Mendez v. Westminster
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Mendez v. Westminster was a 1945 California Supreme Court case that challenged racial segregation in California schools. It its ruling, the court decided that the segregation of Mexican and Mexican American students into separate "Mexican schools" was unconstitutional.
Background
On March 2, 1945, five Mexican-American fathers (Gonzalo Mendez, Thomas Estrada, William Guzman, Frank Palomino, and Lorenzo Ramirez) challenged the practice of school segregation in the Ninth Federal District Court in Los Angeles. They claimed that their children, along with 5,000 other children of "Mexican and Latin descent", were victims of unconstitutional discrimination by being forced to attend separate "Mexican" schools in the Westminster, Garden Grove, Santa Ana, and El Modeno school districts of Orange County.Judge Paul J. McCormick ruled in favor of Mendez and his co-plaintiffs on February 18, 1946. However, the district appealed, and more than a year later, on April 14, 1947, McCormick's ruling was upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal in San Francisco.
On June 14 of the same year, California Governor Earl Warren signed into law a repeal of the last remaining school segregation statutes in the California Education Code. Thus ended "separate but equal" in California schools, and with it de jure school segregation. The case preceded a similar ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States in the case Brown v. Board of Education by seven years.
Sources
- Wollenberg, Charles. All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. Chapter 5, "The Decline and Fall of Separate But Equal." Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976
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