Thanks for joining us for this special edition of Sustaining US here on KLCS PBS.

I'm David Nazar.

When we talk about education, in this case, the history of school desegregation, the Supreme Court decision Brown versus Board of Education in the 1950s is the iconic judicial ruling that finally helped bring children of all backgrounds, all walks of life together.

However, not everyone is as familiar with Mendez versus Westminster.

Mendez v Westminster was another crucial court case that preceded Brown versus Board of Education that helped pave the way for that decision and subsequent desegregation.

Now, some history.

In 1947, parents in Orange County, California, won a federal lawsuit against several California school districts that had segregated Mexican-American schoolchildren.

This unprecedented case introduce evidence into court that school segregation could basically destroy the future of children.

Now we introduce or in some cases, reintroduce you to the award winning documentary Mendez versus Westminster for All the Children.

This 75 years after that groundbreaking decision, these days, the Mendez case and the documentary are ever so significant in today's controversial education narrative all throughout the U.S., which we are going to discuss in detail later in this broadcast.

First, though, we begin with a historical tour of some of the places in Orange County that helped set the stage for Mendez versus Westminster.

In 1943, farmworker Gonzalo Mendez and his family were living in what was then the predominantly white Westminster School district neighborhood of Orange County, California.

Gonzalo Mendez had relocated his family to this orange grove farming community, seeking opportunity for work and for education for their children.

Gonzalo Mendez found that work opportunity when he leased a 60 acre farm in Westminster from a Japanese family who had been relocated to a Japanese internment camp during World War Two.

That business agreement allowed Mendez to go from farm worker to farm boss.

However, the education opportunity he was seeking for his children was an opportunity of misfortune.

When he was introduced to segregation, the segregation of Mexican-American students, Gonzalo Mendez and his children were denied admission to their local public school.

On 17th Street.

Gonzalez knew even back then when activism was not common in Orange County, that he must do something to try and effect change.

The Mendez family used all the money they earned farming to help them hire an attorney and organize a class action lawsuit to take legal action against a district for banning their children and other kids from their school.

In 1945, Mendez and four other plaintiff families filed that lawsuit on behalf of 5000 Mexican-American children to integrate the schools and four Orange County school districts.

Those districts were Westminster, Almudena Santana and Garden Grove.

That precedent set in case here in California, was a significant step in furthering the 20th century fight for equality for all children to get a good education no matter what their race, color or ethnic background.

So I have been passionate about saying that Mendez is taught in all of our schools because it really shows that we are one, that every voice matters.

Some 20 years ago, a journalist from Westminster read about this story of school desegregation in her hometown.

That she had never known about.

The story prompted her to find out more about this unheard of legal battle.

What began as a simple quest for knowledge morphed into dedicating the next 20 years of her life to try and let the world know about Mendez versus Westminster.

I am Sandra Roby, the writer, producer of the Emmy winning documentary Mendez versus Westminster for All the Children.

Mendez tells the story of the 1947 Orange County school desegregation case.

They helped to pave the way to the Supreme Court case, Brown versus Board of Education, and helped make California the first state in the nation to end school segregation.

I used to drive around talking about Mendez versus Westminster in my 1967 Volkswagen bus looked like this because nothing says peace and love like a Volkswagen bus.

And that's what I want this story to be about, a story of celebration of how far we have come.

But I stopped driving my bus when I started feeling like I was writing a skateboard downhill without a helmet.

Because there is nothing in front of you.

If you're the driver, this is it.

So today I'm going to be taking you on tour on my new wheels.

I've got a razor scooter and a helmet.

We've got a story to tell.

And right now, I'm standing in front of the Cypress Street School building, which is in the Cypress barrio of Old Town Orange, California.

We are just four miles from Disneyland.

And this is a school that only allowed Mexican children to attend.

The school was opened in 1931, specifically for Mexican children.

And in fact, if you can imagine, orange groves all around here, that's what was surrounding this place, because this was the heart of Orange County's Citrus area.

In fact, just down the road was the packing house.

The orange groves were all around here and behind us.

You can probably hear railroad bells because the train came by here.

They always said, if you're looking for the barrio, look for the railroad tracks, because that's where they're going to be living.

All the workers, all the industry are going to be really close to the train.

And this is where the children of those pickers attended school.

So if you go around and visit the houses here, some of the families actually have relatives who attended the segregated school.

And when you talk about segregated schools, everybody's experience is different.

The folks that attended this school I've spoken with, some of the the folks were children and they said that the teachers are very nice.

But there are other schools down Chapman Avenue.

There was the Lincoln and Roosevelt School.

The the Lincoln School was for Mexicans, I believe, and the Roosevelt School was for whites.

