Mendez V. Westminster Case Study

Mendez v. Westminster (1946) was a case enacted by, “Gonzalo Mendez, William Guzman, Frank Palomino, Thomas Estrada, and Lorenzo Ramirez” who “filed suit on behalf of their fifteen…children and five thousand other minor children of ‘Mexican and Latin descent’” (Valencia, 2010, p.23). They sued Westminster school district because they were denying their children the right to enter schools near their home. The school was in California and was predominantly White and did not allow any Mexican American children to attend. Mendez claimed that the school was segregating his children, and others, based on race and kept them separate from the White Society. The “Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment played a key role in the Mendez case”