Each of these men had to make the decision — with his family — to attach his name to a federal lawsuit against the school districts in a community where he lived and worked and sent his children to school. The social calculus of that decision was not simple. Retaliation against parents who challenged institutional practices could take many forms, not all of them overt. Employment vulnerability, community relationships, children’s daily experience in institutions controlled by the people being sued — all of these were real considerations.
That all five families made the decision to proceed is a measure of how seriously they took the harm being done to their children and how committed they were to changing it. The legal record tends to preserve names and dates; the human experience of five families deciding together to challenge the institutions of their communities is harder to recover but no less real.
## California’s Long History of School Segregation
Understanding the context of Mendez v. Westminster requires a clear picture of California’s specific history with school segregation — a history that was different in form from Southern segregation but no less real in effect.
California had statutory provisions authorizing the segregation of certain groups from the late nineteenth century onward. Native American children could be placed in separate schools. Asian American children had been subject to separate school provisions at various points, most infamously in San Francisco’s treatment of Japanese children in 1906 — an episode that became an international incident and required diplomatic resolution between the United States and Japan.