Texas' junior senator, Lyndon B. Johnson, who arranged for Longoria to receive full honors and burial at Arlington National Cemetery. The Longoria incident pushed the American G.I. Forum to the forefront of the postwar Mexican American civil rights strategy. The Forum, alongside LULAC and El Congreso, greatly expanded their operations after World War II and began their fights to end segregation. Court cases In the 1940s, there were two major court cases involving the civil rights of Mexican Americans. The first, Mendez v. Westminster (1947), involved Gonzalo Méndez, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Mexico, and his Puerto Rican wife Felicitas, who joined four Mexican American families to sue four Orange County school districts. The families challenged the common California practices of drawing school boundaries around majority-Mexican American neighborhoods and of placing Mexicans who lived in majority-white communities into segregated Spanish "remedial" schools. During the trial, the Orange County superintendents justified school segregation because the Mexican American children had inferior "personal hygiene", "scholastic ability", and "economic outlook". On the plaintiff's side, the constitutionality of educational segregation was questioned on the basis of the Fourteenth Amendment, and social scientists were brought in as expert witnesses to dispute the supposed educational benefits of segregated schools. In 1946, Judge Paul McCormick ruled that school segregation was a "clear denial" of the Equal Protection Clause, and the next year, McCormick's decision was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals. The Méndez case was significant for several reasons, including: the support of NAACP counsel Thurgood Marshall; the plaintiffs' revolutionary use of social scientific research as a basis for law; the legal precedent marking educational segregation as unconstitutional; and the case's influence for the Anderson Bill (1947), which repealed California school segregation. The second major civil rights court victory for Mexican Americans also occurred in California. Andrea Pérez, who was Mexican American, and Sylvester Davis, who was African American, had met and developed a friendship immediately before he was drafted to fight in World War II. When he returned, they resumed their relationship, fell in love, and married. At the time, California's anti-miscegenation code barred interracial marriage. Pérez and Davis hired the civil rights attorney Dan Marshall to represent them in challenging the ban. When the Los Angeles County clerk denied them a marriage license, Pérez formally filed suit. In 1948, the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of the couple, becoming the first state in