A Puerto Rican/Mexican couple who changed the face of segregation and the civil rights struggle in the United States, seven years before Brown v. Board of Education.

The California landmark civil rights case of Mendez v. Westminster (1947) arguably made one of the greatest contributions to the civil rights struggle for equality in the United States. During the last decade, several successful attempts to educate the public about the importance of the case have resulted in Mendez finally beginning to be recognized as a significant case in the historic context of the civil rights era. However, to this date, Mendez is not mentioned in most law school textbooks as one of the “Road to Brown” cases; this is largely because it was decided in the California Supreme Court and Appellate Court but never reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

To keep the Mendez legacy alive and provide a historical, legal and human context to the case, one must distinguish Mendez from and place the case in the context of the other civil rights cases, also known as the “Road to Brown” (Brown v. Board of Education). Most of the known landmark cases that lay the groundwork for Brown were what is known in the legal realm as “test cases,” meaning that the cases consisted of plaintiffs who were carefully selected and financed to legally challenge the unconstitutionality of “Separate But Equal.”

The test case tactic underlies most legal cases that are brought to the U.S. Supreme Court, especially in the areas of discrimination, religion, affirmative action, gender, sexual preference and voting rights, just to mention a few areas. By contrast, the plaintiffs brought the Mendez case on their own behalf and financed their own expenses and those of their peers. The Mendez family effectively ended segregation in California seven years before the Brown decision, on their own initiative, at their own expense and in response to an unplanned event. They were not selected to assume the role of plaintiff and did not have an army of lawyers or money behind them.

Anti-Segregation test case: Plessy v. Ferguson.

There were test cases even in the 1890s. The most well-known was Plessy v. Ferguson, a case that went bust. The case was organized and brought to court by well-intentioned people in New Orleans, including the owners of a railroad company which sought to desegregate the trains based on their belief that segregation resulted in excessive, unnecessary expenses and less profit. In other words, segregation was bad for business.

When Homer Plessy entered the train and sat in the white section, refusing to give his seat to a white person in opposition to the Louisiana state law, he provoked his own arrest and triggered a cause of action for discrimination under the United States Constitution’s 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause. When he left the train that day, a group of businessmen, integrationists and lawyers were waiting for Plessy, committed to supporting his struggle to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court.

Unfortunately, the outcome of the case went the opposite direction. The Supreme Court, in perhaps the most reprehensible decision in history, stated that:

“the object of the 14th Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions upon color or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to each other… if one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the U.S. cannot put them on the same plane.”

In other words, there can be equality but not integration or sharing of the same physical space due to the nature of one race being inferior to another. The failure of Plessy effectively resulted in the legal affirmation of the odious policy of “Separate But Equal” that endured for an additional 70 years.

The Road to Brown.

Beginning in 1930, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund began using the courts in order to chip away at the Plessy decision, focusing on institutions of higher education that discriminated against black applicants. Almost all of the cases were test cases designed to trigger discriminatory actions that reflected that separate was inherently not equal. This strategy, created by Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, resulted in a number of favorable Supreme Court decisions known today as “The Road to Brown.”

Mendez v. Westminster.

However, in 1947, in the middle of the Road to Brown, something happened in California. Two parents, Felicita Gomez, born in Puerto Rico, and Gonzalo Mendez, a Mexican, decided to take matters into their own hands when their two children were not admitted at the Westminster Elementary School in Santa Ana because they were visibly darker than the rest of the students. Their cousins who had a Mexican father of French descent were admitted the same day, but the Mendez children were not admitted because, according to the school, they were darker than the rest of the students.

Gonzalo’s sister, Soledad Vidaurri, had brought her sons and nieces to be enrolled to the school. When they rejected her brother’s children, she decided not to enroll her own.

The case was filed in March 1945, bringing suit under the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. The State’s defense asserted that California’s Mexican children possess contagious disease, have poor moral habits, inferior personal hygiene, and speak Spanish; however, the California statute applied segregation only for children of “Chinese, Japanese or Mongolian parentage.” As soon as the NAACP learned of the Mendez case, Thurgood Marshall went to California and filed an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs.

At home, Gonzalo and Felicita decided to fight back. The family decided to sue the school, paying the cost of legal representation with their own money. They also paid for the legal representation of four other plaintiffs who joined them.

The Mendez family understood that in order to be successful, they needed to gain support from the community and the public in general. Therefore, they decided that Felicita would stay home to work the farm while Gonzalo traveled to garner the necessary support and raise funds for legal representation.

Felicita not only administered the farm and worked the land herself for the first time ever, but she also organized local parents in the community into the La Associación de Padres y Niños Mexico Americanos. When other parents had to travel for meetings far away from their farm, in addition to paying for the bulk of legal fees for all plaintiffs, the Mendez family paid for their transportation and loss of pay. Eventually, the Mendez family was offered a deal that would allow only their children to be admitted in the school, but not the other Mexican children. They flatly rejected the offer.

On February 18, 1946, after the testimony of a sociologist and psychologist, in strategies that were used 7 years later in Brown v. Board of Education, Judge Paul McCormick found that the rights of the plaintiffs had been denied. The judge specifically stated that:

“. . . the equal protection of the laws pertaining to the public schools system in California is not provided by furnishing the same technical facilities, textbooks and courses of instructions to children of Mexican ancestry. A paramount requisite in the American system of public education is social equality. It must be open to all children by unified school association regardless of lineage.”

This was the first time in history that any state’s highest court had ruled that segregation was unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment.

Mendez was decided seven years before Brown. Eventually, the 9th Circuit Appellate Court unanimously upheld the lower court decision, but not under the 14th Amendment. Instead, the Appellate Court based its decision on absence of a state statute to establish and allow discrimination against Mexican children. Earl Warren, who was the Governor of California at the time, used the decision to dismantle segregation throughout the state. He signed Assembly Bill 1375 to end segregation in California for good.

Mendez served as precedent in many local cases throughout the South to end school segregation. Seven years after Mendez, Warren became Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, at a time when 3 Justices out of 7 voted against ending segregation. His experience with the Mendez case in California helped him to persuade those three judges in opposition to favor desegregation. And, 7 years after Mendez, the unanimous decision against segregation in Brown saw Plessy crumble.

Mendez v. Westminster was never meant to be. The case was not an orchestrated plan by a large defense fund and many wealthy donors; it was not a test case. The Mendez family was forced to embark with their community on an unknown legal journey of their own creation. They built their own road, almost alone, to fight against the education department in a state that discriminated against their children’s right to attend school. They were smart and unstoppable. When they eventually won, they did not call a press conference or have a celebration with bottles of champagne. They went home to continue taking care of what they loved most in the world, their children.

Nobody noticed. And, just like that they became invisible even when their case was being use as a legal precedent to desegregate local segregation statutes in the South, most notably in Texas.

They lived for years not realizing what they had accomplished until one day; one of their daughters, who was attending college, heard in class the Westminster story. The facts of the story and characters were so familiar that she went home and asked her mother if she and her father were the parents in the story. Felicita responded affirmatively, adding that she had forgotten about it. When Felicita, already in her golden years, was asked about what they did, she said, “We had to.” And, that was it.

Jaime Estades, Esq., MSW, an immigration and political consultant, is an adjunct professor in social policy and welfare at the Rutgers University Graduate School of Social Work and president and the founder of the Latino Leadership Institute, Inc. He can be reached at jaimeestades@yahoo.com.