Costa Mesa: History of School Desegregation

Museum of Teaching and Learning (MOTAL) invites all ages to experience our popular exhibit, A Class Action: The Grassroots Struggle for School Desegregation in California, now on view at Coast Community College District.  This traveling exhibition will be in this new home for three months. It tells a dramatic, historic story of five Mexican-American families who fought school segregation. The key to their success was the shrewd legal strategy used in the groundbreaking class action case, Mendez et al. v. Westminster School District et al. They fought on behalf of thousands of children who were being discriminated against by being placed in segregated schools. The plaintiffs won the original case in 1946 and then won the appeal in 1947, seven years before Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

This exhibition has won a prestigious national award and has traveled to eighteen venues throughout California and Oregon.  To receive a gift copy of the film Mendez v. Westminster: Families for Equality by Erica Bennett with a small donation, contact the Fullerton College Foundation at 714-992-7790 or info@foundationfc.com.