And at that school, if you spoke Spanish, you were punished with a beating.

That's the reality of what segregated schools were in California.

So for the students out there who are watching this, I want to ask you, as we go on this tour, to think about your neighborhood, are there any old buildings or old churches, old theaters that you have driven by?

I want to encourage you to dig into the history of those buildings, because often the stories we tell on these tours, historic tours, is about the architecture, the exterior.

I want you to see what went on inside these buildings.

That is the real story of all of us.

Okay, so we are here in front of the Orange Theater in Old Town Orange, California.

Okay, so the Orange Theater was segregated.

Mexicans had sat in the balcony and angles at below.

And this was typical of theaters all across the United States.

So what was really powerful here and helping to change segregation that was happening in the community is World War Two.

World War two was a watershed moment in American civil rights history because we had soldiers of all different colors fighting across the globe to end injustices and then come home and face segregation.

That wasn't happening anymore.

So the way that segregation ended at the Orange Theater, a Mexican-American soldier from the barrio came to the theater with his friends, bought a ticket, and rather than sit up in the balcony, which was the Mexican section, he took a seat on the main floor, and immediately an usher came up and said, Excuse me, you have to go to the balcony.

That's where the Mexicans sit.

And he goes, I'm not going.

Said, Well, if you don't go, we can't start the movie.

He said, Well, then we'll all wait.

He said, Well, if you don't go to the balcony, I'm going to have to get my manager.

And the soldier said, Go ahead, get your manager.

I just came from fighting Nazis in Germany.

I'm pretty sure I can handle your manager.

So I always ask students.

Who was the bad guy here in this scenario?

Was the usher the bad guy for trying to enforce the rules that the community held?

Was the Mexican soldier the bad guy for trying to stop the segregation?

That is the power we have each and every day to make a decision that makes just as possible and equality possible for everyone.

And that is one of the huge lessons for me in Mendez versus Westminster in studying the segregation history that took place all across this country.

Okay, Are you with me?

Is this fun?

I love this stuff.

Let's do this.

We are at Heart Park in the city of Orange.

It was established in the 1930s with moneys used from the works Progress Act that was created during the Depression.

So this old pool was a segregated swimming pool.

Monday was Mexican Day.

That was the only day that Mexicans could swim in the pool.

And then the pool would be cleaned, drained, refilled to make it available for Anglos after that.

I want to hear the story about how the segregation ended here.

Again, it was tied to World War Two, and there were about 90 families with Latino soldiers fighting in World War Two, and they weren't allowed to come into the pools on Mondays.

So finally the whole barrio came down to City Hall and they said, Look, we've got uncles, fathers, brothers, cousins fighting to end injustice in Europe and you won't let us swim in the pool.

They said, You know what?

That doesn't make any sense.

And that is how integration happened at the Hyde Park Pool.

Our history books always talk about segregation that happened in the American South, but it was only a black and white issue.

But the story of Mendez reveals so many life truths, among them that the American civil rights struggle is about each and every one of us every day, too.

That history is so much bigger and deeper than what our books can tell us.

And three, we are all connected.

We are one, and every voice matters.

It makes a difference in our freedoms and the future ahead for all of us.

And joining me now to discuss this further is our amazing tour guide, Sander Roby.

Although, truth be told, she's a lot more than our tour guide.

Sandra is the Emmy Award winning writer, producer and director of Mendez versus Westminster for All the Children Porro Todos Los Ninos documentary, which also won her a golden mic now.

Nearly two decades later, Sandra is on a new tour of her own, so to speak, on a personal crusade to get Mendez v Westminster into schools all throughout the US as part of the curriculum, the education curriculum.

Sandra, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for inviting me and so thrilled to be here.

Sandra To begin, why is this Mendez case and your documentary so vital for the education of not just kids, for everyone, really, in your opinion?

Well, to start a little background, I grew up in Westminster, which is in Orange County, right south of Long Beach, if you're familiar with that area.

And I never heard about the Mendez case until I was a mother with small children of my own.

And it was shocking to me to learn the story of a desegregation case that took place here in Orange County seven years before Brown versus Board of Education.

And I had the impact of not just changing our state, but impacting national desegregation efforts.

The way our history books tell the story of American desegregation is that it was solely a black and white issue that happened only in the American South.

It was about people who were different from us and totally separate from us.

But here is a story that took place during World War Two and the Japanese internment.

It involved a Jewish lawyer, a Japanese American family that was being interned, a Latino family who was not just Mexican, but Mrs. Mendez was Puerto Rican.

So a lot of Borek was on the East Coast to be happy about that.

And they had, like I said, a Jewish lawyer involved Japanese-American and Asian-Americans, Native Americans.

