Entangled Inequalities: Japanese American Incarceration and Mendez v. Westminster

In 1947 the Mendez, Guzman, Palomino, Estrada and Ramirez families won their fight in federal court to end racial segregation in California's public schools. Mendez, et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County, et al. came 7 years before Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court case that declared school segregation unconstitutional.

The story begins with two families in southern California. During World War II, 125,000 Japanese Americans were forced from their homes into incarceration camps. Seventy percent were U.S.-born citizens; the rest included their immigrant parents, legal residents of the United States. Among them was the Munemitsu family, who left everything behind and leased their farm to the Mendez family, hoping one day to return. The Mendez family moved from Santa Ana to Westminster, less than 10 miles away, and made the farm their home. When they tried to enrol their children in the local school, they were turned away and sent to the "Mexican" school instead.

Janice Munemitsu, daughter of Tad Munemitsu and author of The Kindness of Color, has put it this way: government and school district racism took constitutional freedoms and rights from both families, but kindness along the way opened the road to justice.

Places in the story: 1) the Munemitsu farm, 2) Poston War Relocation Authority camp, 3) the U.S. Courthouse and Post Office. Image from the National Park Service's page.

The Munemitsu farm

The farm covered forty acres on Edwards Street in Westminster. Seima Munemitsu first leased it from an elderly woman who owned it, and when she died she gave the family first chance to buy. But California's Alien Land Law of 1913 barred Seima from buying because he was not a citizen — and the law also blocked him from becoming one. So his son Tad, a U.S. citizen still a minor, became the owner.

The property held the farmhouse, four workers' cottages, a packing house, a barn and two outhouses sharing a wall; Seima added two ofuros, Japanese soaking tubs. As many as fourteen braceros — Mexican labourers admitted to the United States for a limited time to do farm work — usually lived in the cottages. The mother of whichever family was living there cooked for both the family and the workers.

When the Munemitsus were forced to leave, their banker and friend Frank Monroe advised them to lease the farm to keep it safe until the war ended, and introduced them to Gonzalo Mendez, who had grown up working as a farmhand in the area and had always wanted a farm of his own. It was leased "move-in ready," with tools, equipment and crops — mainly asparagus — already in the ground. The Mendez family could live there, work the land and sell the crops, paying the Munemitsus rent, so that both families gained. Janice Munemitsu found lease documents from December 1944 and for August 1945 to August 1946; whether earlier papers were lost, or a handshake arrangement covered 1942 to 1944, is unknown.

Today two public schools of the Westminster School District, Johnson Intermediate and Finley Elementary, stand on the land.

Poston

Living quarters at the Poston War Relocation Authority Center, seen from the water tower, June 1, 1942. Credit: National Archives and Records Administration.

From May 1942 to September 1945, the Munemitsu family, except Seima, was held at the Poston Relocation Center in what is now La Paz County, Arizona — officially the Colorado River Relocation Center, one of ten major War Relocation Authority (WRA) centres. Before Tule Lake, Poston held the most Japanese Americans; at its peak population of 17,814 it was the third-largest community in Arizona, after Phoenix and Tucson.

It was built on 71,000 acres of the Colorado River Indian Reservation over the objections of the Tribal Council, which saw the incarceration as an injustice; the government overruled it. The WRA and the Office of Indian Affairs ran the camp jointly for its first eighteen months. Poston was divided into three camps, which the people held there nicknamed "Roasten," "Toasten" and "Dustin" for the harsh Sonoran Desert climate. Besides barracks, it had a store, mess hall, hospital and schools. Most people who were held there remember the complete lack of privacy in the open latrines, open showers and barracks.

The courtroom

The 1946 class-action suit challenged separate schools for Mexican American students in southern California and eventually helped end public school segregation across the state. It was tried at the U.S. District Court on the second floor of the U.S. Court House and Post Office in Los Angeles, a National Historic Landmark built in 1940.

The people around them

• Frank Monroe, a white banker at the First Western Bank of Garden Grove, was a friend to Gonzalo Mendez and to Seima and Tad Munemitsu. He had mentored Tad from about the age of eight, when Tad translated between English and Japanese for his Issei father. After Executive Order 9066 forced the family into the camps in May 1942, Monroe helped arrange the lease — which let Mendez become a farmer rather than a farmworker, and saved the Munemitsus from losing the farm or selling it cheaply.
• David C. Marcus, a Jewish American attorney who spoke fluent Spanish and worked for the Mexican Consulate, represented the Mendez family. In 1944 he had won a suit against San Bernardino over the exclusion of Mexican Americans from its only park and swimming pool. In Mendez he argued, with a sociologist and an education expert, that segregating students by nationality or ethnic background made them feel inferior and harmed their education, including their learning of English. His own experience of antisemitism shaped his approach; his second wife, (Maria) Yrma Davila, had immigrated from Mexico City, and their children were Mexican American.
• Thurgood Marshall, Robert L. Carter and Loren Miller, attorneys for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), filed a brief to the Court of Appeals arguing that school segregation was unconstitutional and that, wherever segregation is the general rule, it serves to enforce inequality. Their brief became the basis of their case against segregating Black students in Brown v. Board of Education.
• Earl Warren, governor of California during the case, signed the Anderson Bill in June 1947, repealing what remained of the state education code's provisions allowing segregation. By the time Brown reached the Supreme Court in 1954, he was its chief justice, and he wrote the unanimous opinion ending public school segregation by race nationwide.

The legacy

Janice Munemitsu keeps her family's story; her book The Kindness of Color (2021), with a foreword by Sylvia Mendez, traces the two families' bond through archives and family history, along with the kindness both received amid racism. Janice Munemitsu and Sylvia Mendez carry the story forward together. In December 2020 the City of Westminster dedicated Mendez Tribute Park, with educational panels created by the Orange County Board of Education. Winifred Conkling's 2011 novel Sylvia and Aki tells the story for readers in grades three to five.

Japanese American incarceration and school segregation are usually told separately, but in the Mendez and Munemitsu story they happened side by side — a forerunner of the civil rights struggles and the fight against school segregation in the 1950s and 1960s, and part of a struggle for equality that continues.

Sources

Based on "Entangled Inequalities: Japanese Incarceration and Mendez, et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County, et al.," published by the National Park Service; rewritten in hubnx's own words.

• The article describes the later fight as "against school desegregation"; this page says segregation, as the rest of the article makes clear.
• The article's cover collage, which includes a family photograph and a mural by incarcerated youth, is not reproduced.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.