CELEBRATE! : Orange County’s First 100 Years : COMING OF AGE : ‘A PERSON GETS TIRED OF BEING PUSHED AROUND’

Eight years before the U.S. Supreme Court called for the end of racial segregation in schools nationwide, a U. S. District judge ruled that four Orange County school districts were wrong in forcing Latino children to attend schools in facilities separate from their Anglo peers. It was the first time a federal judge had denounced such segregation; the decision was seen as one that would change education in the entire country.

On the first day of school in the fall of 1944, Soledad Vidaurri took her two children and her brother’s two children to the 17th Street School in Westminster. When she walked up to a table of school officials, they took one look and told her they would allow her children to enroll in the all-Anglo school but would not admit her brother’s children.

“Her kids were lighter-skinned than ours, and her last name was French,” says Vidaurri’s sister-in-law, Felicitas Mendez, who was married to Vidaurri’s brother, Gonzalo Mendez. “They told her that they would take hers, but that ours belonged in the ‘Mexican school’ in the barrio.”

Soledad Vidaurri returned home without enrolling even her own children.

That the Mendez children were told to go a few blocks away to the Hoover School, known as “the Mexican school,” while their cousins would be allowed in the 17th Street School because they looked “white enough” was no surprise to Latinos at that time. Having to enduring that kind of segregation wasn’t unusual for Latinos in the Southwest. But that particular instance happened to be the last straw for an asparagus farmer and his wife who decided that the status quo stood squarely at cross-purposes with the dreams they had for their children.

“A person gets tired of being pushed around,” Felicitas Mendez, now 74, said recently at her daughter’s home in Fullerton.

The result was a lawsuit filed a year later on behalf of her husband, Gonzalo Mendez, then operator of a popular cafe, and “some 5,000 persons similarly affected, all of Mexican or Latin descent,” according to the lawsuit.

In February, 1946, eight years before the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education called for the end of racial segregation in schools nationwide, U. S. District Judge Paul J. McCormick ruled that four Orange County school districts--Westminster, Santa Ana, Garden Grove and El Modena--were wrong in forcing Latino children to attend schools in facilities separate from their Anglo peers.

In his decision, McCormick rejected the districts’ argument that children of Mexican descent should be separated from others because of their problems with the English language. All of the children involved in the lawsuit were American citizens, and McCormick pointed out that school districts were not testing their English-language proficiency before arbitrarily sending them to separate schools.

“A paramount requisite in the American system of public education is social equality,” McCormick wrote. “It must be open to all children by unified school association regardless of lineage.”

He cited specifically two elementary schools in the El Modena district, which has since been incorporated into the Orange Unified School District. The Lincoln and Roosevelt elementary schools were next door to each other, with only a fence separating them. Mexican-American children attended Lincoln, while Anglo students attended Roosevelt. That type of segregation, McCormick wrote, “foster(s) antagonism in the children and suggests inferiority among them where none exists.”

His decision, legal scholars say, rejected the notion of “separate but equal” facilities and established that separate school facilities violated the 14th Amendment provision for equal protection.

Although other lawsuits in the Southwest had challenged segregation policies--though only a few successfully--this was the first time a federal judge anywhere in the country had denounced racial segregation in public schools, according to legal scholars.

Legal experts immediately saw the Orange County case as a trailblazer for a decision that would change education in the entire country.

The Yale Law Review wrote in 1947 about Mendez, et al, vs. Westminster school district, et al: “There is little doubt that the Supreme Court will be presented with a case involving segregation in schools within the next year or two.”

They were prophetic words. Though it would be eight more years before the Supreme Court would take action, a young attorney named Thurgood Marshall began laying the groundwork for just such a case. Marshall filed a friend of the court brief for the Mendez case when it was appealed to the U. S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco in 1947, according to Gilbert G. Gonzalez, author of a book on segregation in Southern California. The appellate court upheld McCormick’s decision, and the school districts decided not to appeal further.

Marshall, who is now a U.S. Supreme Court justice, would go on to file the successful Brown vs. Board of Education suit on behalf of a black family in Topeka, Kan., after their daughter was refused admittance to an all-white school.

THE MENDEZ SUIT “was a very important case in Orange County,” says Gonzalez, a historian and professor of comparative culture at UC Irvine. “Maybe it wasn’t as significant as the 1954 case, but it certainly had an impact on the Southwest.”

