Lum v. Rice

Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78 (1927), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that the exclusion on account of race of a child of Chinese ancestry from a public school did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution . The decision effectively approved the exclusion of any minority children from schools reserved for whites.

The case was brought by the Lum family of Rosedale, Mississippi , Chinese immigrants with two American-born children who had attended local public schools for white children without incident until, in the wake of an increase in anti-Chinese sentiment nationwide after passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 , they were told by administrators that their children could only attend the district's school for black children. Adrienne Berard points out in Water Tossing Boulders that their reason for choosing to avoid black schools was motivated by racism. In fact, Katherine Lum later told a reporter, “I did not want my children to attend the ‘colored’ schools [because] the community would have classified us as Negroes.” They filed suit in local court to force the district to allow their daughters to continue attending the white school.

Earl Brewer , a former governor of the state, represented the Lums, arguing that forcing the girls to attend the inferior school violated their Fourteenth Amendment rights, and that since they were not Black they should be allowed to attend the schools for whites. He was able to win the writ of mandamus they sought, but then the school district appealed to the Mississippi Supreme Court , which heard the case _en banc _ and unanimously reversed the lower court, holding that Mississippi's constitution and laws clearly distinguished Asians ("Mongolians", it called them) from whites, so the Lums could not attend white schools.

The U.S. Supreme Court granted Brewer's _certiorari _ petition to review the case. The case was never argued , just decided on its briefs, and the Lums were so poor it led Justice Louis Brandeis to ask around if some other lawyer could be found on short notice to argue the case. Chief Justice William Howard Taft 's unanimous opinion ended with a pronouncement that all racial segregation in schools was constitutional; while it was overturned by _Brown v. Board of Education _ a quarter-century later, it gave greater legal foundation to educational segregation in the short term and set back efforts to end it.

Background

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Legal background

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In the 1885 case _Tape v. Hurley _, California's Supreme Court held that a Chinese student's exclusion from a San Francisco public school was unconstitutional; the state responded by allowing the establishment of segregated schools.

Two years earlier, in the _Civil Rights Cases _, the Court had held that the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, both passed in the years after the war, only barred racial discrimination by the government, not private parties. In 1896's _Plessy v. Ferguson _, a case which upheld the constitutionality of laws that mandated segregation in railway coaches, the Court had noted the history of segregated schools in the United States as a justification for its decision.

The Lum family

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Jeu Gong Lum, a native of southern China , illegally immigrated to the U.S.

from Canada in 1904 and settled in the lower Mississippi Delta , where immigration laws were less enforced as employers sought to replace Black workers who had left for the North . There he married Katherine Wong, a Chinese American woman who had been adopted as an orphan in China and raised mostly in the U.S. by a Chinese father who grew wealthy operating a general store . Lum, too, opened a general store in the small Bolivar County town of Benoit that primarily served the area's Black population, barred from many business establishments by strict racial segregation laws. Operating a store made Lum a merchant and thus exempt from the Exclusion Act. : Ch. 1, 2

The couple had two daughters, Berda and Martha, and later a son, Hamilton. Both Gong Jeu and Katherine especially sought to make sure their children lived a better life than they had. : Ch. 1, 2 While Berda resisted her parents' efforts to educate her, desiring to leave the Delta region when she grew up, Martha consistently earned good grades in the local school. : Ch. 5

Underlying dispute

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In 1923, the Lums bought a house in Rosedale and moved there. The girls attended Rosedale Consolidated High School of the Rosedale Consolidated School District for two semesters. The following September, that ended when the school district, in response to the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 , which effectively ended all immigration from Asia, told the Lum girls they could no longer attend its schools for whites because they were not considered white. : Ch. 5

There was no school in the district maintained for Chinese students, and the Lum daughters were required to attend school. That left the district's school for colored children as the only public school available. It was underfunded and poorly equipped; the Lums did not want their daughters educated there. They retained local lawyer Earl L. Brewer , a former governor who had just overwhelmingly lost an election to the U.S. Senate , to represent them in legal action against the district. The Lums and their daughters were the plaintiffs ; all

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Lum v. Rice

Primary source

Background

Lum v. Rice

Contents

Background

Legal background

The Lum family

Underlying dispute