Mendez v. Westminster

Mendez v. Westminster fought the segregation of Mexican-American students in the state of California in the 1940s -- and it went on pave the way for the much more famous Brown v. Topeka Board of Education.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the Platus
Tracy V. Wilson. So, if you listen to the podcast
for very long, you know I've lived in the South
my whole life, right, And even though the Supreme Court

(00:24):
struck down segregation in America in nineteen fifty two with
the decision on Brown versus the Topeka Board of Education,
most of my K through twelve education was actually heavily
influenced by the legacy of segregation and racism. Mine too. Yeah.
I went to public schools in a system that had
to bust children to different places to try to maintain

(00:46):
the racial balance and schools. I think until I was
in tenth grade, we had one family that was not
white attending our school. Yeah. Yeah, there was nowhere to
There's no one to bust in. Yeah, it was kind
of a pretty homogenized community. Yeah, the our school system really,

(01:07):
Like I lived in a in a part of the
county that had some predominantly African American neighborhoods and some
predominantly white neighborhoods, and and depending on how the other
parts of the school districts were worth trending. That's where
boundary lines would move a lot. So sometimes I would
be on a bus that was like driving past two

(01:28):
predominant neighborhoods of one race or another, or on a
bus that was picking up all of those kids. It's
sort of depended. So that was really heavily in my consciousness,
and the idea of segregation as a subject that related
to Caucasian children and African American children like that is

(01:48):
how my experience of of race and segregation has been.
And that's one of the reasons that I've really thought before,
and it's on the list somewhere about doing an episode
about Brown versus to peak a Board of Education. Um,
I kind of. I'm really interested in who those people
were and how that all played out. We may really
still do that, but that also does get a lot

(02:11):
of air time in most history classes, you know, yeah,
more than other racial relations issues, to get a little
more pushed to the side. Most people have heard of.
I know some things about Brown versus Board. Yeah, I
think I did not know about the case we're going
to talk about at all today. I didn't either. I
certainly never heard about it growing up. Yeah, and where

(02:33):
I grew up now has a much broader spectrum of
people who live in the area. Uh, but it was
really primarily about white children and African American children. Uh.
This was really not the case in for example, the
American Southwest, where Mexican children were segregated away from white children.

(02:55):
And the case that changed that in the state of
California was Mendez versus west Minster, which really went on
to pave the way for the much more well known
Brown versus Board. So that's what we're gonna talk about today.
And a note on language. At the time, Uh, everybody
was pretty much using the word Mexican to apply to people,

(03:15):
whether they were actually from Mexico or had Mexican heritage.
So today we have much more nuanced classifications for people,
but a lot of the language at the time just
used Mexican, has this blanket term for everyone. So we're
going to talk about Mexican and Mexican American. We're gonna
use lots of different words, but that doesn't quite reflect

(03:37):
what people were using at the time in terms of language.
So first of allly the groundwork. Yeah, when the Mexican
American War ended in eighteen forty, the US gained territory
from Mexico, where Mexicans were already living, and the people
that were affected by this had a choice. Uh they
could relocate to the territory Mexico had retained, or they

(03:59):
could stay in the you know, need States, and Mexicans
still in the United States a year after this all
went down would then be considered American citizens. Right. What
was supposed to happen was that Mexicans who stayed in
the United States territory would gain all the rights of
citizenship upon being there for a year. What really happened

(04:20):
was that discriminatory laws and social norms went into effect
pretty much immediately or built on laws that were already there.
But even so, people moved from Mexico to the United
States for a range of political and economic reasons. Um
there were a lot of things going on in Mexico
that caused that, including many of them were fleeing the

(04:40):
Mexican Revolution which started in nineteen ten, and until nineteen
twenty four there weren't any laws prohibiting Mexicans from entering
the United States, so a different climate in terms of
um immigration than there is now. Right. There are also
some big incentives for moving to the American side of
the border. The United States started restricting immigration from several

(05:04):
Asian countries starting in the late eighteen eighties, and then
during and after World War One, the United States also
started restricting immigration from parts of Europe, and without an
immigrant population um coming into the country, this led to
a labor shortage in some parts of the United States,
so in response, employers started to try to recruit more

(05:26):
labor from Mexico and Puerto Rico. This was especially true
in California as the agriculture industry really started to boom.
Uh And of course, after years of legal back and forth,
residents of Puerto Rico became American citizens in nineteen seventeen. Though,
because they physically resembled Mexicans and they spoke Spanish, Puerto

(05:48):
Ricans were often lumped in with Mexicans in the eyes
of many Americans. People would use the word Mexican to
apply to both Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, which is not
accurate at all in the least um but because of,
you know, some similarities that people would sort of apply
the same standard to two completely different gips of people.
Because of these and other factors, the Mexican and Mexican

(06:11):
American population in California tripled between nineteen twenty and nineteen thirty,
and that trend actually shifted a bit with the coming
of the Great Depression. So when the Hoover administration launched
an effort to depoor illegal aliens, that change things. It
led to both the deportation of Mexicans who were in
the United States illegally and American citizens of Mexican descent.

