## McCormick’s Ruling
On February 18, 1946, Judge McCormick issued his ruling. He found for the families.
His reasoning directly challenged the school districts’ justifications. He found that the segregation of Mexican American children was not a response to genuine educational need but a discriminatory sorting by ancestry. He noted that English proficiency was not actually being assessed — children were assigned based on appearance and surname. Many of the children being placed in Mexican schools, including the plaintiffs’ children, spoke English at least as well as their white counterparts.
On the equal protection question, McCormick made a statement that went further than simply finding that the resources in Mexican schools were inferior. He held that separate schools offering the same “technical facilities, textbooks and courses of instruction” did not satisfy equal protection. The problem was not merely resource inequality but the fact of separation itself. And he articulated a principle that would echo through subsequent legal argument: “A paramount requisite in the American system of public education is social equality.” He stated that public education “must be open to all children by unified school association regardless of lineage.”
The assertion that separate education violated equal protection even when physical facilities were nominally equivalent was a direct challenge to the framework established by Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court case that had established the “separate but equal” doctrine. Plessy held that racial separation did not itself violate the Fourteenth Amendment as long as nominally equal facilities were provided. McCormick’s ruling, at least in its logic, pushed against this framework by insisting that the act of separation itself caused harm — that education could not be equal when it was structured to exclude.