Lum V. Rice
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''Lum v. Rice'', 275
U.S. The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 contiguous ...
78 (1927), is a
United States Supreme Court The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that turn on question ...
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 Fourteenth Amendment (Amendment XIV) to the United States Constitution was adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments. Considered one of the most consequential amendments, it addresses Citizenship of the United States ...
. 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 Rosedale is a city and one of two county seats of Bolivar County, Mississippi, United States, the other seat being Cleveland. The Rosedale population was 1,873 at the 2010 census, down from 2,414 in 2000. Located in an agricultural area, the c ...
, 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 The Immigration Act of 1924, or Johnson–Reed Act, including the Asian Exclusion Act and National Origins Act (), was a United States federal law that prevented immigration from Asia and set quotas on the number of immigrants from every count ...
, 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 ecausethe 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, 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 A writ of (; ) is a judicial remedy in the English and American common law system consisting of a court order that commands a government official or entity to perform an act it is legally required to perform as part of its official duties, o ...
they sought, but then the school district appealed to the
Mississippi Supreme Court The Supreme Court of Mississippi is the highest court in the state of Mississippi. It was established in 1818 per the terms of the first constitution of the state and was known as the High Court of Errors and Appeals from 1832 to 1869. The court ...
, which heard the case ''
en banc In law, an ''en banc'' (; alternatively ''in banc'', ''in banco'' or ''in bank''; ) session is when all the judges of a court sit to hear a case, not just one judge or a smaller panel of judges. For courts like the United States Courts of Appeal ...
'' 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 In law, ''certiorari'' is a court process to seek judicial review of a decision of a lower court or government agency. ''Certiorari'' comes from the name of a prerogative writ in England, issued by a superior court to direct that the recor ...
'' 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 Louis Dembitz Brandeis ( ; November 13, 1856 – October 5, 1941) was an American lawyer who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, associate justice on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1916 to ...
to ask around if some other lawyer could be found on short notice to argue the case. Chief Justice
William Howard Taft William Howard Taft (September 15, 1857March 8, 1930) served as the 27th president of the United States from 1909 to 1913 and the tenth chief justice of the United States from 1921 to 1930. He is the only person to have held both offices. ...
'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 ''Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka'', 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the ...
'' a quarter-century later, it gave greater legal foundation to educational segregation in the short term and set back efforts to end it.


Background


Legal background

In the 1885 case '' Tape v. Hurley'', California's Supreme Court held that a Chinese student's exclusion from a
San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...
public school was unconstitutional; the state responded by allowing the establishment of segregated schools. Two years earlier, in the ''
Civil Rights Cases The ''Civil Rights Cases'', 109 U.S. 3 (1883), were a group of five landmark cases in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments did not empower Congress to outlaw racial discrimination by ...
'', the Court had held that the
Thirteenth In music or music theory, a thirteenth is the note thirteen scale degrees from the root of a chord and also the interval between the root and the thirteenth. The thirteenth is most commonly major or minor . A thirteenth chord is th ...
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 ''Plessy v. Ferguson'', 163 U.S. 537 (1896), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that ...
'', 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

Jeu Gong Lum, a native of
southern China Northern China () and Southern China () are two approximate regions that display certain differences in terms of their geography, demographics, economy, and culture. Extent The Qinling–Daba Mountains serve as the transition zone between ...
, illegally immigrated to the U.S. from Canada in 1904 and settled in the lower
Mississippi Delta The Mississippi Delta, also known as the Yazoo–Mississippi Delta, or simply the Delta, is the distinctive northwest section of the U.S. state of Mississippi (and portions of Arkansas and Louisiana) that lies between the Mississippi and Yazo ...
, where immigration laws were less enforced as employers sought to replace Black workers who had left for the
North North is one of the four compass points or cardinal directions. It is the opposite of south and is perpendicular to east and west. ''North'' is a noun, adjective, or adverb indicating Direction (geometry), direction or geography. Etymology T ...
. 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 A general merchant store (also known as general merchandise store, general dealer, village shop, or country store) is a rural or small-town store that carries a general line of merchandise. It carries a broad selection of merchandise, someti ...
. 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 Racial segregation is the separation of people into race (human classification), racial or other Ethnicity, ethnic groups in daily life. Segregation can involve the spatial separation of the races, and mandatory use of different institutions, ...
laws. Operating a store made Lum a merchant and thus exempt from the Exclusion Act. 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. 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.


