## The Anderson Bill and Earl Warren
While the Ninth Circuit appeal was pending, the California state legislature was moving. Governor Earl Warren, who had been California’s governor since 1943, signed the Anderson Bill — formally Assembly Bill 1375 — into law in 1947. The bill repealed California statutory provisions that had authorized segregation of Native American and Asian students in public schools, effectively removing the remaining legal infrastructure for school segregation in California.
The relationship between the Anderson Bill and the Mendez litigation is somewhat contested historically. Some accounts treat the legislation as a direct response to the case and its public attention. The Wikipedia article on the case notes that the legislature acted before the Ninth Circuit issued its appellate decision, complicating straightforward causal narratives. The legislation did not cite Mendez, and historians disagree about how much the case directly drove the legislative timing.
What is clear is that after the Anderson Bill and the Mendez ruling, California had both eliminated its remaining statutory segregation and had a federal court order requiring the four Orange County districts to end their administrative practices. The combined effect meant that Sylvia Mendez and her brothers could, in principle, attend the school that had turned them away.
Earl Warren would go on to be appointed Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court in 1953, where he wrote the unanimous opinion in Brown v. Board of Education the following year. Whether his experience with school segregation as California’s governor influenced his thinking as Chief Justice is a question historians have debated without fully resolving. Warren himself connected the two experiences in some later accounts. What can be said is that he was not unfamiliar with the arguments when Brown reached his court.