Ahead of the Curve on Integration

In 1951, when Oliver Brown filed suit against the Topeka Board of Education, he had one goal: that his 8-year-old daughter, Linda Carol, be allowed to attend school near her home. But the ruling ultimately issued by the U.S. Supreme Court 50 years ago this week changed the nation, marking a decisive turn away from racial discrimination.

The effect of the case on civil rights was profound. Nine white men of varied backgrounds and impeccable intellects proclaimed that segregation, at least in public schools, was wrong, that it hurt children, that it must end. The decision, Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1956, “came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of human captivity. It came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of colored people throughout the world.” And for the nation’s new chief justice -- Earl Warren had only joined the court in October 1953 and had not been confirmed until March 1954 -- it was a political and personal triumph as well.

Warren inherited a badly divided court from a failed predecessor but within a year had delivered a unanimous ruling on one of the most divisive issues in America. He did so despite a conspicuous lack of support from the president who appointed him, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Indeed, during the period when Warren and his brethren were considering Brown vs. Board of Education, Eisenhower invited Warren to join him at dinner with a number of guests, including John Davis, one of the lawyers for the Southern states in the Brown case. Taking the chief justice by the arm as the two stood up from the table, the president motioned to the others in the room and whispered into Warren’s ear: “These are not bad people. All they are concerned about is that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school beside some big, overgrown Negroes.” With that comment, Eisenhower earned Warren’s undying contempt.

The chief justice needed no lecture on discrimination. A veteran of California’s vicious racial politics, Warren had aggressively supported the internment of Japanese civilians during World War II. And yet, just as that war ended, Warren learned that when barriers fell, everyone benefited.

So bright is the glow surrounding Brown and so vivid is its history that it is sometimes difficult to recall the important legal rulings that preceded it. But one California case in particular, decided while Warren was governor, is worth noting as the nation reflects on its long, still-unfinished journey from racism toward equality. Mendez vs. Westminster foreshadowed Brown, invoking some of the same principals that would guide the court in 1954. Moreover, it brought together two of the key actors who would deliver that profoundly important American moment.

The Mendez case arose not from the legacy of slavery in the Jim Crow South but from the fruit groves and newly created suburbs of Orange County. It addressed the fates of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans in the blander but no less pernicious racism of California. And though its initial chapters were written in community meetings and the federal courts, its final pages were set down not by a stubborn, recalcitrant Southern Democrat in Little Rock but by a progressive California Republican in Sacramento.

In 1944, Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez sought to enroll their daughter, Sylvia, in the local public school near their home in Westminster. There were two elementary schools run by Westminster in those days. The Westminster School had 642 students, of whom 628 were Anglo or, in the parlance of those days, “English-speaking” -- though the language test was a shallow pretense for discrimination, since fluent English speakers of Mexican heritage rarely escaped from the “Mexican” schools. The Hoover School had 152 students, all of Latino descent. Sylvia’s cousin, fairer skinned than her and blessed with an Anglicized last name, was allowed to attend Westminster. Sylvia was ordered to go to Hoover.

Gonzalo Mendez refused, instead becoming the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit with four other fathers of Mexican American children as co-plaintiffs. Their action targeted the school districts of Westminister, Garden Grove, El Modeno (now eastern Orange) and Santa Ana -- all of which operated separate schools for “Mexican” children.

In the midst of a war against the racist tyrannies of fascism, the moral high ground was held by Mendez and the other fathers. The law was less clear. Separate-but-equal remained an accepted legal standard for public schools in America in 1945, having been legitimized by the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896. But Mendez and the state of California were fortunate to have the case assigned to a brave activist federal court judge, Paul J. McCormick.

On Feb. 18, 1946, McCormick dismissed the notion that the children were segregated because of their language skills as a fraud intended to justify the “general and continuous segregation in separate schools of the children of Mexican ancestry.” He found that segregation caused “Mexican” children to feel inferior to whites and promoted ill will between children of different races. And despite a footnoted, pained acknowledgment that the U.S. Supreme Court had sanctioned “separate-but-equal” schools, McCormick ruled for the plaintiffs and ordered the districts to integrate.

“A paramount requisite in the American system of public education is social equality,” McCormick wrote. “It must be open to all children by unified school association regardless of lineage.” The school districts resisted, appealing to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. MS

The appeal drew national attention to the lawsuit, and liberal organizations joined with the plaintiffs to urge desegregation.

One of those organizations was the NAACP, whose legal director, Thurgood Marshall, would argue Brown before the U.S. Supreme Court nearly a decade later. In the Mendez case, the 9th Circuit narrowed McCormick’s legal argument but sustained his ruling. For the first time, Western states were under orders to halt the illegal segregation of “Mexican” children, seven years before the Supreme Court would take up that issue for black children and resolve it for the nation.

With that, Orange County gave up its legal defense and embarked on a series of reforms to unite its Anglo and Latino students into single schools. A decades-old bastion of California racism fell -- and to wide acclaim. Sylvia Mendez was allowed to enroll in her neighborhood school. Thousands of others followed.

The rulings left, however, two sections of the state education code that specifically authorized segregation. Under Sections 8003 and 8004 of the code, districts were permitted to create separate schools for “Indian children and children of Chinese, Japanese or Mongolian parentage.” Neither McCormick’s original decision nor the 9th Circuit ruling upholding it struck down those provisions. So even after Mendez, it was legal in California for districts to segregate some students.

Legal, at least, until June 1947. That’s when California’s progressive Republican governor signed a law striking down those two artifacts of the state’s regressive past. Six years and eleven months before the Warren court ended separate-but-equal for America, Gov. Warren on that late spring day in 1947 ended it for California.