Before Brown v. Board, Another Segregation Case Changed Public Schools
Eight decades after Mendez et al. v. Westminster sparked a revolution, the people preserving its legacy confront the reality that many schools are still segregated.
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was originally reported by Nadra Nittle of . .
To understand why five California families took their fight against segregated schools to court in the 1940s, picture the buildings reserved for their children鈥檚 learning.
At that time in rural Orange County, just south of Los Angeles, school officials ordered Mexican-American children into environments that weren鈥檛 designed for education. Their studies took place in converted cattle sheds or horse stables covered in dirt and reeking of manure. Instead of new textbooks with glossy pages and fresh ink, they learned from the torn and tattered primers White schools had discarded.
Outraged by the prospect of their children continuing their education in ramshackle schoolhouses, five families 鈥 the Mendezes, Ramirezes, Guzmans, Estradas and Palominos 鈥 decided to act.
鈥淭hey demonstrated a spirit of resistance, an unwillingness to settle for lesser benefits than what they were entitled to as full participants in the American experiment,鈥 said Kelly Gardner, deputy director of litigation for the Legal Defense Fund, a racial justice organization.聽
In the 1940s, California didn鈥檛 expressly ban Mexican Americans from attending classes with White students. What the state did was argue that Latinx children needed 鈥渟eparate鈥 instruction due, in part, to language barriers. Yet when a relative of Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez tried to enroll the Mendez children at the all-White 17th Street School in Westminster, the principal didn鈥檛 test their English. He sized up little Sylvia, Gonzalo Jr. and Geronimo by their skin tone.
The school turned away the Mendez children but enrolled their lighter-skinned cousins whose surname didn鈥檛 call out their Latinx ancestry. The Mendezes weren鈥檛 alone. When William and Virginia Guzman in nearby Santa Ana tried to enroll their son in a White school, officials also denied their request. The Guzmans were , though their initial suit failed.
Rather than accept horse stables and decaying books for their children鈥檚 education, the five families mobilized against multiple Orange County school districts for excluding Latinx youth. Together, Frank and Irene Palomino, Tomas and Mary Luisa Estrada, and Lorenzo and Josefina Ramirez, along with the Guzmans and the Mendezes, changed the course of history.
“The community was already really active. They had their own agency,鈥 said Cindy Mata, site director of the University of California, Irvine鈥檚 History Project, a partnership between the Department of History and K-12 educators in Orange County. 鈥淭hey were primed to be able to fight that segregation. That’s the story that is undertold.鈥
(Courtesy of Chapman University Digital Commons)
As the plaintiffs who won Mendez et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County in 1947, the families revolutionized access and opportunity in California鈥檚 public schools. A federal court ruled that the state hadn鈥檛 authorized segregating children of Mexican descent and that doing so violated the 14th Amendment, which guarantees 鈥渆qual protection of the laws.鈥 The case resulted in one of the nation鈥檚 first federal ruling against school segregation, paving the way for the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case, , that ended with an order for schools nationwide to integrate.
鈥淚t took a great deal of courage to challenge the status quo,鈥 said Thomas Saenz, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF). 鈥淵ou’re putting your name out there. That can be dangerous. We still face that today. We have had clients who had very good cases who opted not to pursue them because of those fears. The courage to change things in a major way is really a very unique kind of courage.鈥
Despite its significance 鈥 the class-action lawsuit represented roughly 5,000 students 鈥 Mendez v. Westminster remained largely unknown to the public for decades. Then, in 2011, President Barack Obama awarded Sylvia Mendez the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, for her activism and her family鈥檚 role in the Mendez et al. case. Schools in California, Texas and North Carolina bear the name Mendez, as does a , renamed in the family鈥檚 honor in 2025. Last year, after relentless advocacy from educators, filmmakers, activists, scholars and lawmakers, California enacted legislation requiring schools to teach students about the case.
, even if it manifests differently today, and curriculum restrictions in some states limit what students learn about the past. Still, the individuals striving to keep this history alive stand out in their own right.
Sandra Robbie, 67, grew up in Westminster, the same Orange County town as the Mendez children, though it was only as an adult that she learned about their legal battle. In the late 1990s, Robbie read in the Orange County Register that a school would be named for the Mendezes and why.
