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IDKMYDE: The First Desegregation Case Wasn’t Brown · The Breakfast Club

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  Speaker 1: The first desegregation case wasn't Brown versus the Board of Education.
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  Speaker 1: I Welcome back to It alls to another episode of
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  Speaker 1: the most anticipated podcast on the Black Effect Podcast Network,
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  Speaker 1: especially in February, entitled I didn't know Maybe you didn't either.
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  Speaker 1: I'm your host, be Dot, I'm Carlo's husband and Isaiah
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  Speaker 1: and Ryan's father, and true to form, we will kick
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  Speaker 1: off today's episode with three of the most useless facts
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  Speaker 1: You'll never need not a day in life. Up first,
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  Speaker 1: the legal strategy that won Brown versus the Board of
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  Speaker 1: Education was tested seven years earlier by a Mexican American
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  Speaker 1: family in Orange County, California. Your second useless fact. Third
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  Speaker 1: Good Marshall, the man who argued Brown and later became
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  Speaker 1: the first Black Supreme Court justice. He wrote a legal
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  Speaker 1: breath for that earlier case and used that as his model.
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  Speaker 1: And your third useless fact the lead Aina's daughter, received
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  Speaker 1: the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in twenty
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  Speaker 1: eleven for a case most Americans have never heard of.
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  Speaker 1: I know, I hadn't I didn't know. I didn't know.
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  Speaker 1: I didn't know. I didn't know. I didn't know. I
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  Speaker 1: didn't know. I didn't know. I didn't know. I didn't know. Okay,
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  Speaker 1: first order of business is let's clear something up. Brown
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  Speaker 1: versus the Board of Education didn't start desegregation. No, it
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  Speaker 1: finished a legal fight that honestly started with a nine
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  Speaker 1: year old Mexican American girl in Orange County. Her name
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  Speaker 1: is Sylvia Mendez. In nineteen forty four, Sylvia's family moved
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  Speaker 1: to Westminster, California, to work a farm. But here's the thing.
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  Speaker 1: The farm wasn't theirs. It belonged to the Muna Mitsu family,
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  Speaker 1: a Japanese American family who had been forcibly removed to
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  Speaker 1: an internment camp. So the Mendez family, Mexican American citizens,
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  Speaker 1: were only there because another minority family had been stolen
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  Speaker 1: from their land. That's the backdrop. Now. When Sylvia's aunt
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  Speaker 1: tried to register her and her brothers at the local school,
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  Speaker 1: the clerk said, well, the Mendez children have to go
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  Speaker 1: to the Mexican school. The school superintendent, James Kent He
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  Speaker 1: later said in court that Mexican Americans were intellectually, culturally,
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  Speaker 1: and morally inferior to European Americans. Those were his words
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  Speaker 1: on the record. Sylvia's parents didn't accept that. They hired
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  Speaker 1: attorney David Marcus, and they sued. Four other families joined.
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  Speaker 1: Mendez versus Westminster went to trial in nineteen forty six.
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  Speaker 1: Now here's what made a revolutionary. Attorney Marcus didn't just
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  Speaker 1: argue that Mexican schools had worse resources. He argued that
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  Speaker 1: segregation itself called psychological harm. He brought in social sciences
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  Speaker 1: to testify that separating children made them feel inferior. Sound
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  Speaker 1: familiar because that's the same argument that Thirdgood Marshall would use.
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  Speaker 1: Eight years later. In Brown, Judge Paul McCormick ruled in
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  Speaker 1: favor of the Mendez family. The school district, of course, appealed,
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  Speaker 1: and that's when the NAACP got involved. Thirdgood Marshall and
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  Speaker 1: Robert Carter wrote a brief supporting the Mendez family, and
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  Speaker 1: Robert Carter later said that the NAACP's briefs were the
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  Speaker 1: model for the briefs in Brown versus the Board of Education.
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  Speaker 1: So on April fourteenth, nineteen forty seven, the Ninth Circuit
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  Speaker 1: upheld the ruling. Two months later, the Governor California, Earl Warren,
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  Speaker 1: the same man who would later become Chief Justice and
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  Speaker 1: alf of the Brown decision, signed a build ending school
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  Speaker 1: segregation in California. California became the first state to officially
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  Speaker 1: desegregate its public schools. Did you know that that was
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  Speaker 1: seven years before Brown? But here's what they don't teach you.
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  Speaker 1: The Japanese American Citizens League also fouled a brief. The
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  Speaker 1: American Jewish Congress also fouled a brief. Multiple communities came
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  Speaker 1: together because they understood, if they can segregate one of us, now,
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  Speaker 1: they can segregate all of us. In twenty eleven, President
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  Speaker 1: Barack Obama awarded Sylvia Mendez the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
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  Speaker 1: She was seventy five years old. Her father, Gonzalo, had
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  Speaker 1: died in nineteen sixty four, ten years after Brown, at
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  Speaker 1: the age of fifty one. He never saw the full
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  Speaker 1: impact of what his family started. Brown versus Board that
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  Speaker 1: gets the chapter in the textbook, But Mendez versus Westminster
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  Speaker 1: has got a footnote because without Mendez, there is no Brown.
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  Speaker 1: The first desegregation case wasn't decided in nineteen fifty four.
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  Speaker 1: It was decided in nineteen forty seven by a Mexican
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  Speaker 1: American family farming land that belonged to a Japanese American
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  Speaker 1: family locked in an internment camp. And third, good Marshall
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  Speaker 1: took the note and I didn't know. Maybe you didn't either.
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  Speaker 1: I