents, Gonzalo and Felicitas, were also outraged: They were hardworking American citizens. The Mendezes were determined to fight back—and would eventually join with other families to do so in court.

Their lawsuit, Mendez v. Westminster School District, would ultimately lead to the end of school segregation in California. It would also help pave the way for an even bigger victory: the outlawing of segregation in public schools throughout the United States.

Courtesy of the Mendez Family

A segregated school for Mexican Americans, 1944

Facing Discrimination

In the 1940s, Orange County, California, where the Mendez family lived, was one of the nation’s top producers of fruits and vegetables. Most of the workers picking that produce were Mexican American citizens or migrants from Mexico. The work was hard and paid poorly. But few other jobs were open to people of Mexican then.

In fact, in much of the country, particularly the Southwest, they faced constant discrimination. They were prevented from living in areas with sewers or paved streets. Stores and restaurants posted signs such as “No dogs or Mexicans” to keep them out. And Mexican American kids were forced to attend inferior schools, separate from their White peers.

The school for Mexican Americans was little more than a couple of shacks.

Sylvia saw the differences firsthand. Every day, the school bus would drop her and her brothers off in front of the Westminster Main School, a big, clean building with a beautifully kept grass yard, palm trees, and a playground with swings, a seesaw, and more.

But Sylvia and her brothers had to walk right past it—down the street to Hoover Elementary. The overcrowded school for Mexican American students was little more than a couple of wooden shacks. Sylvia knew that the students there received a poor education.

“The schoolbooks were all handed down, so they’d be torn,” she says. Rather than being taught subjects like science and math, the children were trained to become farmhands and maids. The White officials who oversaw Hoover Elementary expected the school’s students to grow up to provide cheap labor.

But people like the Mendezes envisioned a different future for their kids, and change was coming.

Courtesy of the Mendez Family

Sylvia’s parents Felicitas and Gonzalo Mendez (left); Gonzalo on the farm

By the mid 1940s, Mexican Americans were already fighting for equal rights in the Southwest. Parents in Texas, Arizona, and California had successfully sued individual school districts, forcing them to integrate. Still, school segregation was practiced almost everywhere else.

Many Mexican American families were determined to right that wrong. In Orange County, where Sylvia lived, parents and community groups had appeared before school boards to demand integration—but they had largely gotten nowhere.

Finally, a group that Sylvia’s father was part of hired a lawyer to challenge school segregation in court. The lawyer, David Marcus, had represented other Mexican American clients before. To win, he said, several families should join together in a class-action lawsuit.

Sylvia’s father and other community members drove around Orange County with Marcus, looking for families to sign on. Sylvia’s mother took over running the farm and got parents to sign a petition against their school board.

Russell Lee Photograph Collection, e_rl_14646_0038, The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin

Signs like this were once common sights throughout the Southwest.

'They Are Americans'

In the end, five families from four Orange County school districts came together for a federal lawsuit. In March 1945, it was filed on behalf of the families as Mendez v. Westminster School District. The plaintiffs argued that forcing their children to attend separate schools denied them equal protection under the law—a right guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Their lawsuit was the first to challenge school segregation under the Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

The trial began July 5 at the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. Marcus called the parents to the witness stand to explain how they'd tried to enroll their children in their neighborhood schools but had been denied. For their part, school officials claimed that the Mexican American students had been placed in separate schools because they didn’t speak English well and would have held back the other learners. But Marcus called two students to the stand to prove that claim false. Not only did they, like many of their classmates, speak English fluently, but also officials had never even tested them.

‘The American dream is possible, no matter the color of your skin.’

All in all, members of 13 families testified about the discrimination they had faced. When Sylvia’s mother, Felicitas, took the stand, she explained: “We always tell our children they are Americans. They shouldn’t be .”

Through skillful questioning, Marcus got school officials to show that they believed people of Mexican heritage were inferior to White people. One superintendent admitted that he thought Mexicans were far less intelligent and that they should be segregated in society.

Importantly, Marcus also called experts to the stand to show that separating children based on their ethnicity was damaging to them. “Segregation, by its very nature, is a constant reminder of inferiority, of not being wanted,” one longtime educator said in her .

Paving the Way for Brown

On February 18, 1946, Judge Paul McCormick, who had heard the case, issued a decision: By segregating Mexican American children, he said, the school districts had violated the students’ 14th Amendment rights to “equal protection of the laws.”

“A requisite in the American system of public education is social equality,” McCormick wrote in his decision. “It must be open to all children by unified school association regardless of lineage.”

But the fight wasn’t over. The Orange County schools the judge’s decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. In April 1947, that court the Mendez victory. The case only applied to Mexican American students based on state laws at the time, but it prompted California Governor Earl Warren two months later to sign a bill banning all racial segregation in California schools.

From there, the case would trigger bolder demands for racial equality, says historian David-James Gonzales of Brigham Young University in Utah, an expert on the Mexican American struggle for civil rights.

“The whole legal basis for segregating people by race was undermined by Mendez,” he says.

Crucially, the victory laid a legal foundation for the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka—and the 1954 ruling on it by the U.S. Supreme Court—which banned racial segregation in American public schools.

Larry Downing/Reuters

Sylvia Mendez gets the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2011.

Paving the Way for Brown

After the ruling, Sylvia and her brothers were finally able to enroll in the Westminster Main School. The coursework was more rigorous there, and Sylvia enjoyed learning alongside classmates of all races. She rose to the challenges her lessons presented—then pushed on through high school and college, and had a long career as a registered nurse.

In recent years, Sylvia has dedicated herself to sharing what her community accomplished some 75 years ago. As she travels the country speaking to students about the legacy of the Mendez case, she has one central message: Education is critical.

“The American dream is possible, no matter the color of your skin or where you come from,” she says. “But you have to work hard.” And like her parents and the many Mexican American families who fought for equality, “you must persevere.”

Milestones in Mexican American Civil Rights

Other historic events in the fight for equality

1954: Hernandez  v. Texas
In a landmark civil rights case, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that Mexican Americans—and all racial and ethnic groups—have equal protection under the law, as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. (Previously, the 14th Amendment applied only to Black Americans.)

Arthur Schatz/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Labor activist Cesar Chavez (center) with grape pickers, 1968

1965: Delano Grape Strike
César Chávez of the National Farm Workers Association leads a five-year labor strike and boycott. It results in a collective bargaining agreement with major grape producers yielding job protections and better pay for Mexican American workers.

Devra Weber. From the La Raza Photograph Collection, #1000. Courtesy of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center

School walkouts staged by Mexican American students

1968-69: School Walkouts
Mexican American student groups in Los Angeles and Denver stage school walkouts protesting unequal conditions in schools, including bans on speaking Spanish.

1974: Equal Educational Opportunities Act
Congress passes a law that makes bilingual education more widely available in public schools.

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