On April 14, 1947, seven years before the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education that officially ended segregation in schools, a federal court in Orange County California ruled in favor of Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez, whose Mexican-Puerto Rican children were denied entry to 17th Street Elementary. The family was told to enroll the Mendez children at Hoover Elementary School, which was specifically for Mexican Americans. After unsuccessful appeals to the principal and the county school board, Gonzalo Mendez decided to take legal action with four other Hispanic families whose children had been forced to attend segregated schools. 

Civil rights attorney David Marcus filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of the families against Westminster School District and three other school districts in Orange County. Marcus argued that segregating children based on ethnicity was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. He also stated that segregating the children was detrimental because it interfered with their ability to learn English and made them feel inferior. The defense countered that the segregation was based on the fact that Hispanic students were deficient in the English language and thus needed special instruction.

In early 1946, a federal judge ruled in favor of Mendez and ordered the four school boards to stop segregating Hispanic children. The next year, an appeals court upheld the decision, and a few months later the state of California outlawed all segregation in its public schools.

Mendez v. Westminster paved the way for the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education. Thurgood Marshall, who represented the plaintiffs, used David Marcus’s equal protection argument to successfully argue that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.

After the Mendez court case, Sylvia Mendez—the oldest of the three Mendez children—attended the desegregated 17th Street Elementary. Years later, she earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing and a public health certificate from California State University at Los Angeles. She subsequently worked at the Los Angeles County University of Southern California Medical Center for more than 30 years. After retiring from nursing, Mendez was active in teaching others about her legal case. In 2011, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her civil rights work.

Read more about Sylvia Mendez and Mendez v. Westminster.