{"id":13946,"date":"2016-08-28T17:07:00","date_gmt":"2016-08-28T17:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/?p=13946"},"modified":"2023-08-28T17:19:24","modified_gmt":"2023-08-28T17:19:24","slug":"how-mexican-immigrants-ended-separate-but-equal-in-california","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/?p=13946","title":{"rendered":"How Mexican immigrants ended \u2018separate but equal\u2019 in California"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Philippa Strum <\/strong><\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Sylvia Mendez was born in Santa Ana, California in 1936. As a young child, Ms. Mendez was the child at the center of the landmark 1947 case, Mendez vs. Westminster,<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In the coverage of the 2016 election cycle, you\u2019ll hear this time and again: Latinos \u2014 immigrants and their families \u2014 are playing an important role in electing the next U.S. president. They are the largest minority group in the nation, and they are poised to make a major impact on American democracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It won\u2019t be the first time. Seventy years ago, Mexican immigrants moved American civil rights forward, away from racial segregation toward integration and equality. It happened eight years before the Supreme Court began to dismantle segregation by handing down its decision in Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1943, five Mexican American families took four school districts in Orange County to court, challenging the \u201cseparate but equal\u201d education their American-born children were getting in \u201cMexican schools.\u201d They knew their kids were treated as second-class citizens: taught by underpaid teachers, forced to use books and desks discarded by Anglo students, relegated to shoddy school buildings where the classrooms had so little light that reading was almost impossible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The lack of resources, however, wasn\u2019t what the plaintiffs in the case, Mendez et al vs. Westminster et al, complained about to the courts. Instead, they mounted a frontal attack on segregated schools, even though to many other enemies of segregation, the time wasn\u2019t right. Thurgood Marshall, founder of the NAACP\u2019s Legal Defense Fund, was convinced that federal courts weren\u2019t ready to strike down segregation. Instead of asking them to do so, the NAACP had adopted a tactic of bringing case after case designed to force Southern states to make separate schools truly equal. The goal was to make \u201cseparate but equal\u201d so expensive that the states would give it up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But in California, the Mexican American families and their attorney David Marcus told the courts that equal facilities would not satisfy them. It was segregation itself that was unconstitutional, they said. Separating Mexican American children from their Anglo peers did them \u201cgreat and irreparable\u201d harm, by making them feel so inferior that their ability to learn was affected. The Constitution\u2019s 14th Amendment guarantees equal treatment under the law. Segregation violated that mandate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Orange County school systems replied that they were treating the Mexican American children equally by providing an education particularly suitable for them. At trial, they produced experts who testified that the children could not speak English, though no one had given them language tests. The children\u2019s hands and faces, said the school districts\u2019 witnesses, were \u201cgenerally dirty,\u201d they lacked proper clothing and \u201ccleanliness\u201d of body and mind, they had no manners, and they were \u201cretarded\u201d in their ability to learn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Federal District Court Judge Paul J. McCormick, who presided over the case, rejected the schools\u2019 case. Segregating children because they were Mexican American, he held in February 1946, violated the Constitution by suggesting \u201cinferiority\u201d among the children \u201cwhere none exists.\u201d It was exactly the same assertion that the NAACP would later adopt in its argument in Brown vs. Board, telling the courts that forcing minority children into separate schools sent the message that they were not as good as others. Low expectations led to low levels of learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA paramount requisite in the American system of public education is social equality,\u201d McCormick wrote. Public schools \u201cmust be open to all children by unified school association regardless of lineage.\u201d In other words, \u201cseparate but equal\u201d was not equal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The decision was the first by a federal court asserting that separate but equal was unconstitutional. Opponents of segregation including the American Jewish Congress, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Japanese-American Citizens League rushed into the case when the Orange County school districts appealed McCormick\u2019s decision. So did the NAACP; the brief it filed in Mendez became its practice brief for Brown vs. Board.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Sacramento, Gov. Earl Warren read about the case and decided the time had come to end all segregated education in the state. A California statute specifically permitted segregation of Asian American and Native American children, and Warren and state legislators mounted a successful effort to repeal the law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Warren was named chief justice of the United States in 1953. When he wrote the Supreme Court\u2019s unanimous decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, his reasoning paralleled McCormick\u2019s in Mendez vs. Westminster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1947, when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld McCormick\u2019s decision, Westminster and the other school districts in Orange County quickly began to integrate their classrooms, and so did other school districts in California and all over the Southwest. Federally mandated school integration had come to the United States, and it was Mexican immigrants who made it happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Philippa Strum, a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, is also professor emerita at the City University of New York and author of \u201cMendez v. Westminster: School Desegregation and Mexican-American Rights.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Philippa Strum In the coverage of the 2016 election cycle, you’ll hear this time and again: Latinos — immigrants and their families — are playing an important role in electing the next U.S. president. They […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13947,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-13946","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-california","8":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13946"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13946\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13949,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13946\/revisions\/13949"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}