Future teachers, educators and civil leaders gathered on a gloomy Tuesday afternoon, at the Mendez Tribute Monument Park in Westminster, to remember the landmark Orange County case that ended segregated education in California.
At the park, teaching candidates from Costa Mesa’s Vanguard University met with civil rights activist Sylvia Mendez, whose parents were among several Mexican American families who successfully challenged segregation in California schools in the 1940s — years before Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that would declare segregation unconstitutional.
“I remember we lived in a white neighborhood, so when the bus dropped us off, all of my friends were allowed to go to the school with the beautiful playground,” Mendez, who grew up in the area, shared at the event. “I wasn’t allowed to go to that school. I had to go to my dreadful school.”
In 1943, Mendez and her siblings were denied entrance to Westminster’s Seventeenth Street School because of their Mexican heritage. Mendez was 9 years old. She and other Latino students were told to attend “a nearby Mexican school” and forced to walk a half mile further to get to Hoover Elementary, the area’s segregated school.
Mendez’s parents and four other Mexican American families soon took their stories to California courts, filing a class action lawsuit (Mendez v. Westminster) against four different OC school districts — Santa Ana, Garden Grove, and what was then known as El Modena in East Orange — in 1947. Their successful case led to segregated schools being repealed in California, and built much of the groundwork to uphold Brown v. Board of Education, experts said.
At Tuesday’s event, Vanguard teaching candidates got to walk the same path, along Hoover St., that Mendez and her classmates took.
Today, the Mendez Tribute Monument Park, on the corner of Westminster Blvd. and Olive St., pays homage to the landmark case and the Mendez family’s…
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