## The Amicus Briefs
The case attracted attention from civil rights organizations that had their own interests in the legal questions being raised, even when their primary constituencies were different from the Mexican American plaintiffs.
The NAACP filed an amicus brief, with Thurgood Marshall and Robert L. Carter as counsel. The NAACP’s interest was strategic as well as principled: the organization was in the process of developing the legal arguments it would use to challenge school segregation on behalf of African American children, and the Mendez litigation offered an opportunity to test and advance those arguments in a different context.
Robert L. Carter’s brief for the NAACP tested what the organization called its “segregation per se” argument — the position that segregation itself, regardless of whether the separate facilities were physically equal, violated the Fourteenth Amendment. This was the argument the NAACP was building toward, and its presentation in Mendez was an early articulation of the constitutional theory that would eventually underpin Brown v. Board of Education.
The JACL — the Japanese American Citizens League — also filed an amicus brief. The JACL’s involvement connected the case to the wartime experiences of Japanese Americans, whose own treatment by the American legal and governmental system had exposed the fragility of constitutional protections for nonwhite citizens. The organization’s interest in a case about equal protection in education was consistent with its broader civil rights commitments.
Other organizations filed as well, including the American Jewish Congress and the ACLU. The range of organizational amici reflected the degree to which the case was understood, within civil rights communities, as raising questions that extended beyond the specific situation of Mexican American children in Orange County.