Underlying dispute

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 The Immigration Act of 1924, or Johnson–Reed Act, including the Asian Exclusion Act and National Origins Act (), was a United States federal law that prevented immigration from Asia and set quotas on the number of immigrants from every count ...
, 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. 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 A governor is an politician, administrative leader and head of a polity or Region#Political regions, political region, in some cases, such as governor-general, governors-general, as the head of a state's official representative. Depending on the ...
who had just overwhelmingly lost an election to the
U.S. Senate The United States Senate is a chamber of the bicameral United States Congress; it is the upper house, with the U.S. House of Representatives being the lower house. Together, the Senate and House have the authority under Article One of the ...
, to represent them in legal action against the district. The Lums and their daughters were the
plaintiff A plaintiff ( Π in legal shorthand) is the party who initiates a lawsuit (also known as an ''action'') before a court. By doing so, the plaintiff seeks a legal remedy. If this search is successful, the court will issue judgment in favor of the ...
s; all the members of the school district's board of trustees, and other state education officials, were named as defendants, with the head of the board of trustees, Greek Rice, as the lead. Among the state officials was the state superintendent of education, Willard Faroe Bond, whom Brewer believed to have betrayed him politically while he was governor; Brewer thus drew some satisfaction from the knowledge that Bond would be personally served with the legal papers. A lower court granted the plaintiff's request of a
writ of mandamus A writ of (; ) is a judicial remedy in the English and American common law system consisting of a court order that commands a government official or entity to perform an act it is legally required to perform as part of its official duties, o ...
to force the members of the board of trustees to admit the Lums. Their case was not that racial discrimination as such was illegal but that his daughter, had incorrectly been classified as ''
colored ''Colored'' (or ''coloured'') is a racial descriptor historically used in the United States during the Jim Crow era to refer to an African American. In many places, it may be considered a slur. Dictionary definitions The word ''colored'' wa ...
'' by the authorities.


