Jim Crow Finds a New Target

Gong Lum v. Rice (1927)

On the morning of September 15, 1924, nine-year-old Martha Lum and her older sister Berda walked into the Rosedale Consolidated High School in Bolivar County, Mississippi, the same school they had attended without incident for years. At the noon recess, the superintendent pulled Martha aside. Acting on an order from the school's board of trustees, he told her she could not come back, because she was, in the language the board itself used, "of Chinese descent, and not a member of the white or Caucasian race."1 She went home that afternoon having learned, in the space of a few hours, exactly where Mississippi's racial order believed her family belonged.

What happened next does not fit neatly into the pattern this series has followed so far. It is not simply a story about a family fighting discrimination and losing. It is a story about exactly what the title of this piece suggests: an existing system of racial control, built for one purpose, stretching itself to absorb a community it hadn't originally been built to police, with the full participation, at times, of the family caught inside it.

A Third Race in a Two-Race State

Jeu Gong Lum had not entered the United States through any front door. By multiple historical accounts, he crossed into the country from Canada around 1904 without inspection, evading the Chinese Exclusion Act's restrictions, and made his way south to the Mississippi Delta, a region where immigration enforcement was famously loose, in part because Delta planters wanted Chinese labor to help replace the Black workers who had been leaving the South in growing numbers.2 He married Katherine Wong, a Chinese American woman who had been adopted and raised largely in the United States. Gong Lum opened a general store in the small town of Benoit, serving the area's Black residents, who were themselves barred by segregation from shopping in most white-owned establishments. Operating a store placed him within one of the exclusion law's recognized merchant exemptions, narrowing, though not eliminating, his legal vulnerability under a law aimed primarily at laborers.3 The family settled, prospered modestly, and eventually moved to Rosedale, where Gong Lum ran a successful grocery and the family built a house. Martha and her older sister Berda attended the local public school.

Mississippi's 1890 constitution required the state to maintain separate schools for white and Black children; state courts interpreting that provision, including in this case, read it as dividing students more broadly into the "white or Caucasian race" on one side and "brown, yellow, and black races" lumped together on the other, a reading the Mississippi Supreme Court applied directly to Martha.4 For years, in a town small enough that everyone simply knew each other, this division had been applied loosely where Chinese children were concerned. According to oral history collected decades later by a longtime Mississippi Delta Chinese resident, in towns where local families "mixed with the Bok Guey," using a Chinese term for white people, school officials sometimes let Chinese children attend the white school anyway, on the theory that nobody official was likely to object. The same source recalled exactly what changed that calculation: "But as soon as…somebody said [a child was] colored, she's Chinese, then you have to be dismissed."5 Someone, in September 1924, said something. The Lum girls were dismissed the same day.

The Lawsuit the Lums Actually Brought

What the Lums sued over is worth stating precisely, because it is not what most popular summaries of this case suggest. Gong Lum's petition did not argue that segregated schools were unconstitutional. It argued that his daughter had been wrongly classified. Martha, the petition stated, "is not a member of the colored race, nor is she of mixed blood, but she is pure Chinese," and was therefore entitled to attend the white school, not because segregation itself was wrong, but because she did not belong on the "colored" side of the line the state had drawn.6

This was not an oversight or a rhetorical compromise forced on the family by a cautious lawyer. According to Adrienne Berard, whose 2016 book Water Tossing Boulders is the most thorough account of the case, the Lum family pursued this argument because they understood exactly what the alternative classification would mean for their place in Mississippi's social order. Katherine Lum herself later put it to a reporter in the plainest possible terms: "I did not want my children to attend the 'colored' schools [because] the community would have classified us as Negroes."7 The family was not contesting the existence of a racial hierarchy. They were contesting their position within one, and trying to climb to the side of it that came with more rights, more resources, and more standing in a state where standing was everything.