(06:37):
This effort increased tensions, of course between Mexican American and
Anglo American communities right so there were people with Mexican
heritage who were citizens of the United States who chose
to go back to Mexico during this time and people
who were deported back to Mexico during this time. Although
many people came to the United States from Mexico because
of the promise of work, a lot of times this

(06:59):
did not actually work out well. It was really exhausting
work under very poor conditions for very low pay, and
so unemployment quickly became a big problem in Mexican American
communities along with us the spread of illnesses because of
living conditions and overcrowding, so predominantly Mexican neighborhoods tended to
be very poor in this part of the United States,

(07:20):
but they were also very close knit with very strong
support networks within the community. So even though people did
not have a lot of money or a lot of
food or a lot of healthcare, they really were trying
to support each other within their community. So at the
same time, looking at it in the context of schools,
school funding in California was tied to race as early

(07:42):
as eighteen fifty five, and that's when school budgets were
based on the number of white students and only white
students in the county. In short order, however, students who
were not white were restricted from attending white schools entirely. Right,
the only the white students counted is the bottom line
is that's the bottom line. And so since only white
students counted, only white students were allowed to go to

(08:04):
the better schools that were getting most of the money.
In the United States, Supreme Court ruled that having separate
facilities for people of different races was constitutional as long
as those facilities were equal, and that was the famous
plus e versus Ferguson decision. So segregated classrooms were really
it became the norm for many races and ethnicities in

(08:26):
many parts of the parts of the United States, and
apart from the financial considerations that were involved uh in
school budgets, school boards were genuinely worried about the health
and language skills of Mexican American students since so many
Mexicans were living in poverty and in generally poor living conditions.
Some children were you know, arriving at school in the

(08:48):
morning hungry or without having bathed, and illnesses, including serious
ones like tuberculosis, would spread rapidly because of the overcrowding
and a lack of access to medical care. Unfortunately, at
least some administrators and board members associated these traits not
with poverty but with being Mexican, so they attributed it

(09:10):
to a racial issue instead of just the fact that
they were living, in some cases, really really rough conditions.
There were also a couple of real factors that did
work against many Mexican American students when it came to
keeping up with the rest of the class. Because a
lot of Mexican workers were holding seasonal migrant jobs, Mexican
American children were often pulled out of school for months

(09:33):
at a time as their parents moved to follow work.
This would cause students to fall behind and have to
repeat grades. And some Mexican American families primarily spoke Spanish,
which school board members thought would make it hard for
the children to keep up in an English language classroom.
This today seems very silly, considering how many people will

(09:54):
put their children on waiting lists for second language immersion school. Yes,
but at the time, the solution, and we put that
in air quotes to all of these problems was to
educate Mexican students separately. And although these facility facilities were
supposed to be equal, in reality, they really did tend
to be inferior in pretty much every respect, from the

(10:18):
way the spaces that they were learning and were constructed,
to how much the teachers and administrators involved in their
education were paid. That was basically the case in in
separate but supposedly equal facilities across the board, regarding pretty
much every race and ethnicity. If there was a separate
facility for a man minority population in general, that facility

(10:41):
was inferior um. So this was not just related to
California or or Mexican American students. On top of this
inferiority in the buildings and the teacher pay and all
of those sorts of things. The curriculum in classrooms for
Mexican American children and was often geared to do two things,

(11:02):
to assimilate Mexican children into American culture and to prepare
them for a life of labor. In some schools, boys
learned trade skills and gardening, while girls learned sewing and
homemaking instead of having any academic part of their their
subject work. That kind of makes my blood boil. As
with many episodes, this is one where just the layers

(11:25):
of offensiveness pile on the deeper we get into something. Yeah,
it's hard to stay sort of neutral with the information
at hand because it just it makes my blood boil.
By nine thirteen, Mexican children were being taught in different classrooms,
and the first segregated school in Orange County, California, which

(11:45):
is where the Mendees family lived, started in nineteen nine. Occasionally,
gifted Mexican children could potentially go to a white school
if they agreed to being inspected and visited by white
school administrat So, if if a Mexican American fild was
particularly stellar in in academic ability, that child might be