I mean, this took the walls down about everything that the American civil rights struggle was about and shows that we are all connected.

And so many life truths became apparent to me in learning about Mendez.

And one of them is that the stories we tell tell us who we are and who we can be.

And in the Mendez story, we have a story of Americans of all different backgrounds coming together to fight an injustice that made a difference for all of us.

So I think that is a story that we can celebrate and that our children need to hear today, especially when it feels like everything is so divided.

It's a story of people coming together to make a difference for all of us.

And I think everybody should celebrate and know about this story.

And advancing this story.

Sandra, what then is your personal goal with all this?

I did mention earlier that you're sort of hoping to have Mendez be a part of a national discussion, you know, part of our national education curriculum.

This is really sort of your personal crusade, is it not?

It is.

And it has been so much fun to work mindfully and strategically to help to get the story told.

Because when I first started to share the Mendez story, it was really only known in a pocket.

A few people in Orange County.

There were some news stories and the school was going to be built, named in honor of the Mendez family in Santa Ana.

But still, the year that I did my documentary, I remember going to the Hispanic Bar Association in Orange County and of the Hispanic Bar Association, Latino lawyers.

10% of them had heard of Mendez versus Westminster and so bit by bit, we developed well, I developed a strategy.

I, I felt that this story needed to be told across the country.

I needed to enter the national awareness, the dialog.

So when people say Brown versus Board of Education, I want them to also say Mendez versus Westminster.

And when they say Mendez, I want them to also say the Japanese internment.

There was a Jewish lawyer.

It desegregated schools in California for Asian-Americans and Native Americans.

I want this to blow those walls down, like I say, to show the truths of our stories that we are all connected.

So part of my plan from the very beginning was to see that this is taught in all of our schools.

But in order for that to happen, I recognized that we had to get affirmations by people whose support could be so credible it could not be denied by anyone that the story needed to be told.

And so my goal was to get it to the White House.

And so through through a lot of effort and through support, winning the the golden Mike, winning the Emmy.

Talking to folks across the country and at every place.

I promise you, if I met you anywhere in the last 20 years, if we had 2 minutes together, you learned about Mendez versus Westminster.

And I'm so grateful for one of the board members with Kelsey at the time.

I wanted to get this to the White House, and I remember telling them, this is what I want for Mendez.

I want them talking to Cade.

Correct.

Talk to Oprah Winfrey, dancing with the president.

And they kind of laughed.

I said, No, that's the goal.

If we can get to the White House, nobody can deny the credibility of the story and Joel Slutsky at the time said, hey, I know Andrew Card, who's chief of staff for President Bush.

I gave him the documentary and all the documentation of the stories we had done and that next year we were invited to the White House for the Hispanic Heritage Month celebration in the East Room.

And from there, stories, new stories beget new stories, and the awareness spread out wide and deep.

And eventually U.S. postage stamp came out on Mendez and 2007, Sylvia mendez was honored with a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

I believe that was in 2011.

And just recently, California voted Mendez into the ethnic studies guidelines so teachers can teach Mendez.

But if they don't know it, they can't teach it.

So we still have a loud drum to bang and lots of noise to make and celebrations and praise.

And I'm all about the celebration so that Mendez can be taught in our schools.

And even if our teachers don't teach it, I want to have a celebration so exciting and fun that our students will celebrate it and demand that their teachers start to teach it.

That's what the goal is.

Sandra Let's advance this story and let's advance your narrative.

Really.

Now, the million dollar question How does Mendez versus Westminster really relate to things today?

I mean, there's so much going on with education, with kids, some extremely controversial, particularly on the national level, when so much of what we hear, it's being talked about, either depending upon who you listen to, Fox News or CNN or MSNBC, it's a completely different narrative when we're hearing about things like critical race theory, racism, diversity.

So many people today have such a different take on all this talk about Mendez and the relation to what I just mentioned.

And then let's sort of individually discuss these specific issues.

Is there a connection in any way with advancing the narrative, this case from 75 years ago now, 75 years later, the documentary 20 years later, what are we learning?

Well, absolutely.

There is a great teacher and that's a great question.

So, first of all, the whole controversy about critical race theory, I think is just people not really understanding what it's about.

I think that rather than calling it critical race theory, they should call it just human race theory.

And that critical thinking is essential in what our students need to be learning when they're in school to evaluate information that's in front of them and to see what the truths are for themselves.

So the truth is, whether you're in the United States, whether you're in in Germany, whether you're in Russia, no matter what country you're in, the people who are in power are going to be making rules that further empower them.

And that you can see that clearly in America's civil rights history.

I mean, can you think of one law that was made to discriminate against people, white men, from 1776?