鈥淚t was an absolute paradigm shift,鈥 Robbie recalled. 鈥淭he day I read that article, I could feel the wall start spinning around me. When I looked up, everything in my world looked different.鈥
In Orange County, a conservative pocket of Southern California, Robbie tried her best to fit in as a Mexican American in the 1960s and 鈥70s. 鈥淚 never dated a Mexican guy,鈥 she said. Her parents only spoke Spanish when they didn鈥檛 want their children to understand them. 鈥淚 got the secret code that speaking Spanish was bad,鈥 Robbie said.
When she found out about Mendez et al., both the micro and macroaggressions she had experienced as a youth began to make sense. She remembered playing with her blonde, blue-eyed best friend as a tween when the girl said suddenly, 鈥淚鈥檒l be the mom, and you鈥檒l be my little [N-word] baby.鈥 The comment stunned Robbie. 鈥淚鈥檇 never been called that in my life. I walked away,鈥 she said. 鈥淏ut later, when I learned about Mendez, it all made sense. It gave me the courage to stand up.鈥
(Stella Kalinina for The 19th)
She felt a connection to Felicitas Mendez, a married to a Mexican-American man. When school officials told the Mendezes their children had to attend the segregated school, Felicitas pushed her husband to fight. Robbie finds her defiance inspiring.
鈥淚f it hadn鈥檛 been for Felicitas saying, 鈥楴o, I鈥檓 not going to let my kids go,鈥 this case never happens,鈥 Robbie said. 鈥淪he was the Rosa Parks moment.鈥
Robbie feels particularly drawn to the multiracial elements of Mendez et al. David Marcus, a Jewish lawyer married to a Mexican woman, represented the families in court. The Mendezes paid their legal expenses through profits from the farm they leased from the Munemitsus, a Japanese-American family sent to an internment camp. The Japanese American Citizens League 鈥 along with civil rights groups the ACLU, NAACP and American Jewish Congress 鈥 submitted friend-of-the-court briefs supporting the plaintiffs. Thurgood Marshall, the attorney who founded the Legal Defense Fund, then the NAACP鈥檚 legal arm, co-wrote an amicus brief. Marshall went on to win Brown v. Board and serve as the first Black justice on the Supreme Court.
Robbie rejects the idea that Mendez et al. is 鈥渏ust a Latino story,鈥 she said. 鈥淢y hope is that Mendez will desegregate the way we talk about American civil rights history.鈥
She headed back to school to take TV production classes and got an internship at her local PBS station, where she pitched a film on Mendez et al. Robbie was determined to expose the case to the masses. The project, 鈥淢endez vs. Westminster: For All the Children/Para Todos los Ni帽os,鈥 won an Emmy in 2003.
Her fight to direct more recognition to the case didn鈥檛 stop there. A PBS acquaintance with White House connections passed along a manila envelope filled with articles, photos and ephemera Robbie assembled about the lawsuit to then-President George W. Bush鈥檚 chief of staff. The maneuver worked. Shortly afterward, Robbie and the Mendezes received an invitation to attend a Hispanic Heritage Month celebration with Bush. As Bush honored that history-making family, Robbie felt sure that 鈥渆very voice matters,鈥 she said through tears.
For the next two decades, she pushed for the case to be taught in schools. In 2024, , requiring California鈥檚 K-12 classrooms to do just that. Robbie immediately texted her old college professor, who had once told her, 鈥淗istory takes time.鈥 She remembered that adage throughout her fight to direct national attention to Mendez et al. 鈥淚 had faith every step of the way,鈥 she said.
sits in an industrial section of Boyle Heights, a neighborhood just east of Downtown Los Angeles. Emily Grijalva works there as the community school coordinator, a role that requires her to foster relationships with school leaders, local organizations, and students and their families. Part of her role is to provide tours of the campus, full of murals of the Mendezes, and educate students and visitors about the historic court case.
Grijalva didn鈥檛 learn about the lawsuit until the early aughts, when she was in college 鈥 and she鈥檚 determined to not let the same happen to her students, especially since the discrimination of the past reverberates today, she said. Grijalva also draws parallels between the case and her own life: She was born in Los Angeles and raised in the United States and Guatemala, where she attended an international school that prohibited its large population of Spanish-speaking students from using the language.
