Gracias, Sylvia Mendez!

Sylvia Mendez is part of one the most important families in the struggle for civil rights.  Her story became even more widely known when the children’s book, Sylvia and Aki by Winifred Conkling, was selected for The Seattle Public Library’s 2014 Global Reading Challenge.  The book chronicles two tragic events in American history—the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and the segregation of Mexican Americans in the public school system in 1945—through the eyes of two little girls who lived it.

The Munemitsu family’s farm became ground zero in the chain of events that would make monumental strides in public education rights.  When the Munemitsus were forced to leave their thriving asparagus farm to be imprisoned in an internment camp for the duration of the war, their farm was available to be leased. The Munemitsus feared that an untenanted farm would never return to their possession after the war so an offer from the Mendez family to rent it was a godsend.

The Mendezes closed their café, rented out their house in Santa Ana, and moved to Westminster to run the 40 acre farm.  What the Mendezes found in Westminster was a system of public education that tolerated the separation of Anglo and Mexican-American children.  For Sylvia and her siblings, their parents’ brave and long stance against this injustice would culminate in equal education for all minority children in California. They filed the lawsuit Mendez v. Westminster, argued it, and won in Federal Court.  Mendez v. Westminister School Desegregation and Mexican American Rights by Philippa Strum is a very fine treatise on this case for the layperson.  These events set the stage for the landmark Brown v. the Department of Education case that would abolish segregation on a national level.

In 2011, Sylvia Mendez was recognized by President Obama with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her efforts in keeping this story of desegregation alive and for encouraging students to lay claim to their precious education, hard won as it was.  Sylvia will be at The Seattle Public Library in mid-February to share her story with many 4^th and 5^th graders in Seattle Public Schools, one of the perks of participating in the Global Reading Challenge.