Mendez case "was NOT based on racial equality"

School desegregation brings to mind famous photos of African-American children integrating classrooms after the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. But over seven years earlier, five Latino families fought and won a case that helped integrate schools in California. On its 70th anniversary we look back at the mostly forgotten Mendez v. Westminster case.

When attorney David Marcus filed the lawsuit in 1945, his case was not based on racial equality. At that time, the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson ruling allowed for the separation of races as long as there were equal facilities, so the courts were rejecting the argument that segregation based on race was unconstitutional. For Marcus, the key would be to prove not that segregation was wrong, but that Latino students were white and being discriminated against.

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On Feb. 18, 1946, U.S. District Judge Paul McCormick of Los Angeles ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. “A paramount requisite in the American system of public education is social equality. It must be open to all children by unified school association regardless of lineage,” he wrote. This rejection of the idea that schools could be “separate but equal” stirred excitement among civil rights groups, who thought Mendez v. Westminster might be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where a victory could be used to integrate schools across the country.

In the end, an appellate court narrowed Judge McCormick’s decision to apply solely to Latino students in the specific districts listed in the lawsuit. The case fell into obscurity and the civil rights spotlight focused on racial integration.

 

Kelly, Brigid. (2016, Feb. 22). 70 years ago, California ended a type of segregation. KCRW. 

"No question of race discrimination"

  "Mendez et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County, 64 F. Supp. 544 (1946), Conclusions of the Court"

Race not at issue in Mendez

Méndez, along with four other parents, decided to hire David Marcus to represent them in their suit on behalf of “some 5,000 other persons of Mexican and Latin descent and extraction”against four Orange County school districts. In California, Section 8003 of the Education read, “the governing board of any school district may establish separate schools for Indian children…and for children of Chinese, Japanese, or Mongolian parentage.” Because Mexicans were not one of the groups that the law permitted to be segregated, the school district’s attorney argued that the segregation was not based on race.

Mexicans, after all, were legally Anglo. Instead, the segregation was a result of Mexican children’s lack of English-proficiency. David Marcus, attorney for the Méndezes, also argued, “race discrimination” was not the issue at hand “since persons of Latin and Mexican extraction are members of the ‘white’ race.” If Mexican children were white, it was illegal to segregate them from other white children. Marcus had to prove, then, that language proficiency was not being tested equally and that many of the Mexican students unfairly segregated were actually fluent English speakers. Judge McCormick agreed, and on February 18, 1946 he ruled in favor of the Méndezes because the school district had failed to prove they were testing for English proficiency in ways that did not specifically target Mexican students.

The school district appealed the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Marcus again emphasized the whiteness of Mexicans so the court did not have to confront Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal doctrine.” Because, as Marcus argued, the case was not about racial segregation, the court could uphold that the segregation of Mexican children was unconstitutional because they were Anglo, while preserving the legality of racial segregation.

 

 Cecilia Márquez, “The Strange Career of Juan Crow: Latino/as and the Making of the US South, 1940–2000,” PhD thesis, University of Virginia (2016) 

"There is no connection!"

 

A year after Sweatt v. Painter, the U.S District Court for the District of Kansas heard Oliver Brown's suit against the Topeka School District for refusing to allow his third-grade daughter, Linda, to attend the white elementary school, which was nearer to her house than the segregated grade school on the other side of a railroad switchyard.

When Wirin suggested in 1953 that the Mendez and Delgado segregation cases in California and Texas would likely influence the outcome of the Brown cases, [George] Sanchez exclaimed: "There is no connection!" Our cases really were on the "due process' clause[that segregation was] ('arbitrary, capricious') much more than on the equality...clause - whereas the present [Brown] cases attack the right of the states to legislate segregation (something which has never been done for Mexicans). "Does one of the present cases attack Negro segregation where there is no law decreeing such segregation? Only in such a case would we be concerned."

For Sanchez the overriding issue was not the constitutional right of states to legislate segregation, but rather the illegality of segregating Mexicans from other whites in the absence of state law. While Thurgood Marshall sought to overturn a half-century-old Supreme Court decision, Sanchez challenged local school districts that arbitrarily segregated Mexicans for their alleged language handicap.

Foley, N., 2010. Quest for equality. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.