(12:08):
able to go to a white school if their family
agreed to like home visits from school administrators, and I
wonder how they would identify students that could academically really
kind of why when there's no academic parts in their curriculum. Yeah,
that's a great question. By there were fifteen Mexican only

(12:31):
schools in Orange County, and between eighty and ninety percent
of schools in the South and the Southwest segregated Mexican children.
And there were also other court cases along these lines
that were happening before the case that we're discussing today,
including Alvarez versus Lemon Grove School District and Salvadierra versus
Del Rio Independent School District. But these cases, which found

(12:54):
in favor of Mexican American families, either didn't have an
effect outside the school system in question and for legal reasons,
or they got overturned during an appeals process. And as
sort of a side note, schools were not the only
places where Mexicans are being segregated. They're also served last
in restaurants after white families had been served. There were

(13:15):
racially restricted covenants that allowed Mexicans only to buy property
in certain neighborhoods and some public pools. Mexicans could only
swim one day a week, and the next day the
pool would be drained and cleaned. While we're thinking about
that happy picture, um and trying to make our blood
not boil, we're going to take a brief moment and

(13:35):
talk about lumosity. So, Holly, you and I both exercise, Yeah,
but we mostly are exercising our bodies and not so
much our brains. Yeah. It's just a slug a lot
of the time. Yeah, which is sort of what's why
luosity dot com is an awesome thing to kind of
have a personal trainer or your brain or your nogging.

(13:57):
I would like to say that it does feel like
somebody who's just kicking my brain into gear. Yeah, in
a really good way. Yeah. So, based on the science
of neuroplasticity, leumosity dot com gives you customized online workouts
and so they're like exercises, but they're fun because they're
also gains uh and therefore your brain. And it only
takes a little while, like a ten or fifteen minutes

(14:19):
a day, Yeah, and you can be making your brain actually,
um sort of have better mental acuity, right, I have
sharpener focus. I have a useless block of time in
my mornings. It's between two meetings and it's about eight
minutes long. And previously I've been like that, I'm what
I'm gonna do. I'm gonna tidy my desk for eight minutes.

(14:40):
Now I'll do some lumosity so I can try to
be a little sharper, a little more focused, boost my
problem solving skills, or maybe just think a little more clearly. Yeah,
because Lumosity will actually let you customize your program. So
if there's one of those areas you really feel like
you're struggling with, like you can try to do exercises.
The will help the part of your brain that helps

(15:01):
you remember people's names after you meet them, or the
part of your brain that helps you not misplace things,
which was my primary focus. My primary focus was to
be flexibility because my job involves being constantly pulled away
from what I'm doing all the time. However, it turns
out that I do exceptionally well with that already, So

(15:22):
instead I'm working on my memory. We have been using
it and it's been a little bit startling in some regards,
and that like I would not have picked the area
that I excel in as the area I excel in,
which is problem solving. I would have thought I would
have rated hirghing flexibility, but new So that's an area

(15:45):
I need to work on. And I mean it's a
little nice reality check that, yes, you need to be
exercising these portions of your brain because otherwise they do
just kind of uh atrophy you. If you don't use it,
you're losing it. So if you would like to get
on his action, which is extremely fun and also challenge Jane,

(16:05):
go to lumosity dot com today, click the start training
button to create your own program and then just start
playing your first game that's lumosity dot com and tell
them that you heard about it on How Stuff Works.
So let's return to the story of the Mendez family.
Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez were the parents in Mendez Versus Westminster.

(16:28):
Gonzalo was originally from HuaHua, Mexico, and along with his
mother and four siblings, he immigrated to Westminster, California in
nineteen nineteen. He actually attended Westminster Main School, the same
school his children were eventually barred from attending. UH when
he was a child, although in his late elementary years,
he was briefly sent to a segregated school. He and

(16:51):
his classmates, who were fluent in English, were eventually transferred
back to Westminster Main although he had to drop out
to work as an orange picker because his family needed
the money. He was naturalized as an American citizen when
he was thirty years old. Felicitas was from Puerto Rico.
She and her family had moved to Arizona from Puerto
Rico in nineteen six and they stayed there for about

(17:11):
six months. The working condition for Puerto Ricans there where
they were living were terrible, and felicitas family had participated
in protests against these terrible working conditions, I am the
fact that their pay was dramatically less from what they
had been promised before they emigrated. Felicitas's family then moved

(17:31):
to California to a predominantly Mexican neighborhood, where she later
met Gonzalo and the pair were married in nineteen thirty five.
They opened a cantina in the Mexican barrio of Santa Anna,
and their business was successful and eventually they saved enough
money to buy a house. They had three children who
are extremely important to this story. Clivia, Gonzalo Jr. And Jerome.

