How Westminster is celebrating its civil rights legacy

At the Mendez Tribute Monument Park in Westminster, there is a black-and-white class photograph on display with students of Mexican descent standing by their teacher in a segregated school.

A year after that photograph was taken in 1947, the Mendez, et al v. Westminster School District, et al, ruling lead to the desegregation of California schools. And on Tuesday, July 25, some of the students in that photograph came together to honor the landmark ruling and celebrate the legacy of that case.

The California case is said to have set the stage for the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, in which the racial segregation of children in public schools was declared unconstitutional.

At Tuesday’s reunion, former students of the segregated Westminster Mexican School of the 1940s, Socorro Perez, Dolores Ponce, Luisa Hernandez and Frank Mendoza, shared their life stories, highlighting the struggles they overcame to pursue an education. The students were also each presented with a copy of the photograph.

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Former Westminster Councilmember Sergio Contreras, who helped organize the event with Councilmember Carlos Manzo, said the reunion was important because “we can learn from them” and “continue to build equity in education and prevent something like this from happening in the future.”

“We have come a long way, but we have a long way to go,” Contreras said.

Having these conversations is important, he said, because as a Latino child – and a lifelong Westminster resident – he only learned about the case when he was in college in his 20s.

“To finally have the park come to life after all those years was very exciting because it commemorates our civil rights history here in Westminster and in the nation,” Contreras said.

The Mendez Tribute Park opened in December with three monuments: one has the name of the students engraved, another features statues of Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez, the lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit, and the third depicts a boy and a girl, holding books that read “college,” symbolizing the 5,000 children represented in the class action case.

The statues were created by sculptor Ignacio Gomez, whose work is featured in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Gomez was also present at the reunion.

Also at the park are technology stations that allow visitors to learn the story of the children, who back in 1943 were turned away from schools for “Whites only” and asked to “go to the Mexican school.”

This prompted, five fathers, including Gonzalo Mendez, to file the lawsuit in 1945 against school districts in Westminster, Garden Grove, Santa Ana and El Modena, which today falls under the Orange Unified School District.

Former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall — and the first African American to sit on the Supreme Court — represented Mendez. He used some of the same arguments that he used in the Mendez case in the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954, where he represented Linda Brown.

One year later, the Mendez suit won the class action lawsuit at both the trial and at the appeals court.