It is worth sitting with this rather than smoothing it over. The Lums were themselves the targets of real, serious discrimination, barred from entry by federal law, treated by white Mississippians as a "third race" occupying an uneasy, undefined space between Black and white. Their fight to keep Martha in the white school was also, inescapably, a fight to avoid being grouped with the Black children and families who shared their grocery store's customer base and, in many cases, their daily lives. Berard does not flinch from this complexity, and neither should this account: the people fighting Jim Crow's classification in this case were not trying to dismantle it. They were trying to be classified out of its worse half.

A Bankrupt Governor and an Inexperienced Understudy

The family's original lawyer was Earl Brewer, a former Mississippi governor who had lost much of his fortune and most of his political standing by the time he took the Lums' case, a man, in Berard's description, with little left to lose.8 Brewer argued the case at the state level with real conviction, telling the Mississippi Supreme Court that "the state collects from all for the benefit of all" and that "Martha Lum is one of the state's children and is entitled to the enjoyment of the privilege of the public school system without regard to her race."9 It is a genuinely fine line, and it lost. The Mississippi Supreme Court ruled that the state constitution divided children into white and "brown, yellow, and black" categories, that Martha belonged to the "Mongolian or yellow race," and that she therefore had no claim to a seat in the white school regardless of how exemplary a student she was.10

By the time the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, Brewer had stepped back, occupied with an unrelated matter involving the murder of a Black man in Bolivar County whose killers he was trying to bring to justice, and handed the Lum case to a younger associate, James Flowers, a corporate railroad attorney who had, by his own apparent understanding, never argued a Fourteenth Amendment case before.11 Contemporaries and later historians alike generally describe Flowers's brief to the Supreme Court as inconsistent: at points defending the basic legitimacy of segregated schools, at other points attacking the specific classification applied to Martha, and ending with a suggestion that separate schools were inherently unequal, an argument that, if the Court had taken it seriously, would have undercut the entire legal foundation of segregation nearly thirty years before Brown v. Board of Education eventually made exactly that case.12 Nobody on the Supreme Court appears to have taken it seriously, including, it seems, Flowers himself, who by most accounts delivered the argument unevenly and without the depth the stakes demanded.

Nine Pages, No Footnotes

Chief Justice William Howard Taft, the former president of the United States, wrote for a unanimous Court. The opinion runs nine pages, contains no footnotes, and reads with the unhurried confidence of a question the Court did not consider close.13 Taft began by establishing that the basic power to run public schools, including the power to draw racial lines within them, belonged to the states, not the federal courts, citing a 1899 case, Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education, that had already upheld this same principle for Black students in Georgia.14 He then turned to the actual question the Lums had asked the Court to decide: was Martha wrongly classified as "colored"?

Taft's answer treated the classification question as secondary, so long as some "colored" school existed somewhere in the county that Martha could, in principle, attend. The Lums had argued there was no school for Chinese children in their specific district. Taft noted this wasn't quite the same as saying no colored school existed anywhere in the county, and that distinction, a school somewhere else, in a different district, that Martha could "conveniently" travel to, on the Mississippi Supreme Court's own representation rather than any independent inquiry the U.S. Supreme Court conducted into actual travel conditions, was enough to satisfy the Constitution's equal protection guarantee.15 Race itself, the actual core of the family's complaint, the opinion treated as essentially settled and uncontroversial: the same "separate but equal" logic that already applied to Black and white students extended just as easily to a child who was neither.

The ruling drew directly on Mississippi's invented racial taxonomy without examining whether the taxonomy made any sense on its own terms. The state constitution had split the world into white and "brown, yellow, and black," a system built to police one specific racial line, and Martha simply got swept into whichever side of that line state officials decided fit her, with no real inquiry into whether the category had been built with someone like her in mind at all. There is little evidence the framers of Mississippi's 1890 constitution contemplated Chinese grocers and their children in the Delta at all. The category existed to manage Black and white relations in the wake of Reconstruction, and the Lum family found themselves classified by a system they had nothing to do with creating, simply because that system needed somewhere to put them and chose the side that kept the existing hierarchy intact.

