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Mendez v. Westminster School District, 64 F.Supp. 544 (C.D. Cal. 1946), aff'd, 161 F.2d 774 (9th Cir. 1947) (en banc), was a 1946 federal court case that challenged racial segregation in Orange County, California schools. In its ruling, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in an en banc decision, held that the segregation of Mexican and Mexican American students into separate "Mexican schools" was unconstitutional.

Background

On March 2, 1945, five Mexican-American fathers (Thomas Estrada, William Guzman, Gonzalo Mendez, Frank Palomino, and Lorenzo Ramirez) challenged the practice of school segregation in the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. They claimed that their children, along with 5,000 other children of "Mexican" ancestry, were victims of unconstitutional discrimination by being forced to attend separate "schools for Mexicans" in the Westminster, Garden Grove, Santa Ana, and El Modena school districts of Orange County.

Senior District Judge Paul J. McCormick, sitting in Los Angeles, presided at the trial and ruled in favor of Mendez and his co-plaintiffs on February 18, 1946, finding segregated schools to be an unconstitutional denial of equal protection. The school district appealed to the Ninth Federal District Court of Appeals in San Francisco, which upheld Judge McCormick's decision, finding that the segregation practices violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Governor Earl Warren, who would later become Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court and preside over Brown vs. Board of Education, signed into law the repeal of remaining segregationist provisions in the California statutes. Several organizations joined the appellate case as amicus curiae, including the NAACP, represented by Thurgood Marshall and Robert L. Carter. More than a year later, on April 14, 1947, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court's ruling, but not on equal protection grounds. Although it did not challenge the "separate but equal" interpretation of the 14th Amendment announced by the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.

The appellate ruling

The Ninth Circuit ruled only on the narrow grounds that, although California law provided for segregation of students, it only did so for "children of Chinese, Japanese or Mongolian parentage". And because "California law does not include the segregation of school children because of their Mexican blood," therefore it was unlawful to segregate the Mexican children.

Presumably, a similar lawsuit filed by "Chinese, Japanese or Mongolian" children in segregated schools would have had the opposite result. This was remedied in California later that same year, on June 14, 1947, when California Governor Earl Warren signed a law repealing the remaining school segregation statutes in the California Education Code.

Seven years later, in Brown v. Board of Education, Earl Warren, who later became a Chief Justice of the United States, wrote the unanimous decision holding "separate but equal" schools to be unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.

See also

• Sylvia Mendez
• Gebhart v. Belton
• Tape v. Hurley
• Brown v. Board of Education
• Plessy v. Ferguson
• Parents v. Seattle

Sources

1. The reported opinions of Judge McCormick and the Ninth Circuit, Mendez v. Westminster, 64 F.Supp. 544 (C.D. Cal. 1946), aff'd, 161 F.2d 774 (9th Cir. 1947) (en banc).
2. “All Deliberate Speed” UC Press (1976), Charles Wollenberg. Each chapter provides a detailed history of the various non-white ethnic groups and their educational struggles in California.
3. “Knocking on the Schoolhouse Door” 8 La Raza Law Journal 166 (1995), Christopher Arriola. A look at one town involved in the lawsuit, El Modena, and an examination of the appellate briefs used in the case.
4. “Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation” UCI Press, (1992) Gilbert Gonzalez. A sociological history of Mexican School Segregation in the Southwest.
5. “The Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans” Princeton University Press (2004) Stephen J. Pitti. A look at the history of Chicanos in San Jose, CA.
6. “The Barrios of Santa Ana” Dissertation published by the University of Michigan Press (1985), Mary Lisbeth Haas. A complete history of the Mexican Community in Santa Ana, CA, up to 1948.
7. “Chicanos in California” Materials for Today’s Learning (1990), Albert Camarillo. A short, concise history of Chicanos in California.
8. David S. Ettinger, The History of School Desegregation in the Ninth Circuit, 12 Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 481, 484-487 (1979)
9. "The Mexican American Struggle for Equal Educational Opportunity in Mendez v. Westminster: Helping to Pave the Way for Brown v. The Board of Education". Richard Valencia, Teacher's College Record, Vol. 107, Number 3, March 2005, p 389.

References

External links

• "District court ruling". http://w3.uchastings.edu/wingate/Mendez%20v.htm. Retrieved 2006-09-11.  
• "Ninth Circuit opinion (PDF)". http://tcla.gseis.ucla.edu/equalterms/history/pdf/mendez.pdf. Retrieved 2006-09-11.