The Fight for Equity and Justice

In 1947, Mendez v. Westminster, a landmark legal case brought by Orange County resident Silvia Mendez and other students, resulted in the end of Mexican schools in California and served as a key precedent for Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that ”heralded the end of school segregation in the United States.

In a section headlined “educational inequities threaten the region’s future,” the Orange County Equity Profile (OC Equity Profile, Executive Summary, p. 9) found that:

Orange County ranks high (27th) among the 150 largest regions in terms of the share of residents with an associate’s degree or higher, but Latinos, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, and African Americans are much less likely than whites to have this level of education. At the same time, the county ranks even higher (19th) in terms of the share of residents who lack a high school diploma. Latino immigrants are the most likely to have less than a high school diploma, followed by U.S.-born Latinos and Asian immigrants. More specifically, OCEP documented the following inequities: · “Racial economic gaps persist across education levels” (p.48)

· “Education gaps for Latinos and Native Americans” (p. 61)

· “More youth are getting high school diplomas, but racial/ethnic gaps remain” (p. 62)

· “Many youth remain disconnected from work or school” (p. 63)

· “Inequality in kindergarten readiness across the county” (p. 64)

Examining the historical context of systemic racism in education – including school segregation, postsegregation discrimination, and reactionary ballot measures – illuminates how and why these conditions exist in present-day Orange County, while learning from the activism and resilience of impacted communities – including community organizing, advocacy, and litigation – points to steps that can be taken to address those current conditions. White Americans may be inclined to think of school segregation as an artifact of the Jim Crow South enshrined by the “separate but equal” doctrine from the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896, but segregation of Asian, Black, and Native American students was legal in California for significant portions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although California law never specifically