What the Decision Actually Did

The practical effect reached well beyond the Lum family. By affirming that states had extremely broad discretion to define racial categories for school segregation purposes, Gong Lum gave Jim Crow's machinery a flexibility it hadn't clearly possessed before: not just the power to separate Black from white, but the power to sort anyone else who showed up into one category or the other, on terms the state alone would set. Newspapers at the time understood this implication clearly. The Los Angeles Times, reporting on the decision, ran an editorial on its front page praising the ruling specifically for showing segregation's defenders "the way toward making it still more effective," since private social agreements about who counted as white sometimes broke down, and a clear constitutional ruling solved that problem for good.16

For Chinese families across the Mississippi Delta, the ruling meant continued exclusion from white schools that persisted, in many areas, for another two decades or more. Conditions began to shift gradually during and after the Second World War, helped along by the fact that China had become a wartime ally against Japan, a development that softened some white Mississippians' attitudes toward their Chinese neighbors in ways the Supreme Court's 1927 ruling had never required or anticipated.17 For the broader history of American segregation law, Gong Lum became, alongside Plessy v. Ferguson, one of the doctrinal pillars "separate but equal" rested on, cited and unchallenged for twenty-seven years, until Brown v. Board of Education finally dismantled the framework both decisions depended on.

The Lum family did not stay in Rosedale to accept the outcome quietly. According to Berda Lum's own account, recorded decades later, Katherine reacted to the loss with open anger: "Mama got mad and said, 'If they can't go to school here, I'm not going to live in this town.'"18 The family moved across the Mississippi River into Arkansas, where Katherine found a white school willing to take her daughters, even though the building was older and the instruction reportedly weaker than what Rosedale's white school offered. It was, by her own evident calculation, still preferable to what Mississippi had decided her children deserved. Martha Lum's name endures mostly in law school casebooks and constitutional history, rarely as a person, more often as the answer to a question about how far "separate but equal" could be stretched. Earl Brewer continued practicing law and won a genuinely significant civil rights victory nine years later, successfully arguing Brown v. Mississippi before the Supreme Court in 1936, a case that held confessions obtained through torture and beatings could not be used against criminal defendants. He died in 1942, more than a decade before school segregation itself fell. Gong Lum died in 1965, Katherine Lum in 1988, both living to see Brown v. Boardsucceed where their own family's case, brought a generation earlier and for narrower, more self-protective reasons, had failed.

A Harder Kind of Honesty

This piece's title describes Jim Crow finding a new target, and that is accurate as far as it goes: Mississippi's racial classification system extended itself to absorb a family it hadn't been originally designed to address and used the same machinery to keep them in a subordinate position regardless. But the title risks implying something too simple, that the Lums were purely victims of a system reaching out to claim them. The truth sits less comfortably than that. The Lums were victims of that system, and they were also, in the specific argument they chose to bring, participants in its underlying logic, asking not for the hierarchy's abolition but for a better seat within it. That a Court operating within, and ultimately reinforcing, a legal order built on white supremacy refused even that limited request doesn't make the request itself simple or pure. Both things are true, and a history that only tells one of them isn't telling the whole story.

What connects this case most directly to the rest of this series isn't a triumphant win undone, the way Chy Lung's was, or a doctrine built to expand judicial deference, the way Chae Chan Ping's was. It's the same instability of categories already on display in Ozawa and Thind: race, in American law, functioned again and again less as a fixed fact waiting to be discovered than as an administrative category whose boundaries shifted depending on whoever held power and whatever outcome they needed. The Lum family asked to be sorted differently. The Court declined, and in declining, confirmed that the sorting itself, not any individual family's place within it, was the thing the system had been built to protect all along.

Related Cases and Precedents

• Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) — The foundational "separate but equal" precedent Gong Lum directly extends; Taft's opinion treats the principle as already settled and uncontroversial, applying it to a racial category Plessy never contemplated.

• Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education (1899) — Cited directly in Taft's opinion, this earlier case established that federal courts would defer heavily to state authority over public school administration, a principle Gong Lum leaned on to avoid scrutinizing Mississippi's racial categories closely.

• Tape v. Hurley (1885) — Decades earlier and in a different state, a Chinese American family in San Francisco won a more limited right for their daughter to attend public school at all, though California subsequently created separate "Chinese schools" in response, illustrating a recurring pattern of partial victories quickly narrowed.

