Mendez had united with other Hispanic parents in Orange County whose children had been denied entry to public schools, hired the Jewish American civil rights attorney David Marcus and sued in federal district court, leading to the Los Angeles hearing that morning in 1945.
A few days earlier, Marcus had questioned the superintendent of the Westminster school district. At first, the superintendent claimed the school district planned to merge the two schools, and the problem would be solved – it was just that it was too expensive to build a newer, bigger school at the moment, wartime and all. Marcus questioned the superintendent until it became clear that there was no actual merger in the works.
Next, the superintendent claimed the schools were separated based on English-language ability, which he determined by a brief conversation on the first day of school; there were neither written tests nor records kept on how the children’s English abilities were assessed. It was true, Marcus forced him to admit, that lessons at the Spanish-language school were “retarded” — that is, not as challenging as at the main school — but if a parent thought their child’s English was good enough for the main school, they were welcome to request a transfer, he claimed. It just so happened that all such requests, like Sylvia’s, had been rejected.
Other superintendents named in the lawsuit were less subtle. One testified that regardless of English-language proficiency, Hispanic children had to be segregated because they needed additional instructions on hygiene, that they carried “lice, impetigo, tuberculosis,” and they had “generally dirty hands, face, neck, ears.” He called bilingualism a “handicap,” and said Hispanic people had inferior “ability” and “economic outlook.”
The judge didn’t buy any of those arguments, ruling in 1946 for Mendez and the plaintiffs on 14th Amendment equal-protection grounds. “Segregation prevalent in the defendant school districts foster [sic] antagonisms in the children and suggest inferiority among them where none exists,” Judge Paul McCormick wrote. “The equal protection of the laws pertaining to the public school system in California is not provided by furnishing in separate schools the same technical facilities, textbooks, and courses of instruction to children of Mexican ancestry that are available to other public-school children regardless of their ancestry.”
The school districts appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, catching the attention of civil rights groups nationwide. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a brief in support of Mendez, as did the American Jewish Congress and the Japanese American Citizens League. Another brief from the NAACP previewed arguments it would use a few years later in Brown v. Board of Education. The brief was written by Thurgood Marshall, the lawyer who would defend the Brown family before the Supreme Court.
In 1947, the 9th Circuit upheld the lower court’s decision, forcing the desegregation of White and Hispanic students in Orange County schools. In January 1948, Sylvia Mendez, now 11, and her siblings were finally allowed to enroll in the main school.