鈥淭hey would give us detention for speaking Spanish in the hallways,鈥 the 42-year-old recalled. 鈥淲e were native speakers being taught by Canadians with thick accents. It was colonial education.鈥
She cast the Spanish ban as culturally insensitive; the school鈥檚 administrators ignored her concerns and pegged her as a troublemaker. 鈥淚 didn鈥檛 have the language to advocate for myself then,鈥 she said. That experience is what fuels her pursuit of a doctoral degree at Claremont Graduate University, where she鈥檚 researching linguistic justice. 鈥淚 never want a student to feel that shame again,鈥 she said.
(Stella Kalinina for The 19th)
At Mendez High, Grijalva sees the ghosts of Mendez et al. every day, particularly since immigration enforcement has emerged as an urgent crisis over the past two years. 鈥淚CE raids have devastated us,鈥 she said. 鈥淔amilies are self-deporting. Students are just disappearing. Parents are afraid to attend meetings.鈥
But she never forgets how the school鈥檚 namesakes resisted injustice. Felicitas and Gonzalo Mendez Senior High School is 30 miles northwest of Westminster, and the Mendez family has visited the campus multiple times. Sylvia Mendez, now 90, has popped up for graduations and the . It offers medical, dental and mental healthcare to community members, honoring Sylvia Mendez鈥檚 decades as a nurse.
The health center鈥檚 sterile beige halls stand in stark contrast to Grijalva鈥檚 office, located in a classroom covered in posters that broadcast her staunch support of immigrants, LGBTQ+ youth and the Los Angeles Football Club. She makes sure that no incoming student completes orientation without learning about Mendez et al. and that their understanding of the school鈥檚 namesakes is far more than cursory.
鈥淭he Mendez family teaches us that parents will always advocate for their children,鈥 she said. 鈥淢y job is to make sure our students see themselves not as victims of history but as its makers.鈥
Until Mike Ramirez got a knock on his door from a graduate student researching the case in the late 1990s, he had never heard of the Mendez et al. lawsuit. What makes that so shocking is that his own parents, Lorenzo and Josefina Ramirez, were plaintiffs.
Ramirez was 42 when he got his introduction to the civil rights case, which predated his birth by almost a decade. 鈥淢y father died when I was 10. My mother never talked about it.鈥
Ramirez鈥檚 Mexican father stood out as the only plaintiff without U.S. citizenship, he said. That made his involvement even riskier: Deportation was as real a threat then as it is today.
Just as Brown v. Board originally involved 13 plaintiff families, later ballooning to over 200 plaintiffs in five locations, Mendez was never a solo act. 鈥淭he other fathers were working for ranchers,鈥 Ramirez said. 鈥淭hey could have been blacklisted. Mr. Mendez had his own ranch, so he could take the lead, but that doesn鈥檛 mean we weren鈥檛 there.鈥
Learning of his parents鈥 involvement in the case initiated a second act for Ramirez, now 71. He successfully lobbied Santiago Canyon College in Orange to in 2014. Three years earlier, the and their children. Mike Ramirez is now pushing for a school to bear his family鈥檚 name. His parents鈥 contributions deserve recognition, he said.
Today, he works as a custodian at a school in Riverside, California, just east of Orange County. The echoes of Mendez et al. still linger 鈥 and not only because of his family鈥檚 participation in the case. Teachers at one school his grandsons attended gave them differential treatment based on skin color, he said. The darker-skinned boy got treated so harshly, compared with how they treated his lighter-skinned brother, that the family decided to enroll them elsewhere.
For Ramirez, it鈥檚 incidents such as this that make it imperative to keep Mendez et al. in the public consciousness. 鈥淭he truth has to come out,鈥 he said.
At Mendez High, the student body is hues of brown, much like the neighborhood where the school stands. Ninety-seven percent of students are Latinx, a fact obvious to anyone who visits. The rare White or Black student was easy to spot as youth crisscrossed the campus on an overcast May day.
That the school鈥檚 student body belongs overwhelmingly to one group hasn鈥檛 escaped Grijalva. 鈥淟os Angeles is completely segregated,鈥 she said. 鈥淲hite families are gentrifying Boyle Heights, but they are not sending their kids to our public schools. We have one White student right now.鈥
While most of Mendez鈥檚 550 students are economically disadvantaged, the school has distinguished itself academically. About 90 percent of students attend college, with this year鈥檚 valedictorian heading to Stanford University. The the school as a 鈥淲hite House Bright Spot for Latino/a Education,鈥 and the City of Los Angeles has recognized it for its academic and athletic accomplishments. Still, it remains segregated.
