In the Fall of 1944, Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez tried to enroll their children in the Main Street School in Orange County, California. However, the school district had drawn boundary lines that excluded Mexican neighborhoods. The Mendez children were assigned to Hoover Elementary School, which was established for Mexican children.
Other Orange County Latino parents faced similar situations with their children. With the help of the United Latin American Citizens (LUCAC), they joined with the Mendez family and sued four local school districts – Westminster, Garden Grove, and El Modeno School Districts and the City of Santa Ana – for segregating their children and 5,000 others. The landmark case came to be known as
Mendez v. Westminster School District.
This document includes part of the testimony that Gonzalo Mendez gave during the trial while being examined by the attorney for the plaitiffs (the parents), David Marcus. In these pages Mendez describes a conversation he and other parents had with Westminster School District Superintendent Richard Harris. Mendez reported that he told Harris that they lived in houses that Japanese people had lived in (before they were forcibly removed to internment camps) and that the Japanese children had been allowed to attend the school. He also related that Harris had said that "the Mexican people...could not...compete in cleanliness with the American or the Anglo-Saxon people." Mendez's testimony was
continued the following day.
Ultimately, U.S. District Court Judge Paul J. McCormick
concurred with the petitioners, issuing an injunction against the school districts' segregation policies. He stated that there was no justification in the laws of California to segregate Mexican children and that doing so was a "clear denial of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment."
The school districts filed an appeal, partly on the basis of a states' rights strategy. The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court upheld the District Court ruling in 1947, and the Orange County school districts dropped the case.
Select pages of this trial transcript are shown here. See the
entire document in the National Archives online catalog.
This primary source comes from the Records of District Courts of the United States.
National Archives Identifier:
6277737Full Citation: Trial Transcript; 7/9/1945; 4292; Gonzalo Mendez et al v. Westminster School District of Orange County et al, 3/2/1945 - 7/18/1947; Civil Case Files, 1938 - 1995; Records of District Courts of the United States, Record Group 21; National Archives at Riverside, Perris, CA. [Online Version, https://docsteach.org/documents/document/testimony-gonzalo-mendez, May 14, 2024]