Portal:Puerto Rico/Selected biography/3

Sylvia Mendez (born 1936) is an American civil rights activist of Mexican–Puerto Rican heritage. At age eight, she played an instrumental role in the Mendez v. Westminster case, the landmark desegregation case of 1946, when she was denied enrollment to a "Whites" only school. This prompted her parents to take civil action, and the case would successfully end de jure segregation in California and set a precedent for the better-known Brown v. Board of Education seven years later; bringing an end the era of segregated education and paving the way for integration and the American civil rights movement. (more...)