Mother Jones, May 17, 2019
In 1947, seven years before Brown v. Board of Education, a federal appeals court in California struck down segregated “Mexican schools” in Orange County. Mendez v. Westminster prefigured Brown; it was the first case to hold that segregation in schools was inherently unconstitutional. Not long after, then-Gov. Earl Warren signed a bill ending segregation in public schools across California, making it the first state to do so in the country. Warren would go on to become the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and his decision in Brown 65 years ago today followed the contours of the ruling in Mendez.
There was a lesson in this that was forgotten in Brown’s wake. The attack on separate-but-equal was an iterative process, with the struggle on behalf of Mexican students in Orange County inextricably joined to the struggle on behalf of black students in Topeka, Kansas.
Today, resegregation is well underway, and its effects are particularly acute among Latino students. Latinos are more segregated in schools in California than in any other state. Fifty-eight percent of Latino students in California—where the majority of students are Latino—go to intensely segregated schools in which more than 90 percent of their peers are nonwhite.