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In keeping with the subject of the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, May 17, 2014 marks the 60th anniversary of the issuance of the decision on Brown v. Board of Education. Brown is a landmark case in which the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously found that, contrary to the legal doctrine of separate but equal, “separate education facilities are inherently unequal” and ended segregation in the United States. While most people educated in the United States are familiar with Brown, I would like to bring your attention to more arcane cases, with arguably equal significance.
As I wrote about earlier in the blog, the case Hernández v. Texas was decided just two weeks prior to Brown; but there is another little-known case that was instrumental for the American civil rights movement: Méndez v. Westminster. While many scholars of educational desegregation assure us that the beginning of the end of the “separate but equal” doctrine was set underway with Brown v. Board of Education. It could be argued that the beginning of that end may actually date back seven years prior, Méndez v. Westminster, which ended the almost 100 years of segregation that had remained a practice since the end of the U.S.-Mexico War of 1848 and the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The end of the U.S.-Mexico War gave rise to “anti-immigrant sentiments [that] resulted in increased measures to segregate Mexican-Americans from so-called ‘white’ public institutions such as swimming pools, parks, schools, and eating establishments.”
Méndez v. Westminster School District of Orange County was a federal court case that challenged racial segregation in the education system of Orange County, California. Five Mexican-American fathers—Thomas Estrada, William Guzmán, Gonzalo Méndez, Frank Palomino, and Lorenzo Ramírez—set out to challenge the practice of school segregation in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. Their claim was that their children and some 5,000 others of Mexican ancestry, had fallen victim to unconstitutional discriminatory practices by being forced to attend separate schools that had been designated “schools for Mexicans” in the school districts of El Modena, Garden Grove, Santa Ana, and Westminster—all of which were in Orange County. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the segregation of Mexican and Mexican-American students, by relegating them to “Mexican Schools,” was unconstitutional.
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I hope this helped!