The Other Jim Crow

In 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson created "separate but equal," and in 1954, Brown v. Board ended it. So goes the story of Jim Crow in America. In reality, what Plessy started affected far more than the struggling free blacks, and Chief Justice Earl Warren's decision in Brown was not the first case of its kind. Non-black minorities, notably Mexican-Americans, suffered from, and fought against Jim Crow just as much as their black counterparts did.
Mexican-Americans and other Latinos were not enslaved by the USA. That is a fact, and trying to equate the suffering of two distinct minorities is both pointless and demeaning. However, the fact remains that Jim Crow often segregated Latinos the same way it did African Americans. Court cases like Lopez v. Seccombe, Mendez v. Westminister, and Hernandez v. Texas represented successful efforts to overturn the doctrine of Plessy.
A 1944 district court case, Lopez saw 8000 Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans in San Bernardino, who sued to gain access to a public park, win a permanent injunction prohibiting the segregation of persons of Mexican or Latin ancestry.
Mendez v. Westminister, a 1947 federal court case, explicitly overturned "separate but equal" even though the judge found that "the physical facilities, teachers and curricula of the segregated school for Mexican children were 'identical and in some respects superior to those in the other schools.'" District Judge McCormick wrote,

"The equal protection of the laws' pertaining to the public school system in California is not provided by furnishing in separate schools the same technical facilities, text books and courses of instruction to children of Mexican ancestry that are available to the other public school children regardless of their ancestry. A paramount requisite in the American system of pub- lic education is social equality. It must be open to all children by unified school association regardless of lineage."

Finally, Hernandez v. Texas reached the Supreme Court two weeks before the Brown v. Board decision. Pedro Hernandez shot and killed a tenant farmer, was tried by an all-white jury, indicted, and then denied bail. The importance of the Supreme Court's ruling that Hernandez was to be retried by a non-segregated jury was not so important regarding Hernandez's innocence, but set a precedent for when the Equal Protection Clause should give preferential treatment to some groups. Although Earl Warren did not explicitly focus on race and instead cited "other differences," the challenge to Jim Crow's institutions remained the same.

Sources:
Juan F. Perea (University of Florida). 31 October 1997. “The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race: The Normal Science of American Racial Thought.” http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1605&context=californialawreview
Lopez, Ian H., and Michael A. Olivas. "The Story of Hernandez v. Texas." Race Law Stories. By Rachel F. Moran and Devon W. Carbado. New York, NY: Foundation, 2008. N. pag. Web. https://www.law.berkeley.edu/php-programs/faculty/facultyPubsPDF.php?facID=301&pubID=32