Orange County in the 1940s was still a patchwork quilt of farmland, and its economy depended on the oranges, lemons, vegetables and walnuts grown. The backbone of the farm economy was the Mexican labor force. Some Latinos arrived in 1943 as part of the bracero program established by Citrus Growers Inc. to bring 1,650 Mexican workers to the county to harvest crops during World War II. But thousands of Latino families already were living in the county, some for generations.

What happened in 1946 was the result of tension between Latinos, who were beginning to balk at their second-class status, and Anglos, who did not want to change the status quo, according to historians and Latinos who lived in the county at that time.

Several Latino families whose children were part of the lawsuit recall signs in restaurants that read: “No dogs or Mexicans.” Their children were not allowed to swim in public pools with Anglo children, and although Latinos were allowed into movie theaters, they could sit only in the balcony at one Santa Ana theater or on the left side in another theater in Garden Grove.

Latinos made up about 15% of Orange County’s population in the 1940s, Gonzalez said, and represented about one-fourth of the students in county schools.

They were segregated only in the grade schools in most cases, but, as Sylvia Mendez, who is Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez’s eldest daughter, says, “that’s because Mexican kids never made it to high school.”

Some did, of course, but Latino names were rare among the rosters of graduating classes in Orange County high schools during the 1940s.

At the time of the suit, there were six Mexican schools in the four districts being sued--three in Santa Ana and one each in the other three districts.

While Judge McCormick maintained in his decision that the separate schools were “equal” in terms of resources, Latinos who lived in that era disagree.

Genevieve Barrios Southgate, daughter of store owner Cruz Barrios, one of the plaintiffs in the desegregation lawsuit, remembers Hoover School in the Garden Grove school district with loathing.

“It was next to a dairy and a cow pasture,” she says. “It was OK for the Mexican kids to go there, even though there was a lot of illness. It was muddy; it was messy. Kids would have to shoo away the flies during their lunchtime.” She says the parents of Anglo children would not have allowed their children to attend such a school.

Southgate and others who attended Orange County’s segregated schools say that minority children had more to contend with than inferior school buildings.

“Self-esteem--we didn’t get it from the school system, obviously,” she says. “Our parents told us we were somebody, and we believed it.

“These experiences, they can either beat you down, or they can make you more determined,” Southgate says. “It’s what you learn at home; that’s what determines it.”

Isabel Ruiz, who still lives in Orange County, has bittersweet memories of her father Jesus Marcelino Ayala’s listening to classical music on the radio in the 1940s as they were growing up in Garden Grove.

What she remembers most, however, is that her father, a farm laborer who came to the United States from Mexico at age 19, tried to instill in them a pride about who they were.

“He would sit us down in the evening--there was no TV--and he would recite some poetry. My dad loved music, poetry, the classics,” she says. “My dad would quote famous writers to us. He would recite Shakespeare. He told us we should be proud of our ancestors. He would tell us what a magnificent civilization the Aztecs had. He would tell us that they had engineers, that they had accountants . . . .

“And then I would go to a segregated school in the morning, and I would think, who is he trying to kid?”

SCHOOL OFFICIALS maintained that they were separating Latino children from others because of language. But while Spanish was the first language in many Latino homes, many children were proficient in English and spoke little Spanish.

Gonzalez’s research suggests that the segregation was purely for racial reasons.

Minutes of Santa Ana’s school board meetings show that Santa Ana’s Lincoln School PTA in 1918 passed a resolution urging that the board “do something in regard to the Mexican school.” The resolution went on to say that “segregation is eminently desirable from a moral, physical and educational standpoint” and that it “would be a rank injustice to our school, our teachers and our children” if Mexican-American children continued to attend Lincoln on an integrated basis.

The board met with the PTAs of several of the schools and in 1919 declared that all Mexican-American children from then on would attend “Mexican” schools.

Latino families, joined under the banner of the “Pro Patria Club,” objected strongly enough that the school superintendent asked the city attorney for an opinion.

The city attorney ruled that the practice of segregating Mexican-American children was “fully supported by the law” if the children spoke a different language, were older than the average student in their corresponding grades or had irregular attendance. Consequently, the Santa Ana school board passed a resolution stating that “for the best interest of the school and especially for the great benefit to the Mexican children,” they would continue the practice of separate schools.

