Case Summary

In 1946, LULAC helped sue California over its longstanding policy of segregating Latino children into separate schools. LULAC’s victory in Mendez forced California to integrate its public schools, securing equal educational opportunity for California’s Latino population and laying the groundwork for Brown v. Board.

“In Mendez, we struck a crucial blow against school segregation in California and across America,” reflected Roman Palomares, current LULAC National President. “Mendez reflects LULAC’s commitments to education, justice, and equal rights—battles that we fought in the ’forties and are still fighting today.”

LULAC brought Mendez in a challenging time for supporters of civil rights. In 1946, segregation was legal and practiced across America: most states segregated their schools, and the Supreme Court had explicitly held segregation was constitutional in Plessey v. Ferguson. California had discriminated against Mexican American children in its public school system for a century.

In 1946, California refused to allow Sylvia Mendez to attend the public school nearest her family’s farm because Sylvia was Mexican American. Her family reached out to LULAC, which found some of America’s greatest litigators to represent her. She fought her case all the way to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where she won in a sweeping decision that prohibited all discrimination against Latino students in California schools.

One of the litigators working on Sylvia Mendez’s case was a young Thurgood Marshall. A little less than a decade later, Marshall built on the momentum from Mendez when he argued in front of the Supreme Court to secure a universal ban on school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education.

Legal Documents

08/01/1947 Opinion

Further Reading

The Bricks Before Brown by Marisela Martinez-Cola