(17:55):
In nineteen forty three, when the children were all still
under the age of ten, their banker got in touch
with them about an asparagus farm in Westminster. It was
owned by the Minimatsu family, a Japanese family who was
being relocated to an internment camps. A whole other topic
we could discuss great length the mini meats. Who's knew

(18:16):
that they were likely to lose the farm if they
couldn't find a tenant, and they offered to lease it
to the Mendes family to protect it under the intern
until their internment was over. Yeah. Their hope was that
if they had people who were living there and working
it for them, that eventually their internment would be over
and they would be able to compete return to their property. Unfortunately,
I do not have knowledge of how that ultimately turned out.

(18:39):
Topics for future topics for Yeah, I think we do
need a future podcast. I need to first look in
the archive and see if there already is one a
future podcast on the internment of Japanese people during World
War Two. So the Menda's family agreed to lease the farm.
They closed their cafe, rented out their home and moved
to live on the aspair Is farm. Gonzelo sister Solidad

(19:02):
and her husband Frank Vadari went with them. Frank had
experienced running a farm, so he was a logical person
has to be involved in this endeavor, and this was
just It was a really successful enterprise. It spanned forty acres,
it employed up to thirty people. Uh And meanwhile Gonzolo
also managed another farm in the area, and the whole

(19:24):
family really continued to prosper When they moved to the farm.
They moved from the barrio to a neighborhood in the
Westminster School District where there was only one other Mexican
American family. In the fall of nineteen forty four, Solidad
took the children to enroll in Westminster Main School, also
known as the Seventeenth Street School. So Solidad was of

(19:46):
Mexican American heritage also, but she had lighter skin and
she had a last name that didn't sound Mexican. So
the teacher who was doing the enrollment told her that
her her children could go to Westminster Main School, but
that the Mendez children would have to go to the
Mexican school. They had to go to Hoover Elementary instead
of Westminster Main School, which, as we discussed earlier, was

(20:09):
generally inferior. The building was in poor condition, there was
no playground, the textbooks were a very dissortment in a
collection of hand me downs from white schools in the area,
so probably out of date. Lunch was eaten outside on
picnic tables, and since part of the school property was
adjacent to a cow pasture, there were flies everywhere and

(20:31):
the manure smell permeated the school area. Right So solidd
said that if the Mendo's children could not attend Westminster Main,
her children would not be going there either, and she left.
When Gonzalo and Felicitas heard about this, they were both
understandably outraged. They were both citizens of the United States
and they saw no reason why their children should not

(20:52):
attend the school in the district where they lived. So
they went to talk to the principle and they were
told that no, the children had to attend the Mexican school.
Then they went to both the Westminster and Orange County
school boards and they just kept getting the same answer
from everyone. Everyone was still know they have to go
to the Mexican school. Gonzalo contacted lawyer David C. Marcus,

(21:13):
who had recently successfully argued another California civil rights case
involving whether Mexicans could be banned from public swimming pools.
That answer was no, they could not. They discovered that
Mexican and Mexican American children were routinely being segregated in
Orange County. This wasn't actually required or allowed by law,

(21:34):
though the Education Code actually read quote, the governing Board
of any school District may establish separate schools for Indian children,
accepting children of Indians who are awards the United States Government,
and children of all other Indians who are descendants of
the original American Indians of the United States, and for
children of Chinese, Japanese or Mongolian parentage. So there were

(21:58):
actual segregation laws on the books, but none of them
mentioned Mexican American children, right. So this put them into
kind of an interesting position as far as wanting to
to fight what was going on, because there wasn't actually
a law to try to repeal um. So first they

(22:18):
tried to get the support of other Mexican families in
the district to file a class action suit, but many
of the families they talked to actually didn't want the
school board to change its policy. The Mexican school that
their children attended was right in the middle of the
barrio where they were living. It was extremely convenient, so
the parents liked that they had their children close by,
that they could walk their children to school in the morning,

(22:40):
that children could come home at lunchtime. There were real
practical reasons that people liked having their children in a
school that was in their neighborhood um and so that
that made it a little tricky for them to start
to build a case, and believing that they'd have better
success if they could prove that it wasn't just the
Westminster School district in question, Anzalo and his attorney actually

