What Mr. Cross didn't teach us

MY HISTORY TEACHER in high school was a good man, but we sure didn't learn much in his class. We read about Brown vs. Board of Education, but not that its roots were in Mendez vs. Westminster, the landmark 1946 case that ended segregation in Orange County schools. Heard about the Depression -- but not about how local police and sheriff's deputies brutally repressed a strike at a citrus grove just down the road from Anaheim High. Learned about Orange County's German settlers, Disneyland, even the rise of our peculiar conservatism -- but nothing about Latinos, despite our school being more than 75% Latino.

I don't hold anything against Mr. Cross, though. More than likely, he didn't know Orange County history either -- not because my teacher was ignorant but because the county fathers did their darndest to wipe its official narrative clean of Mexicans.

They're still at it. Earlier this week, organizers for Huntington Beach's Fourth of July parade -- one of the largest west of the Mississippi -- considered an application from Sandra Robbie. The Orange County native has for several months crisscrossed the country in a Volkswagen bus nicknamed "The Magical History Tour" to teach children about Mendez vs. Westminster. Riding shotgun was Sylvia Mendez, the namesake plaintiff.

Mendez's parents sued the Westminster, Santa Ana, Garden Grove and El Modena school districts after Westminster officials denied her and her brother entry into a whites-only school while admitting their lighter-skinned cousins. During the trial, school administrators argued that Mexican students were intellectually inferior to their white peers and thus unworthy of better school conditions.

The Mendez family won in federal court and on appeal to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, ending school segregation in Orange County. The case also inspired California Gov. Earl Warren to make its mandate state law, a precedent that played a key role in his Supreme Court ruling on the more-famous Brown vs. Board of Education when he was chief justice almost a decade later.

Including Mendez and Robbie, who produced an Emmy-winning documentary about the case, in the Huntington Beach festivities seemed a natural: local history, an orange VW bus and a living, breathing legend. But parade organizers rejected their application.