Editors Note: President Barack Obama awards the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Sylvia Mendez and 14 other Americans who have made invaluable contributions. USARiseUp congratulates all the recipients for their life-long work to improve humanity. USARiseUp is especially pleased to bring to the forefront this article that featured her story last year.
Sylvia Mendez, 73, keeps hundreds of letters from students who thank her for speaking in their classes. They range from elementary to university students and all of them write that they never knew the story of her parents, Felicitas and Gonzalo Mendez, who fought to make California the first state in the United States to end racial segregation in schools in 1947.
“This is my legacy,” Sylvia says in her Fullerton home where she displays photos related to the Mendez vs. Westminster case in the room where her mother died. “I promised my mother before she died to tell the story and make sure that she and my father would be thanked for what they did.”
In the fall of 1944, Soledad Vidaurri took her niece and nephew Sylvia and Gonzalo Jr. and her daughter, Alice to enroll at nearby 17th Street School. The principal informed Soledad that they would accept her daughter, but Sylvia and Gonzalo Jr., would have to attend Hoover Elementary that was reserved for Mexicans.
Soledad marched the children back home and informed her brother and sister-in-law of what had happened. According to Sylvia, her aunt later found out that Alice, who was half Mexican and half Italian, was eligible to attend 17th Street Elementary because of her fair coloring and last name.
Outraged, Felicitas and Gonzalo Sr. appealed to the Westminster school district to allow Sylvia and Gonzalo Jr. into 17th Street Elementary School. On March 2, 1945, they filed a class action lawsuit against the Westminster, El Modena (now Orange), Garden Grove and Santa Ana school districts to end their policies to segregate Mexican children.
The Mexican Schools
The hands that laid the railroad tracks and picked the citrus trees in Orange County, California were mostly brown. Professor Gilbert Gonzalez of the Chicano and Latino Studies program at the University of California at Irvine estimates that 75 percent of citrus workers in California were Mexican.
The bloody Mexican Revolution sent families across the California and Arizona borders in 1910. Good jobs and a moderate climate lured workers out of Arizona and New Mexico in the 1920's and 30's. While Mexicans solved the needs for cheap labor in California, their increasing numbers presented a problem to educators.
In his book, Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation, Gonzalez found that in 1913, the Santa Ana Board of Education, like many in California, responded by creating separate Mexican classes. The classes were designed to meet the special needs of these children – specifically to Americanize and teach them English – these classes mostly emphasized vocational training. Girls were given lessons in sewing, mending, cooking and cleaning, while boys were trained in carpentry, car repair, haircutting and blacksmithing.
“Mexicans would always be Mexicans if they spoke Spanish,” Gonzalez explained. “By doing away with cultural and language differences, they could create cultural harmony between the workers, their employers and the community.”
The Santa Ana Board of Education opened the first Mexican school in 1919. A small group of Mexican parents protested the board's decision, Gonzalez says. However, the board unanimously agreed that segregating children was in the best interest of the schools and especially for the Mexican children.
“There was a general feeling among educators that Mexicans were very good at hand work and physical labor but when it came to academic work, they were not at the same level as the average American child,” Gonzalez says.
Sylvia remembers the stark contrast between the Mexican school at Hoover Elementary and 17th Street Elementary – where ironically, her father attended in 1924 before it was designated a white school.
“Mira look,” she says, pointing to the picture of 17th Street Elementary circa 1944 with its Spanish-façade, manicured lawn, and palm trees. “I was so disappointed when I had to go to the other school. [The Hoover school] playground bordered a farm and one day a little boy was caught on the electrified fence. The teacher ran next door so the farmer could turn off the fence.”
Natural Born Fighters
Sylvia's parents, Gonzalo and Felicitas were not wealthy, but they were respected business people in the area. Later known as the top orange picker in Orange County, Gonzalo was born in Chihuahua, Mexico; he moved to Orange County at age six and left school after the fifth grade.
Felicitas came to the U.S. with her family in 1926, when the Arizona Cotton Growers Association recruited 1,500 Puerto Ricans to pick cotton. Along with his countrymen, her father moved the family out of Arizona after discovering that the wages and living conditions promised to them by the cotton growers were not the reality.
Felicitas met Gonzalo when her father brought him home to meet her younger sister. They married in 1935. “They were both charismatic,” Gonzalo Jr. remembers. “My mom was always well-dressed.”
“And she'd put you in your place like that,” Sylvia added, laughing.
Together, Gonzalo and Felicitas opened their first restaurant in Santa Ana. In 1944, they leased a farm in nearby Westminster from the Minemitsu family, who under President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066, were interned until 1946.
Felicitas and Gonzalo were not the first parents who tried to fight segregation, but they were determined to be the last. They convinced fellow parents, William Guzman (who had hired an attorney to sue the Santa Ana School Board, Sylvia says), Frank Palomino, Thomas Estrada and Lorenzo Ramirez to join in a class action suit.
Sandra Robbie, producer of the Emmy-winning documentary, “Mendez vs. Westminster: Para Todos Los Ninos/For All the Children” explained the motives behind the Mendez family's decision to lead the charge.
“Mr. Mendez knew that [segregation] would relegate his children to a different place in life,” she says. “As a tenant farmer, he had the resources to fight the case.”
