Civil rights activist Sylvia Mendez, 88, is of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent and was at the center of Mendez v. Westminster in 1947. Mendez’s parents brought the lawsuit against a school in Westminster, California, when it refused to allow Mendez and her siblings to enroll because they were Hispanic.
Other Hispanic families joined the case, and in 1946, a judge ruled in favor of ending the segregation of Hispanic kids across four school districts. The ruling helped usher in a ban on segregation in all public California schools in 1947. Mendez’s case set the precedent eight years later for 1954’s landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education that segregating students based on race was unconstitutional.
Mendez went on to enroll in a newly desegregated Westminster elementary school, eventually attending Orange Coast Community College and then California State University (Los Angeles) where she earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing. For her work as a civil rights activist, including speaking at schools about the value and importance of getting an education and lobbying politicians to include Mendez v. Westminster in California history books, Barack Obama awarded Mendez the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.
