Sandra Robbie has posted her first video about the Mendez family on YouTube. The video depicts college students who are given a quiz about civil rights – and are surprised by the answers.
Robbie is the writer/producer of the Emmy-winning documentary “Mendez v. Westminster: For All the Children / Para Todos los Ninos.” She launched the MvW Magical History Tour in Spring 2007 driving a 1967 VW bus across the country doing Mendez presentations.
She recently founded the nonprofit Mendez America Project with the purpose of preserving and promoting Mendez v.Westminster and continuing its civil rights legacy in our country and communities by working for educational equity and multicultural understanding. Judge Rick Aguirre and Russ Barrios are the founding members of this organization. They are looking for board members and folks who want to join the group. You can email Robbie if you are interested in joining.
For those of you who don’t know about the Mendez family’s contributions to civil rights, here in Orange County and throughout California and the U.S., here is a quick primer, from Wikipedia:
Sylvia Mendez (born 1936) is an American civil rights activist of Mexican-Puerto Rican heritage. At age eight, she played an instrumental role in the Mendez v. Westminster case, the landmark desegregation case of 1946. The case successfully ended de jure segregation in California and set a precedent for the better-known Brown v. Board of Education seven years later; and paved the way for integration and the American civil rights movement.
Mendez grew up during a time when most southern and southwestern schools were segregated. In the case of California, Hispanics were not allowed to attend schools that were designated for “Whites” only and were sent to the so-called “Mexican schools.” Mendez was denied enrollment to a “Whites” only school, an event which prompted her parents to take action which would eventually bring to an end the era of segregated education.
Mendez was born in 1936 in Santa Ana, California. Her parents were Gonzalo Mendez, an immigrant from Mexico who had a successful agricultural business, and Felicitas Mendez, a native of Puerto Rico. The family had just moved from Santa Ana to Westminster to tend a farm that they were renting from the Munemitsus, a Japanese-American family that had been sent to an internment camp during World War II. This took place during a period in history when racial discrimination against Hispanics, and minorities in general, was widespread throughout the United States.
In the 1940s, there were only two schools in Westminster: Hoover Elementary and 17th Street Elementary. Orange County schools were segregated and the Westminster school district was no exception. The district mandated separate campuses for Hispanics and Whites. Sylvia and her two brothers, Gonzalo Jr. and Jerome Mendez, attended Hoover Elementary, a two-room wooden shack in the middle of the city’s Mexican neighborhood, along with the other Hispanics. 17th Street Elementary, which was a “Whites-only” segregated school, was located about a mile away. Unlike Hoover, the 17th Street Elementary school was amongst a row of palm and pine trees and had a lawn lining the school’s brick and concrete facade.
Realizing that the 17th Street Elementary school provided better books and educational benefits, Gonzalo decided that he would like to have his children and nephews enrolled in there. Thus, in 1943, when Sylvia Mendez was only eight years old, she accompanied her aunt Sally Vidaurri, her brothers and cousins to enroll at the 17th Street Elementary School. Her aunt was told by school officials, that her children, who had light skin would be permitted to enroll, but that neither Sylvia Mendez nor her brothers would be allowed because they were dark-skinned and had a Hispanic surname. Mrs. Vidaurri stormed out of the school with her children, niece and nephews and recounted her experience to her brother Gonzalo.
Mendez’s father Gonzalo and his wife Felicitas took on themselves the task of leading a community battle that changed California and set an important legal precedent for ending segregation in the United States. Felicitas attended the family’s agricultural business, giving Gonzalo the much needed time to meet with community leaders to discuss the injustices of the segregated school system and to talk to other parents with the intention of recruiting families from the four Orange County communities to join in a lawsuit. Initially, Gonzalo received little support from the local Latino organizations, but finally, on March 2, 1945, he and four other Mexican-American fathers from the Gomez, Palomino, Estrada, and Ramirez families filed a lawsuit in federal court in Los Angeles against four Orange County school districts
Impressive achievement for the individuals concerned. Long-term effect best exemplified by the SAUSD, where fundamental schools represent a wonderful rainbow of success, while the 95% Latino schools, like Willard and all the other losers, lag far behind. So their class sizes are larger, facilities are wretched and the parents can’t help w/homework in a language they don’t understand. But it’s not explicitly racist, ummkay?