The Breeze

Issue date: 4/7/08 Section: Campus News

Media Credit: Julie Cosgrove Sylvia Mendez and Michael Matsuda are working to bring the story of Latino school desegregation to the school children.

Living in the Inland Empire in the 21st century makes it difficult to remember that legal discrimination against Latino children was in full force only 62 years ago. Even fewer are aware that the end of school segregation for Latinos in California is part and parcel of the Civil Rights Movement of the l960s.

Only the few people who were involved remember to tell the story. One in particular, Sylvia Mendez, came to Chaffey to share her story with the Future Teachers' Club. Along with educator Michael Matsuda, she hopes to have the story of Mendez vs. Westminster told to all of the children in California's classrooms.

Mendez was in the third grade when her parents challenged the segregated school system that sent their children to a run down, impoverished "Mexican" school.

"It was shabby and next to a cow pasture," Mendez recalled. "To keep the cows in the pasture, there was a wire fence with a little bit of electricity running through it."

When Gonzalo Mendez moved his family to Westminster in 1943, his children were denied admittance to the better-funded and safer neighborhood school. He first appealed to the school principal, then the school board, and finally hired an attorney and sued the district as a class action on behalf of 5,000 Latino school children.

As the case wound through the California courts, the community rallied to the cause. Amicus briefs, or Friend of the Court briefs, were filed by the NAACP, the Jewish League, the National Lawyers' Guild, and the Japanese American League. One was submitted by Thurgood Marshall, the then future justice of the Supreme Court and chief counsel in a case that would end school segregation forever.

After two years, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Mendez, making school segregation unconstitutional. A year later, California Governor Earl Warren signed a bill prohibiting segregation.

Seven years later, in the landmark decision Brown vs. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that "separate but equal has no place," and that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." It was written by Chief Justice Earl Warren, former Governor of California, and was inclusive of the arguments made in the Mendez vs. Westminster case.

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