Mississippi Supreme Court

The trustees appealed to the
Supreme Court of Mississippi The Supreme Court of Mississippi is the Supreme court, highest court in the state of Mississippi. It was established in 1818 per the terms of the first constitution of the state and was known as the High Court of Errors and Appeals from 1832 to 1 ...
, which decided to hear the case ''
en banc In law, an ''en banc'' (; alternatively ''in banc'', ''in banco'' or ''in bank''; ) session is when all the judges of a court sit to hear a case, not just one judge or a smaller panel of judges. For courts like the United States Courts of Appeal ...
'', with all six justices participating. Assistant attorney general Elmer Clinton Sharp argued the case for the school district, reiterating the history of segregation in the state and saying that Asians and Native Americans were not considered white. Brewer argued in response that while the state constitution had indeed not put whites and Asians on equal footing, it had also distinguished Asians and Blacks, and therefore the Fourteenth Amendment required that the Lum children be schooled with whites. The court reversed the lower court's decision and allowed the board of trustees to exclude Martha Lum from the school for white children. Justice George Ethridge, a former teacher to whom his colleagues generally deferred in matters related to education, wrote for a unanimous court that considered the case as a question of whether the Lum children were within the statutory definition of white. While some other states' courts and statutes had extended the definition of "white" to include members of other races who were not Black, Mississippi's constitution and statutes were clearer in defining white people as those not "colored". " think," he wrote, "that the constitutional convention used the word 'colored' in the broad sense rather than the restricted sense; its purpose being to provide schools for the white or
Caucasian race The Caucasian race (also Caucasoid, Europid, or Europoid) is an Historical race concepts, obsolete racial classification of humans based on a now-disproven theory of biological race. The ''Caucasian race'' was historically regarded as a biologi ...
, to which schools no other race could be admitted, carrying out the broad dominant purpose of preserving the purity and integrity of the white race and its social policy."''Rice'', at 788 Ethridge found the most relevant
precedent Precedent is a judicial decision that serves as an authority for courts when deciding subsequent identical or similar cases. Fundamental to common law legal systems, precedent operates under the principle of ''stare decisis'' ("to stand by thin ...
to be ''Moreau v. Grandich'', a 1917 case where, in an opinion he had also authored, a unanimous court upheld the dismissal of several children of a white couple from the Bay St. Louis schools after it was learned that they had a Black great-grandmother. While that case had not gone beyond the instant issue in deciding that those whose racial heritage was colored above a certain threshold were themselves legally colored, Ethridge wrote, "a careful reading of the opinion ... shows that the court did not intend to restrict the term 'colored' to persons having negro blood in their veins or who were descendants of negroes or of the negro race." The state had also, since 1892, prohibited marriages between whites and Asians, for whom it used the term "Mongolians", the latter being defined as anyone with more than one-eighth Asian ancestry. Asians and coloreds, also barred from marrying whites, were free to marry each other, Ethridge noted. He added that a pair of U.S. Supreme Court decisions had both held that Asians were not white or Caucasian in the historical sense of how that word had been understood in the United States. Lum's right to an education was not affected by the decision, Ethridge concluded. She could attend the colored school, but did not have to, as she could also be educated privately, as long as she was educated. Lum and Brewer petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for ''
certiorari In law, ''certiorari'' is a court process to seek judicial review of a decision of a lower court or government agency. ''Certiorari'' comes from the name of a prerogative writ in England, issued by a superior court to direct that the recor ...
''.


U.S. Supreme Court


Before the Court

After the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in 1927, Brewer was preoccupied with representing the relatives of a Black man in Bolivar County who had been murdered immediately following his acquittal on murder charges in the death of a local white farmer's son, as they sought to have the killers brought to justice. Brewer handed the Lum case to a younger associate, James Flowers, who had prior to his employment with Brewer worked primarily as corporate counsel for several railroads in Mississippi. Flowers was aware that he was ignorant in the areas of law related to the case, especially the Fourteenth Amendment. Flowers' brief for the Supreme Court justices was inconsistent, alternating between defending segregation but attacking it inasmuch as he argued the Constitution protected Lum from being forced to attend a colored school, yet ending with a suggestion that segregated schools were inherently unequal. Justice
Louis Brandeis Louis Dembitz Brandeis ( ; November 13, 1856 – October 5, 1941) was an American lawyer who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, associate justice on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1916 to ...
, who believed the Fourteenth Amendment allowed too much federal interference with state authority yet was open to arguments that discrimination against members of minority groups violated their due process rights under the Fifth Amendment, to the point that he had written several majority opinions to that effect (most recently '' Ng Fung Ho v. White'', another case involving Chinese petitioners) was deeply disturbed by the brief; he asked a friend,
Felix Frankfurter Felix Frankfurter (November 15, 1882 – February 22, 1965) was an American jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1939 until 1962, advocating judicial restraint. Born in Vienna, Frankfurter im ...
(himself later appointed to the Court), if it might be possible to find more competent counsel for the Lums. The Lums themselves, realizing that the case had implications for all Chinese Americans, had similar concerns, and had arranged for a longtime friend of theirs, not a lawyer, to travel to Washington and be present at
oral argument Oral arguments are spoken presentations to a judge or appellate court by a lawyer (or parties when representing themselves) of the legal reasons why they should prevail. Oral argument at the appellate level accompanies written briefs, which also ...
. That would be unnecessary. Within a week of filing the brief, the Court informed Flowers by telegram that it had scheduled the case for argument within the next week. The short time available to travel to Washington, and the possibility that the case would be forfeited to the state if no one argued for the Lums, was the least of Flowers' concerns. He had never argued a case before any court, considering himself a poor public speaker. First he sought a
continuance In American procedural law, a continuance is the postponement of a hearing, trial, or other scheduled court proceeding at the request of either or both parties in the dispute, or by the judge ''sua sponte''. In response to delays in bringing cases ...
but learned that was unlikely, so then he and Brewer asked if the case could be decided purely on the basis of the briefs. The Court allowed that, and there would be no oral argument of ''Lum v. Rice'' before it.