(23:01):
toured the area and they interviewed families and looked for
other people that would be willing to join the suit.
So outside of their area they expanded to trying to
find some support and other people that would rally along
with their cause right and eventually four other families did
join them, the families of Lorenzo Ramirez, Frank Palomino, William Guzman,

(23:22):
and Tomasa Estrada. Some of these families included veterans from
World War Two, These are people who had just returned
from fighting for their country, specifically fighting Nazis for their country,
and they were really unwilling to accept treatment as second
class citizens once they got back. And with their involvement,
the defendants included for school districts so Westminster, which the

(23:47):
Mendez family had, you know, started this groundswell in Santa
Anna Garden Grove and Elma Dana which is Orange. Yes. Meanwhile,
Phelicitas and other mothers continued to pressure our school boards
to try to change their decisions. Belasitas also helped organize
the Association on Depadres the Menos Mexican Americanos I'm just

(24:08):
gonna apologize for my pronunciation, i am not fluent in Spanish,
to show support during the trial. All of this was
extremely brave on a number of levels. The Mendez family
and the other families faced the possibility of racist retribution
from the Anglo community and anger from people in the
Mexican American community who didn't want this suit to go forward.

(24:31):
Many laborers also ran financial risks associated with the trial
and they would be missing work to testify. And for
this last part, Gonzalo actually reimbursed people out of pocket,
so it's a really important fight to them. They were
willing to kind of literally put their money where their
mouth was. So they filed a class action lawsuit in
the Federal District Court of Los Angeles in March of

(24:54):
They chose to file this in federal court instead of
state court because there was no state law being violated
that they could try to repeal. And before we go
into exactly what this lawsuit involved, and now we will
get back to the Mendez family and the lawsuit that
they filed in the federal district court. So, as we
had just discussed, there was no state law in California

(25:17):
at the time requiring segregation that was based on race.
It was related to Mexican Americans. So the lawsuits argument
was that in absence of a state law, segregation violated
the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and California
state law. The A C. L U and the National
Lawyers Guild also filed amicust briefs. Yes, and if if

(25:38):
you remember our Loving Versus Virginia episode, there's are the
briefs that are from people not directly related to the
case who have sort of expert legal advice to include um.
The trial started on July and it lasted for two weeks.
It was to be decided by Judge Paul J. McCormick.
The school board was to be defended by Orange County

(25:59):
cow Until Joel e Ogul, but he wound up turning
it mostly over to the Deputy County Council George F. Holden.
The testimony for the plaintiffs included evidence of segregation in
several school districts, evidence of how the schools for Mexican
children were inferior, and testimony for Mexican American children about
how the segregation had affected them. Parents and education experts

(26:23):
also testified. Dr Ralph Deal's of u c l a's
Anthropology Department was an expert witness. He argued that segregation
set up white children as superior and Mexican children as inferior,
and drew parallels to what was going on in Nazi Germany.
The school boards defense was um bizarrely offensive to today's year,

(26:45):
so kind of be ready for that. James L. Kent,
the superintendent of the Garden Grove School District, said Mexicans
were inferior and had poor hygiene, in a lower ability
level and outlook than white children. He also said Mexican
families had loose morals, so he kind of was just

(27:06):
making up some garbage because I don't know, fear change
didn't like them whatever. As we talked about earlier, he
kind of conflated problems associated with poverty with problems that
were innate to an ethnicity, correct, which I don't. Maybe
it's because I am a little idealistic sometimes I kind

(27:30):
of think the better option would have been to address
the problems associated with poverty rather than segregating the poor
children into their own school. You hippie. I know it's crazy.
You tend to be idealistic in that regard, and it's
important to remember that it was a different social climate,

(27:51):
but it's hard not to kind of be a little
judgmental of statements like that, blanket statements to say, those
people are terrible for the following reasons, we really need
to keep them separate. Well, and the judge he would
sort of call them on. He was like, so, if
a white child has problems with hygiene and is having
trouble keeping up, what do you do? And they're like, well,

(28:12):
we talked to the parents and we maybe hold them
back a year. He's like, so you don't just segregate
them into somewhere else. So Frank A. Henderson, who was
the superintendent of the Santa Anna School District, also acknowledged
that they were basically making school assignment decisions based on
people's surnames and their skin color, which is ridiculous. Yeah. Uh.

