Sylvia Mendez and her Latino parents paved the way for desegregation in Mendez v Westminster but this Hispanic civil rights contribution is not largely known.
Mendez, now 85, was a third grader when she and her brothers were turned away from registering at the school in the neighborhood and told to go to the Mexican school. In response, her father, Gonzalo Mendez, recruited four other families to join him in fighting for their children’s right to a quality education.
“Back then, I didn’t really know what it was all about,” Mendez told NBC News. “To me, they were fighting so I could go to that nice, pretty school.”dragged on, Mendez said, the school district offered her parents a compromise: if they dropped their lawsuit, she and her brothers could attend the white school. But this deal was offered only to them and would leave the other Mexican American students stuck in the segregated schools. The Mendez family refused.
Two months after the Mendez appeal was over, California Gov. Earl Warren signed legislation to officially end desegregation in public schools.Thurgood Marshall submitted a brief in support of the Mexican families, on behalf of the NAACP. He later used the legal framework from Mendez to argue Brown v. Board of Education at the Supreme Court in 1954.
By then, the chief justice was Earl Warren, who sided with Marshall and wrote the majority opinion ending segregation in public schools. In a sense, the Mendez case
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