Mendez V Westminster Case Study

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In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s there were many issues that involved racial segregation with many different communities. A lot of people did not took a stand for these issues until they were addressed by other racial groups. Mendez vs Westminster and Brown vs The Board of Education, were related cases that had to take a stand to make a change. These two cases helped many people with different races to come together and be able to go to school even if a person was different than the rest. Mendez vs Westminster was a 1947 federal court case that challenged racial segregation in Orange County, California schools. The federal court in California ruled that segregation of school children was unconstitutional however, the case involved segregation …show more content…

As they were trying to enroll the children, the school denied them and told them that the kids had to be enrolled in a Mexican school. This is not the first time that many different families from different countries had to deal with this kind of situation. However, after seeing how they were being treated that is when the Mendez family and other parents decided to organize a protest and demand an investigation to end segregation. At first it was not enough to try to end segregation, but when Gustavo and Felicitas Mendez, along with the League of United Latin American Citizens, contacted other Mexican American parents that had already hired attorneys and decided to file a class action lawsuit. The case officially got intense when David Marcus, A Los Angeles attorney was able to argue that other public facilities desegregation cases in Southern California, was able to present them. In 1945, the Mendez and four other families filed Mendez v. Westminster in federal court. Although, the Mendez family did not argue that schools were unconstitutional, instead they …show more content…

Board of Education was a United States Supreme Court case in 1954 that the court declared state laws to establish separate public schools for black segregated public schools to be unconstitutional. Brown v. Board of Education was filed against the Topeka, Kansas school board by plaintiff Oliver Brown, parent of one of the children that access was denied to Topeka’s none colored schools. Brown claimed that Topeka 's racial segregation violated the Constitution 's Equal Protection Clause because, the city 's black and white schools were not equal to each other. However, the court dismissed and claimed and clarified that segregated public schools were "substantially" equal enough to be constitutional under the Plessy doctrine. After hearing what the court had said to Brown he decided to appeal the Supreme Court. When Chief Justice Earl Warren stepped in the court spoke in an unanimous decision written by Warren himself stating that, racial segregation of children in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that "no state shall make or enforce any law which shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Also congress noticed that the Amendment did not prohibit integration and that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees equal education to both black and white students. Since the supreme court noticed this issue they had to focus on racial equality and galvanized and developed civil

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