Westminster v. Mendez (1947): The Most Consequential Civil Rights Case You've Never Heard Of

Racial segregation in public schools was not restricted to the South. Since 1896, the Plessy v. Ferguson separate-but-equal doctrine was practiced nationwide, including in California. Until the 1940s, there were laws on the books in California that allowed for the segregation of Asian Americans and Native Americans from Anglo (White) Americans. However, there was no law permitting the segregation of Mexican Americans. But that didn’t stop the Westminster, California, school board from building separate schools for Mexican-American students, schools that, as you will hear, were far from equal. 

But in 1944, Sylvia Mendez, an 8-year-old Mexican-American student, along with her family and many other families, started a movement that culminated in a successful lawsuit against the Westminster Board of Education. They won their case in the federal district court in Los Angeles in 1945, then won again in 1947 in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, after the school district appealed that loss. Had the school board appealed their loss, the case would have likely ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court. But no appeal was filed. That’s one reason why people across the country can tell you all about Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, but little or nothing about Westminster v. Mendez in 1947. 

Nonetheless, the case of Sylvia and her family took to court in the mid 1940s was a necessary step in the struggle to end segregation in the U.S. public schools once and for all. Listen as we tell the story of this famous case from California. And, in our last installment of Name That Term, we discuss the difference between bilingualism and diglossia.