(28:33):
In terms of the legal aspects, the school boards trying
to build their defense around the idea that this was
not a matter for a federal court since it was
a county and not a state or federal matter. Yeah,
it was not a very strong defense, and a little
flay at that point, I think. Yeah. And so unsurprisingly,
Judge Paul McCormick of the U. S. District Court Southern

(28:53):
District of California, Central Division ruled that the segregation of
Mexican American students did violate the law. He also describes
segregation itself as inherently unequal, writing quote, A paramount requisite
in the American system of public education is social equality.
It must be open to all children by unified school association,

(29:15):
regardless of lineage. So then this takes a turn into
the yet more offensive. Because the school boards appealed to
the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
in San Francisco while the appeal was taking place. Since
they had been told that what they were doing was illegal,
they all kind of handled their own integration efforts efforts
separately by their own devices. In the case of the

(29:37):
Westminster District, grades one through four wound up going to Westminster, Maine,
and grades five through eight went to Hoover with the
Mexican American children and the Anglo children in the same school.
But that meant that grades five through eight were in
the inferior with the cow pastor and no playground and
no cafeteria, so nobody lives. It is not good. The

(29:59):
ace c LU, the National Lawyer's Guild, the Japanese American
Citizens League, the American Jewish Congress, then Double A CP,
and the Attorney General of California all filed amicust briefs
on behalf of Mendez in the appeal. And we're not
going to rehash the testimony because it was basically the
same testimony over again with the school boards again trying

(30:20):
to build this defense that this was just a county
thing and was not something that the federal court should
be messing with. The Ninth Circuit's decision which came out
in nineteen forty seven, was unanimous. It upheld the lower
court's ruling on the basis that it violated California law,
not on past Supreme Court precedent. Since California had no
segregation law for Mexicans, earlier Supreme Court decisions didn't actually apply,

(30:44):
so it didn't apply the ruling more broadly to the
other races or ethnicities. They still kind of had a
battle of their own to deal with. So while this
did this, this ruling did achieve what people were hoping
it would achieve as far as ending the segregation of
Mexican American children. It was a narrow ruling. It was
based only on the fact that this didn't this wasn't

(31:05):
within California law, like it didn't expand that out to
the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment um at
this point, doing possibly the only thing they had done
right so far, the school boards elected not to appeal
to the Supreme Court, and this may be one reason
why this case has become much less well known than
Brown versus the Topeka Board of Education. And after this

(31:29):
ruling had finalized, uh and apart from overturning segregation of
Mexican students in California. The Mendes versus Westminster case had
other effects later on. It really put a spotlight on
segregation in California. Governor Earl Warren, who later became chiefs
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, proposed to the state

(31:50):
legislature that California repeal all of its segregation laws in
ninety six. He signed this bill into law in ninety seven.
Went on to author the Supreme Court's opinion in Brown
versus Board and in Loving versus Virginia, which we talked
about in earlier episodes of this podcast. Along with many
many other civil rights legislations, the Warren Court was in

(32:15):
a lot of ways extremely progressive when it came to
rights and liberties. Yeah, they really had am I on
achieving equality, I think, And while I was not cited
as a direct precedent in Brown versus Board of Education,
the n double A. CP did use Mendez versus Westminster
as a test case when trying to see how they
might get Brown versus Board overturned. Earl Warren's ruling on

(32:39):
Brown versus Board has a lot in common with McCormick's
ruling in the Mendez case. Yeah, it was clear that
he had read and digested that written opinion thoroughly. Uh
The double A CP. S Amicas Brief was also written
by third Good Marshall, who argued Brown versus Board before
the Supreme Court. Many of the challenges to segregation before

(33:01):
this point had focused on the fact that facilities were separate,
but they were not equal. This was a case in
which the entire concept of separate but equal was thrown
out and it succeeded. This helped propel America towards actually
desegregating schools. Yeah, while there were people who were working
on integration before this point, there was still a lot

(33:22):
of focus on trying to make the facilities be actually equal,
and this really proved. It was sort of a proof
of concept of hey, we can actually get these laws
completely returned instead of just focusing on getting the facilities
to be on the same level as one another. Gonzalo
Mendez died in nineteen sixty four, and he was fifty
one at the time. Felicitas Mendez died in There are

(33:47):
actually two California schools named after them. Commemorative stamp came
out in two thousand seven for the seventieth anniversary of
the ruling, and Celia became an activist. She was awarded
the Presidential Medal of Freedom in eleven at the age
of seventy four. Yeah, she went on to do it.
Just a lot of lecturing on the issues relating to

(34:08):
Mexican American people in the United States and segregation, a
lot of education, education of children on this case in particular,
because it turns out that this even people who are
living in that part of the country don't necessarily know
that this ever existed because so much of the focus
about the civil rights movement is on African American children

(34:31):
rather than children of other races who were also put
into segregated schools. Yeah, and the school integration thing is
largely focused, as we've said on brown v Board. Yeah,
so this does kind of fall by the wayside. Yeah,
it has a weird side note. I watched a lot
of videos for this. They're they're just there are a
lot of videos that have been recorded there about the case.