“My father was educated here and he knew about the constitution and he believed in it,” Sylvia says. “My parents only wanted what every parent wants for their kids; a good education.”
Gonzalo hired Attorney David C. Marcus and worked closely with him while Felicitas oversaw the farm and organized meetings with the local parents. In his filing with the Ninth Federal District Court, Marcus argued that California law, at the time, only allowed for the segregation of Native American and Asian students, not Mexicans or individuals of Latin descent.
Marcus further challenged that segregation based on any race was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The school districts, represented by county counsel, Joel Ogle, responded that the Mendez suit had no merit because federal courts had no jurisdiction over state law. In addition, they defended their policies claiming that they segregated Mexican students because they could not speak English and had special cultural, educational and hygienic needs.
However, on February 8, 1946, Federal Court Judge Paul J. McCormick issued an injunction ending the segregation of Mexican students in all four school districts.
Sylvia remembers that the Westminster School District complied, allowing her and her brother to transfer to 17th Street Elementary. However, Westminster and the other three districts filed an appeal with the United States Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. In the fall of 1946, the Mendez family moved back to Santa Ana when the Munemitsu family returned to their farm.
Even though they lived closer to the local Mexican school in Santa Ana, the family enrolled Sylvia and Gonzalo Jr. into the white school.
“My parents wanted to make a point,” Gonzalo Jr. says with a smile. “And [the teachers] treated us differently. They knew who we were and what our parents were doing.”
Sylvia remembers how excited she was to go to the beautiful school. “At Westminster, I was making friends and I thought everything would be the same in Santa Ana,” she says. “But during PE, a white boy came up to me and told me we didn't belong there. I started crying. I realized then what we were fighting for.”
Joining The Fight For Equality
After the school districts filed their appeal, Thurgood Marshall, an attorney for the NAACP who later argued for Brown v. Board of Education, co-wrote and filed an amicus curiae brief in support of the Mendez case.
“The NAACP had been arguing around the nation in circuit court cases like this where parents were fighting against segregation in their schools,” explained Dr. Bradley Scott of the Intercultural Development Research Association. “Mendez v. Westminster was clearly another plank in the argument that the NAACP would take to the Supreme Court.”
The Mendez case also received support by amicus curiae briefs from the ACLU, the American Jewish Congress, the California State Attorney General and the Japanese American Citizens League. On April 14, 1947, Justice Albert Lee Stephens of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld Judge McCormick's injunction.
The court, in a 7-0 decision, stated: “By enforcing the segregation of school children of Mexican descent against their will and contrary to the laws of California, the respondents have violated the federal law as provided in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution by depriving them of liberty and property without due process of law and by denying them the equal protection of the laws.”
California Governor Earl Warren lobbied the state legislature to enact legislation repealing the state's educational codes that allowed for segregation in public schools.
Warren signed the bill on June 14, 1947 and soon thereafter, school districts all over California began closing Mexican schools and integrating students. In 1953, Earl Warren was appointed Chief Justice by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. A year later, he was the Supreme Court Chief Justice who wrote the Brown v. Board of Education decision ending school segregation in the United States.
Para Todos Los Ninos
When the dust settled, Gonzalo and Felicitas went back to their normal lives. Neither Sylvia nor Gonzalo Jr. remembers their parents talking about the case. Even though the case had seeded the argument and decision in Brown v. Board of Education, and directly involved Thurgood Marshall and Chief Justice Earl Warren, it fell into obscurity.
Then nearly 20 years later, Sylvia's youngest sister called home from her dorm at the University of California at Riverside.
“She sees her parents' names in a history book about Chicanos,” Sylvia says. “She called home and after she asked my mom about it, mom says, ‘We did it so Latinos could go to college.'”
Professor Gonzalez had the same experience as Sylvia's sister, when in the 1970's as a Masters student at UCLA; he heard firsthand accounts of the long-forgotten Mexican labor protests in the 1930's.
“I came from a generation that really began to write about the history of Mexicans,” Professor Gonzalez says. “We were discovering things as we went along and the people who read our work was very limited.”
After Gonzalo Sr. died in 1964 at the age of 51, Felicitas made Sylvia promise to tell the story of the family's role in the civil rights history of this country.
“My education allowed me to become a nursing director, which then gave me a fabulous retirement that allows me to do all of this,” Sylvia says.
In 1998, the Santa Ana Unified School District Board of Education decided to name a new school, The Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez Fundamental Intermediate School. At the age of 81, Felicitas died on April 12, 1998, knowing that she and her husband were finally receiving their due. The school officially opened in 2001 and in 2007, the U.S. Postal Service unveiled a stamp commemorating the 50th anniversary of the case.
However, that was not enough. Sylvia, determined to ensure that no one forgot about the Mendez v. Westminster case, began her campaign to include it in the California state curriculum.
“When I'm talking to Latino students, they know that they have heroes,” she says. “They can be proud that Latinos fought, too.”
In 2007, California State Assembly Member Mary Salas introduced AB 531 to make the Mendez case part of the history and social science curriculum for fourth and eleventh (or twelfth) grade students in the state of California.
“This history has to be on the books,” says Sandra. “It makes me proud that my state led the nation in ending segregation. There is no way Mendez is going back in the vault.”