Desegregation before Brown

I did not know of the Méndez vs.Westminster case out of California, but it's an important piece of American educational history.

When Sylvia was 8, her aunt, who was a lighter-skinned Mexican-American with a French-sounding name - Viadurri - took her to the “white” school to enroll her with the Viadurri children. When school officials refused to admit Sylvia and her brother while at the same time accepting the Viadurris, it set off the battle.
“I started crying and I go home and I tell my mother, ‘They don’t want us in that school,’ and my mother said, ‘We’re going to fight for you, because you’re just as good as they are and we’re all equal under God! Of course you’re going to go to that school.’”

And she did. And the California school system was desegregated in 1946, eight years before Brown v. the Board of Education.