(Stella Kalinina for The 19th)
Mata, of UC Irvine鈥檚 History Project, said that a similar dynamic plays out in Orange County and elsewhere in the state. 鈥淪chools are racially segregated even more so than before, and the added piece to that is class,鈥 she said. 鈥淧eople who can afford to send their kids to private school or charter schools do. In Orange County, the overwhelming majority of [public school] students are kids of color, but there are hella White kids in Orange County. So where are they going?”
In Boyle Heights, the segregation, in part, reflects the homogeneity of the community, which is . But the Los Angeles Unified School District doesn鈥檛 require students to go to their neighborhood school. They can attend schools elsewhere, indicating that families from other areas are choosing not to enroll their children in Mendez 鈥 and that local families still prefer to send their children to schools closer to home.
Gary Orfield 鈥 a longtime school segregation researcher and co-founder of the Civil Rights Project, a 30-year-old think tank at the University of California, Los Angeles 鈥 said this is not an anomaly, but a systemic failure.
鈥淐alifornia never enforced desegregation,鈥 Orfield says. 鈥淪ince the 1970s, the state has done nothing to integrate schools.鈥
A found that school segregation is highest in big cities. There, Black and Latinx students attend schools where, on average, more than 80 percent of their classmates are also children of color. A 1973 Supreme Court case, , determined that Latinx and Black students suffer from similar educational inequities related to segregation. With little enforcement following the SCOTUS decision, however, the 1980s saw Latinx youth become as segregated in schools as Black children.
The endurance of segregation isn鈥檛 the only education crisis ahead of the nation鈥檚 250th anniversary. The push for censorship that has intensified throughout the 2020s threatens to bury the story of the Mendez plaintiffs and other civil rights milestones.
In recent years, most states have introduced laws to restrict what children learn about race or other topics deemed 鈥渄ivisive.鈥 Lisa Ramos lives in one of these states: Texas. The Alamo College professor wrote her dissertation on Mendez et al.
鈥淭here’s so much pressure at the federal government level to erase or hide or not highlight the differences between groups, to fashion this sort of faux unity,鈥 Ramos said. 鈥淏ut before we can be unified, we have to confront what divided us.鈥
Michael Pillera, director of the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers鈥 Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said groundbreaking cases like Mendez et al. instill fear in those who want this history deleted.
(Stella Kalinina for The 19th)
鈥淭he bravery inspires other people to step up, and that is a threat to the status quo,鈥 he said.
To Saenz, of MALDEF, censorship laws don鈥檛 just suppress historical facts. 鈥淲e are experiencing a resurgence of bias and a desire to return to an era of open white supremacy,鈥 he said.
In California, individual school boards and city councils have voted to ban books over the past few years. That includes the city council of Huntington Beach, an Orange County community eight miles south of Westminster. Court rulings ultimately reversed these restrictions, but censorship continues in other places.
鈥淏y removing that history, it’s a way of spirit-murdering our future generations,鈥 Grijalva said. 鈥淭hey’re not going to have that opportunity to see themselves, be empowered and do something with that empowerment.鈥
Grijalva said the conversations she鈥檚 been having now are heavier than at any other time during her two decades as an educator. She likened today鈥檚 climate to the 1930s Mexican Repatriation, when local, state and federal officials pressured up to a million Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans to leave the country. Like Mendez et al., the repatriation is a widely overlooked chapter of national history.
But through it all, Grijalva clings to hope.
鈥淲e all understand the power of seeing ourselves in our education,鈥 she said. 鈥淟ike many of us, I was inspired by Chicano Studies classes. That’s the reason I was able to get through college and come back as an educator.鈥
She had no idea during her first brush with Mendez et al. in college that she would one day work at a school named after one of the plaintiff couples.
Robbie, for her part, is not done raising the case鈥檚 profile. She has considered launching a celebration called 鈥淩andom Act of Mendez,鈥 where people 鈥渂reak out of their boxes鈥 by trying something they’ve never done, even acts as simple as introducing themselves to strangers. She believes people need to expand their minds to be truly inclusive.
鈥淲e have to learn how to stretch,鈥 she said. 鈥淚 know the truth is that we don’t want to stretch sometimes because it doesn’t feel safe.”
The Mendez et al. plaintiffs took action despite the risks. Their success, Robbie said, shows what鈥檚 possible when diverse groups of people come together.
鈥淎bsolutely, we are all connected,鈥 she said. 鈥淭hat is the main story.”
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