(34:53):
A lot of them had this weird undertone that really
bothered me. That was, like, well, everybody thought that my
Sekan children couldn't speak English, but the Mendez children could
totally speak English and I would like so, so that
would have been okay if they didn't. It's very strange. Yeah,

(35:13):
I mean we talked about this a little bit yesterday
when you were commenting on this, and like I said,
I think the idea is that they were trying to
build a case of how ridiculous it looked to try
to keep these kids out of any school. But it
ends up maybe look like they were the exception in
the Mexican American community and the others still should maybe

(35:33):
be segregated. It it set up a weird, very odd tone.
And while the Mendez family was definitely more affluent than
a lot of other Mexican American families in the area,
but that that doesn't mean that all the prejudices about
all of the other Mexican American people were correct, because

(35:54):
that is not true. So, yes, I am really glad
that I got to learn about this case. It was
not one that I was familiar with before. Now, he said,
do you also have some listener mail or what I do?
This is from Sean. It's a little bit of a
longer piece of mail, and Sean says, I'm a long
time family of the podcast, and I particularly love when

(36:16):
podcast subjects pop up elsewhere in my life. I had
just started reading at Home by Bill Bryson, and he
starts talking about the Crystal Palace, which I just heard
about from you. Before that, I had just finished up
a book called Outlaw Marriages by Roger Strike Matter, sorry
if I said that wrong, which included a chapter on
Jane Adams and Mary rost Smith. And the next day

(36:37):
saw that the next podcast up was Jane Adams. I
was very excited that I knew a little about the
ladies relationship from my reading and looked forward to hearing
you talk about it. After listening to part one, where
you talked a bit about it and you then use
the terms Boston marriage and companion, I was concerned that
that would be all you said about it. Now, listening
to your second part, I understand why you spoke of

(36:58):
their relationship the way you did, but I'm going to
respectfully disagree with you. I would like to say I
love it when people respectfully disagree with us, because sometimes
we just get screened at and then that breaks my
heart a little bit. But but I am happy to
be respectfully disagreed with time. So Sean goes on to say,
I am not an Adams or Smith expert, and full disclosure,

(37:21):
I'm a gay man from Chicago, so my bias will
be a little skewed. I fully understand why you, as
editors of a source of historical fact, would not want
to identify someone as definitely of a certain sexual orientation
without written documentation, But I also feel that the context
of the time is the main reason for the minimal
account of written documentation of their relationship. But that documentation

(37:43):
does exist. If you can get a copy of Outlaw Marriages,
I suggest you check it out. The chapter on Smith
and Adams is brief but stripe matter site includes many
sided sources that I think disagree with your assertion that
there is no documentation the women always slept in the
same bed, even sending word ahead to the hotels. Adams
servants knew to bring concerns about their employer's health to Smith.

(38:06):
Adam's correspondence to Smith included promises to be hers till death,
and during a time when they were apart, saying there
is reason in the habit of married folks sleeping together.
Smith not only gave money to Hull House, but provided
Adams with a personal allowance throughout the four decades of
their relationship. To say that you can only identify people
as LGBT if they themselves implicitly said that does a

(38:28):
disservice to the gay community as we continue to fight,
even in the twenty first century for our equal treatment
in the world and in history. By eliminating many historical
figures who would clearly identify as homosexual or transgender if
they live today, when evidence suggests, as it does in
the case of Adams and Smith, I think we need
to acknowledge it boldly, even if also mentioning some uncertainty.

(38:50):
I appreciated your podcasts on Loving Versus Virginia and feel
that this podcast is a supporter of equal rights where
the LGBT community. My question to you is, does your
as search and apply only to gaze if you don't
have any historical documentation for where a figure in history
implicitly calls himself for herself heterosexual, will you not say
that there was a debate about that. Unfortunately, homosexual relationships

(39:13):
have always been viewed as not real, including some including
to the present day, by some in this country and
around the world, and I feel your discussion of Adams
and Smith perpetuates that double standard. I still love the
podcast and I think you do a fabulous job, but
I want to express my concern over this because I
normally don't like being so asserted with my opinion, and
as a blatant attempt to get this email read by you,

(39:35):
I've included cute pictures of my two kitties, my girl
Stella and my boy my boy boris with a normal
pick and one with his laser eyes engage. Thank you
for taking the time to read my email, and I
look forward to many years of podcasts in the future. Sincerely, Sean.
Thank you Sean for writing such a good email, such
a good email. First of all, it was not at
out at all, at all, at all our intent to

(39:58):
belittle their relationship or to make it sound as though
we didn't think their relationship was a real thing, because
clearly it was a loving and committed and supportive relationship.
And I don't it was like in my notes, but
I don't remember if we said it, um that there
were people who after Mary died, they were like, I
don't know how Jane is going to live without her?

