The case was filed, litigated, won, and affirmed at a time when the constitutional outcome was genuinely uncertain. This is part of what makes it significant: it was not building on an established constitutional foundation. It was contributing to the construction of one.
By the time Brown was decided in 1954, the constitutional landscape had been shifted — somewhat, imperfectly, provisionally — by cases like Mendez, by the NAACP’s litigation strategy in other contexts, by the changing composition of the Supreme Court, and by the changing political environment of postwar America. The Brown decision was the culmination of a legal project that had many contributors over many years. Mendez v. Westminster was one of them.
## Legacy
On February 15, 2011, Sylvia Mendez stood in the East Room of the White House to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama. She was seventy-four years old. Her parents had been dead for decades. The school that had turned her away in Westminster had been integrated, eventually, and the practice of separate Mexican schools in California had been ended by the case her parents had brought.
The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the highest civilian honor the United States government awards. Its presentation to Sylvia Mendez was a formal national recognition that what her family had done — what the five families had done, what David Marcus had done, what the social scientists and the organizational amici and ultimately Judge McCormick and the Ninth Circuit had done — belonged to the central narrative of American history.