• Brown v. Board of Education (1954) — Finally overturned the "separate but equal" doctrine Gong Lum had helped reinforce, twenty-seven years after this case was decided.

• Brown v. Mississippi (1936) — A genuinely significant civil rights victory argued by Earl Brewer, the Lum family's original attorney, less than a decade after he lost their case at the Supreme Court.

Sources and Further Reading

For deeper reading:

• Adrienne Berard, Water Tossing Boulders: How a Family of Chinese Immigrants Led the First Fight to Desegregate Schools in the Jim Crow South (Beacon Press, 2016)

• James Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White (Waveland Press, 1988)

• Malik Simba, "Gong Lum v. Rice: The Convergence of Law, Race, and Ethnicity," American Mosaic: Selected Readings on America's Multicultural Heritage

• Far East Deep South (dir. Larissa Lam, 2020) — A documentary following a Chinese American family's journey to the Mississippi Delta to uncover their roots, tracing the same community and the same Chinese Exclusion Act–era history this piece covers, told through one family's search for answers about a father left behind in China.

• Blurring the Color Line (dir. Crystal Kwok, 2022) — A documentary examining Chinese grocery-store families in the segregated American South, set in Augusta, Georgia rather than Mississippi but confronting directly the same uncomfortable middle position this piece describes: communities that benefited from proximity to whiteness while sometimes reproducing anti-Black prejudice within their own families.

Note: As this case overlaps with a story Stephen Chahn Lee has researched and written about in his own series on Asian American legal history, this piece focuses on the case's legal mechanics and its place in the broader throughline of this series. Readers interested in a deeper, family-centered account should also see Lee's piece, credited above alongside Berard's book, which remains the definitive account of the Lum family itself.

Footnotes

1. Britannica, "Gong Lum v. Rice." ↩

2. TIME, "Lum v. Rice: School Segregation Case That Set a Bad Precedent," drawing on Adrienne Berard, Water Tossing Boulders: How a Family of Chinese Immigrants Led the First Fight to Desegregate Schools in the Jim Crow South (Beacon Press, 2016); James Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White (Waveland Press, 1988). ↩

3. Berard, supra note 2; Loewen, supra note 2, on the merchant exemption under the Chinese Exclusion Act. ↩

4. Gong Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78 (1927), opinion text via Cornell Legal Information Institute; Mississippi Encyclopedia, "Lum v. Rice." ↩

5. Zinn Education Project, "Nov. 21, 1927: Lum v. Rice Supreme Court Ruling," quoting oral history excerpted in Berard, supra note 2. ↩

6. Gong Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78 (1927), statement of the petition. ↩

7. Berard, supra note 2, quoted in Zinn Education Project, supra note 5. ↩

8. Berard, interviewed in TIME, supra note 2. ↩

9. Id., quoting Brewer's argument before the Mississippi Supreme Court. ↩

10. Mississippi Encyclopedia, supra note 4, summarizing the Mississippi Supreme Court's reasoning in Rice v. Gong Lum, 139 Miss. 760 (1925). ↩

11. Berard, supra note 2; TIME, supra note 2, on Brewer's other casework and the handoff to James Flowers. ↩

12. TIME, supra note 2, summarizing the inconsistencies in Flowers's brief. ↩

13. Gong Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78 (1927). ↩

14. Id., citing Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education, 175 U.S. 528 (1899). ↩

15. Gong Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78 (1927). ↩

16. Wikipedia, "Lum v. Rice," quoting the Los Angeles Times editorial response to the decision; no alternative primary citation for this specific editorial was located, so this detail should be treated as resting on a single secondary source. ↩

17. Loewen, supra note 2; BlackPast.org, "Gong Lum v. Rice (1927)." ↩

18. Berda Lum, quoted in Berard, supra note 2; "Legacy," Gong Lum v. Rice: The Forgotten Case for Equal Education in the Jim Crow South, gonglumvrice.com, a research site drawing on family interviews and the Delta State University Archives. ↩