(40:20):
Um that said, I my personal feeling, and this is
actually a change in my personal feeling over the last
ten or fifteen years, is that it actually does a
disservice to try to after someone's death identify them as
a particular orientation, because it kind of it's reductive and
kind of presumptuous, and I think it makes it harder

(40:42):
for people to understand the grand spectrum of of like
sexual orientations and types of human relationships and things like that.
Like I am really reluctant to kind of just check
the lesbian box next to someone unless someone themselves uh
expressed that identity to people. Yeah. Uh, and it's something

(41:05):
I think you and I both take very seriously. Uh.
You know, I certainly will say I am I align
myself as an ally um. And as far as whether
it applies to heterosexuals, I mean, my thing is like
I don't think unless you're with that person, it should

(41:27):
matter one way or the other, do you know what
I mean? Like I always joke with people, uh, on
the odd events where it's come up about like oh wait,
are you straight? Or I just tell them I'm Brian
sexual because that's my husband's name. Because it's it's not
your it's not you're saying to know anyway, it doesn't
really matter. And it's not unless you're potentially interested in

(41:48):
that person. I don't see why it should play into
the conversation at all. Right, well, yeah, so, I mean
it is something we're thoughtful about and take seriously. And
I really enjoyed how well thought out his letter was
and what he had to say. And I agree it's
problematic that that LGBT relationships have gotten short shrift, certainly historically. Right. Well,
and the reason that it's that trick of not wanting

(42:10):
to assign something to someone without their permission, right, And
I felt a lot more I had. I had a
lot fewer qualms about doing that. Uh, you know, between
ten and fifteen years ago, when there were so many
fewer out LGBT people in the public eye, like when

(42:31):
there were so many fewer role models to look at
and people to draw, and I had a less less
of a concern about sort of retroactively saying that because
this person had a relationship with this person, that means
that person was a lesbian, Like nowadays, I feel like
that's that's more more reductive than, uh than supportive. Yeah,

(42:52):
And as you said, there's you know, there's a lot
of nuance that I think wasn't that part of the
public awareness or consciousness. Well, and I said in my
response to Sean that it would be very easy if
I were to somehow becomes so notable that history books
wrote about me. I don't know how that would happen,
but if it did, uh that you know, it would
be very easy for historian to look at my life

(43:14):
and look at the fact that I was raised in
the Methodist Church and that I am in a long
term relationship with a man, and to draw conclusions about me,
and that those conclusions would really they would assume a lot.
They would assume specific things based on a few public
elements without really having a sense of the entire rest
of life. So it will probably be an ongoing discussion,

(43:39):
one of great interests, and my my feeling on that
may evolve. Again, So thank you so much again Sean
for writing this letter, and really thank you everyone for
writing his letters. An express respectful disagreement, um, because I
do I get really upset when when people are are
really upset, and we did not intend to be offensive.
So I do apologize if I seemed just a little anyone.

(44:01):
That was absolutely not my intent, and it was absolutely
not my intent to perpetuate any kind of double standard.
But I have not read outlaw marriages. I don't either.
I had a friend recommended to me a while back
and I haven't gotten to it. And I will say,
even without the kiddies, we would have written read the letter.
But the kiddies are really cute. We do. We read

(44:22):
every email that we got. We get, but we are
not able to answer them all. Currently, we try. I
have an alarming number of unanswered emails and the unanswered
email holder. So thank you again, Sean, Thank you everyone. Uh.
If you would like to write to us, you can.
We're at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're also
on Facebook at Facebook dot com, slash History class Stuff,

(44:46):
and on Twitter at missed in History. Our tumbler is
missed in History dot tumbler dot com. And we are
pinning up a storm. It's more like a drizzle right
now on pinteresting. We are penning though we just came
off a holiday weekend. I know we're catching back up.
We're totally catching back up. If you would like to
learn more about some of the subjects that we discussed today,

(45:06):
you can come to our website. Put the word civil
rights in the search bar. And you will find how
the Civil Rights movement where you can do all that
and a whole lot more at our website, which is
how stuff Works dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Because it how stuff Works dot com.

(45:35):
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