Parents suspected the separation was for an even more insidious reason: The school districts were trying to accommodate growers in the area, who often hired Latino children to work alongside their parents.

In the Santa Ana school board minutes of Sept. 13, 1943, for example, the district attendance officer “recommended . . . a walnut session in the Mexican schools as this would permit these children to get their education and also to work five hours per day.”

Ten years earlier, the superintendent reported to the board that “the Mexican schools would be conducted on the basis of a minimum day, opening at 8 a.m. and closing at 12:30 p.m., until the walnut picking season is over.”

The growing resentment among Mexican-American parents toward the schools combined with another factor: the end of World War II.

Hundreds of Latino young men had gone off to war and had come back with a new-found pride and sense of their place in American society. But they returned to find that, while they saw themselves differently, others did not.

“We felt like outcasts because everybody chased us out of places,” says Bill Gallardo, a Santa Ana construction foreman who has lived in Santa Ana all his life. “And we thought to ourselves, ‘They didn’t send us to the service for this. They shot us the same as everybody else.’ ”

SO THE TIME WAS right to challenge the system. Felicitas and Gonzalo Mendez found a lawyer, David Marcus, who had made a name for himself in Los Angeles taking on “Mexican cases,” Felicitas Mendez says.

Marcus and Gonzalo Mendez drove all over the county talking with other Latino parents who were just as angry as the Mendezes about the system of racial segregation. Eventually, the local chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the oldest Mexican-American civil rights organization in the United States, joined the effort to find Latino families who were dissatisfied with the segregation policies.

The case also attracted the attention of other civil-rights lawyers in Los Angeles, and the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Lawyers Guild both filed friends of the court briefs on behalf of the families.

But it proved to be difficult to persuade other Latinos to join the fight against a long-entrenched system.

Gallardo, who was one of the LULAC organizers, recalls going from door to door asking Latino parents to place their names on the action against the school systems. He remembers asking mothers, “Don’t you want to be able to send your kids to the schools of your choice?”

“What for?” they would ask. “We don’t stand a chance. We’re Mexican.”

Although the case was not settled until 1947, when the appellate court decided to uphold McCormick’s decision against the school districts, the Mendez children were already attending the 17th Street School. “When they knew we were making trouble, they let them in,” Mendez says.

But the court victory did not prompt the schools to throw open their doors and invite the Latinos into their fold and it did not mark the end of racial segregation in Orange County schools, according to many families living in the county then. Instead, in a maneuver that prolonged de facto segregation, school officials in the four districts said that if any Latino parent wanted to make an issue of the matter, they would be allowed to enroll their children in previously all-white schools, provided there was a vacancy.

But many Latino parents did not bother, according to Gonzalez and some of the people who were students then.

Sylvia Mendez recalls, however, that her father insisted that she attend the 17th Street School, even though they had by then moved out of the Westminster district into Santa Ana.

It was a lonely year for her.

“We were the only Mexican kids in that school . . . . We didn’t have many friends,” she says.

Sylvia Mendez went on to graduate from Santa Ana High School and is now a nurse. Her two brothers, Gonzalo Jr. and Jerome, also attended Santa Ana High School but neither graduated. Gonzalo dropped out to help his mother when the family was struggling financially, and Jerome enlisted in the military.

Their father died in 1964. And somehow, the case got lost in time and history, so much so that his youngest daughter, who was born three years after the final appeal on the lawsuit, did not even know of her parents’ bold step until she attended college.

Sandra Duran, who now lives in Walnut, was sitting in a Chicano studies class at UC Irvine in the 1970s, flipping through Carey McWilliams’ book “North From Mexico.”

Suddenly she saw the name Gonzalo Mendez, a man from Westminster who had filed a lawsuit charging the Westminster school district with discriminating against Mexican-American children.

“I went home and asked my family about it,” she recalls. “I said, ‘Why didn’t anybody tell me?’ They said, ‘We thought you knew.’ ”

Duran is determined to make sure that the memory of her mother and father’s sacrifice is not forgotten, at least not in her family. “I think my children, all children, ought to read about it.”

DR, COLOR, AMY BLUME