The Anderson Bill’s elimination of the remaining statutory infrastructure for California school segregation was one consequence. The testing and development of social scientific testimony as a civil rights litigation tool was another. The demonstration that the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause could be used to challenge school segregation in federal court — that this theory was viable, that courts would hear it, that a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs was possible — was a third.
For the NAACP’s legal team, the Mendez case was one data point in a larger project of developing and testing the legal arguments that would eventually succeed in Brown v. Board of Education. The contribution was real even if the relationship between the two cases was not as direct or as simple as popular accounts sometimes suggest.
For Mexican American civil rights organizing more broadly, the case established that federal courts were a viable venue for challenging segregation — that the constitutional tools available to civil rights plaintiffs could work in cases involving Mexican American children, not only African American ones. This was an important precedent for subsequent litigation in Texas, Arizona, and other Southwestern states with significant Mexican American populations.
## Her Family Helped Win
The headline that BabyMonikers chose for this article uses a specific and carefully considered formulation: “Her School Turned Her Away. Sylvia Mendez’s Family Helped Win a Desegregation Case Before Brown v. Board.”
The word “helped” is doing important work in that sentence. It acknowledges that the Mendez family was central to the case that bears their name while preserving space for the other four families, for the attorney David Marcus, for the organizations that filed amicus briefs, for the social scientists who testified, for the judge who ruled for the plaintiffs, and for the appellate judges who affirmed.