I mean, where is the law that says white men can't vote, white men can't buy a house that doesn't exist?

And so to understand from a power standpoint what that means for all of us and the structures that we live with and how to start to undo that, it's important to to understand the framework of the laws that were built.

Who was who they built to to support and continue to empower.

And, you know, are those laws something that we want to continue because we evolve as humans and as people every day.

And it's something that we need to really review and understand.

Are these laws serving us or where we want to go and grow as a nation?

And so rather than critical race theory, I promote that it's human race theory.

And let's take a good hard look at it.

Who are we as a people and what who do we want to be?

That's what we need to evaluate.

And it's too bad that even today we haven't learned from your documentary in this case so many years ago, maybe no one should be demonized.

There have been some bad historical moments in the United States.

We can't deny that.

However, there have been some great strides, great strides in the African-American community, great strides in the Latino community.

And we have to be talking about the positives as well, not just focus on the negatives.

And I believe as we learn about your documentary, it is a positive.

It's not saying, well, this ill was done to society, but maybe this is what we learned and why society is so much better today, why these communities are thriving despite what many want to say about there's so much racism out there or there so many problems out there.

We are all succeeding and I think for the better.

To a degree.

And I totally agree with that.

I have to say I have my undergraduate in sociology from UC Santa Barbara, and one of the courses I was so fortunate to take was a class in social movements with a gentleman named Dick Flax, who was very involved in the Sixties movement.

And I remember vividly one day in class, he said to all of us, he said, Now I know my social movement students don't want to hear this, but you need to know that history takes time.

And I remember sitting in class like, What do you mean, has rejects time?

We don't have time for time.

Things are all messed up.

And the morning I learned about Mendez versus Westminster, this was another one of those life truths that like, Oh my gosh, this is what he meant.

So the Mendez case started in 1943 with him and his family moved to Westminster to lease land from a Japanese firm that was being sent to an internment camp.

So they were turned away from the white school right after they moved.

So they decided to file the lawsuit.

That was in 43 the case.

Then they hired the lawyer.

The case started in 45.

The federal decision was in 46.

The appeal was in 47.

The decision for Brown versus Board of Education was in 1954.

The integration at Little Rock was in 1957.

The American Civil Rights Act was in 1964.

It was 20 years from Mendez to the American Civil Rights Act.

And I realized, Oh my gosh, that is what they mean by a life's work.

It takes a generation or change to happen, because institutional change specifically is very hard, because you have to change laws, you have to change people's ideas.

People have to evaluate things.

And and it takes people being in all different places, moving up in their positions to places of power where they can help to move those laws.

And make those things happen or change to occur.

And so what I like to say is that actually history happens every day, but change takes time.

And I wish, rather than debating whether critical race theory should be involved, I wish that our history classes taught something about change theories, too.

And for students to understand how change takes place, what those dynamics are and what those patterns look like.

Because right now there's a changed theory that I love.

It's called essentially team theory, and it goes to four stages of forming, storming, norming and performing.

So forming is the stage where we are all new to each other or race polite or race kind.

You have a basic understanding of where we're going forward, but then as you start to move in a new direction, you start to find out where everybody has differences of opinion.

That's a storming phase.

And then from that starting base goes to a norming phase where people say, okay, we're going to kind of agree on this.

We've got a new idea, a new direction.

But, you know, when you're in the north phase, people still want to go back to what was they like the way it was.

Maybe they had more power or better understanding or who knows all the reasons that people would like to revert to what was more comfortable for them before.

So then norming hopefully goes forward then to performing well.

We come to a new agreement and everybody's on the same page and then this repeats over and over and over again.

Right now, with the incredible strides we've made with LGBTQ laws, with women's rights, with with taking a look at what's going on for African-Americans, we are in a huge scoring phase, and that could go on for years.

But that is essential for change.

And so I want students to understand that this is part of the process.

So when you are trying to change little or small, when people blow up at you, that's because they had a different understanding of how things were supposed to be.

And now moving to the new space, people are going to be uncomfortable.

They may not like it, they may lose power or perceived power in what the new change is going to be and people are going to be uncomfortable.

But it's it's going to happen with change.

Everything that you do that is new and different is going to go through a storming phase.

And that's where we are now center of.

We thank you so much for this great interview.

Greatly appreciated.

Thank you so much, David.

And for more information about our program, just click on KLCS.org and then click Contact us to send us your questions, your comments or story ideas so we can hear from you.

I'll get back with you and be sure to catch our program here on PBS or catch us on the PBS mobile app for All Things Sustainable.

Thank you so much for joining us for this edition of Sustaining US here on KLCS PBS.

I'm David Nazar.