Earlier this year, 90-year-old Sylvia Mendez told students at a Santa Ana, California, school named after her family why she had spent her retirement making sure her parents’ story wasn’t forgotten.
“I wanted the students to know that someone had fought for them, and that [they] had the right to go to any school they wanted to,” she said.
That spring day this year marked the 79th anniversary of the landmark decision in Mendez v. Westminster School District, a lawsuit that Sylvia’s parents filed after their children were sent to a segregated school for Latino students instead of being allowed to enroll in a nearby majority-white school. The ruling in their favor paved the way for the milestone Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision in 1954, when the Supreme Court rejected the long-held “separate but equal” doctrine and ruled that state-sanctioned segregation in schools was unconstitutional…