Mendez vs. Westminster: For All the Children

Mendez vs. Westminster: For All the Children/Para Todos los Niños

Felicitas Mendez and Gonzalo Mendez
Screen-capture
Directed by Sandra Robbie
Produced by Sandra Robbie
Screenplay by Sandra Robbie
Starring Sylvia Mendez
Narrated by Sandra Robbie
Edited by Harold Elyea
Distributed by Sandra Robbie Productions
Release dates
 2003
Running time
 30 minutes
Country United States
Language English

Mendez vs. Westminster: For All the Children/Para Todos los Niños is a 2003 American documentary film written, directed, and produced by Sandra Robbie. The film features Sylvia Mendez, Robert L. Carter, and others.[1]

Synopsis

In the mid-1940s, a tenant farmer named Gonzalo Mendez moved his family to the predominantly white Westminster district in Orange County and his children were denied admission to the public school on Seventeenth Street. The Mendez family move was prompted by the opportunity to lease a 60-acre (240,000 m2) farm in Westminster from the Munemitsus, a Japanese family who had been relocated to a Japanese internment camp during World War II. The income the Mendez family earned from the farm enabled them to hire attorney David Marcus and pursue litigation.

In 1945, the plaintiffs of Mendez, Palomino, Estrada, Guzman and Ramirez filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of 5,000 Mexican American children to integrate the schools in four Orange County school districts: Westminster, El Modena, Santa Ana, and Garden Grove.

Interviews

Background

Mendez vs. Westminster: For All the Children/Para Todos los Niños discusses the little-known Orange County case that made California the first state in the nation to end school segregation – seven years before Brown v. Board of Education. NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall and then-California Governor Earl Warren played key roles in both cases.

Unlike Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which focused on racial discrimination and upheld the constitutionality of segregation based on race in public accommodations under the doctrine of "separate but equal," the plaintiffs in Mendez v. Westminster argued that the students were segregated into separate schools based solely on their national origin.

The U.S. Postal Service commemorated the Mendez case on a postage stamp in September 2007.[2]

Accolades

Wins

References

Bibliography

Notes

  1. ↑ Mendez vs. Westminster: For All the Children/Para Todos los Niños film web site.
  2. ↑ City of Cerritos Public Library. Last accessed: June 14, 2008.
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 5/14/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.