Sent to the 'Mexican school' 75 years ago, Sylvia Mendez's fight for equality continues
LOS ANGELES — On a spring morning, Sylvia Mendez walked into an eighth grade history classroom in Santa Ana and began a talk she's given hundreds of times before. At 85 years old, she held steady with a cane.
Her voice was soft but her message strong.
"Never get distracted," she told the students in front of her. "You have to fight for what you want."
Seventy-five years ago this month, Mendez's parents and four other Orange County families won the landmark class-action court case Mendez, et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County, allowing her to leave the neglected "Mexican school" she was forced to attend and enroll in a whites-only school with a beautiful playground she still remembers with a smile.
The case helped lead to the desegregation of California schools and influenced the legal arguments that were used in Brown v. Board of Education seven years later, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared that separate schools based on race were unconstitutional.
The Brown decision is well known. Less well known is how segregationist policies.