Opinion of the Court

Late in November 1927 the Court announced its decision. In a nine-page unanimous opinion, with no footnotes, written by Chief Justice and former U.S. President
William Howard Taft William Howard Taft (September 15, 1857March 8, 1930) served as the 27th president of the United States from 1909 to 1913 and the tenth chief justice of the United States from 1921 to 1930. He is the only person to have held both offices. ...
, it affirmed the Mississippi Supreme Court's ruling and thus the position of the board of trustees. Taft held that the petitioner had not shown that there were no segregated schools accessible for the education of Martha Lum in Mississippi: Taft further stated that given the accessibility of segregated schools, the question then was whether a person of Chinese ancestry, born in and a citizen of the United States, was denied equal protection of the law by being given the opportunity to attend a school that received "only children of the brown, yellow or black races." In reference to '' Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education'', Taft concluded that the "right and power of the state to regulate the method of providing for the education of its youth at public expense is clear." Additionally, Taft pointed to a number of federal and state court decisions, most prominently ''
Plessy v. Ferguson ''Plessy v. Ferguson'', 163 U.S. 537 (1896), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that ...
'', all of which had upheld segregation in the public sphere and particularly in the realm of public education. Accordingly, Taft concluded:


Aftermath

The Lums had pre-emptively moved across the river to
Arkansas Arkansas ( ) is a landlocked state in the West South Central region of the Southern United States. It borders Missouri to the north, Tennessee and Mississippi to the east, Louisiana to the south, Texas to the southwest, and Oklahoma ...
, which did not restrict Chinese attendance at its schools as strictly, in case the decision went down against them. When it did, they settled in Elaine, where they opened another grocery and Katherine was able to find a high school that would accept her daughters. It was not as prosperous a market as the one in Rosedale, and in later years the family left the Delta region entirely. Other Chinese residents in Mississippi likewise began leaving the Delta, some even returning to China; save for those who found a few school districts still willing to accept their children in their white schools. Other Chinese families established private schools; in the late 1930s the state of Mississippi formally established some schools for Chinese students. They were never well-attended, and the last one closed in 1947. Earl Brewer continued to pursue civil rights cases in the courts. In 1936 he successfully argued '' Brown v. Mississippi'' before the Supreme Court, which held that confessions obtained through beatings and torture were inadmissible as evidence, reversing the convictions of several of his clients. Brewer died in 1942, before he could live to see schools desegregated, but that had happened by the time Jeu Gong died in 1965 and Katherine in 1988.


Press reaction

Newspapers around the country carried the
Associated Press The Associated Press (AP) is an American not-for-profit organization, not-for-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association, and produces news reports that are dist ...
account of the decision. Some responded with editorials. The ''
Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' is an American Newspaper#Daily, daily newspaper that began publishing in Los Angeles, California, in 1881. Based in the Greater Los Angeles city of El Segundo, California, El Segundo since 2018, it is the List of new ...
'' put its response, praising the Court and advocating for further segregation, on the front page: The ''
Chicago Defender ''The Chicago Defender'' is a Chicago-based online African-American newspaper. It was founded in 1905 by Robert S. Abbott and was once considered the "most important" newspaper of its kind. Abbott's newspaper reported and campaigned against Jim ...
'', a prominent Black newspaper, also ran a front-page editorial, condemning the decision as ignoring the "
separate but equal Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in United States constitutional law, according to which racial segregation did not necessarily violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which nominally guaranteed "equal protectio ...
" provisions supposedly governing segregation in light of the conditions found in many schools for Black children only:


Legacy

''Lum'' continued to be cited in briefs supporting racial segregation, and court decisions upholding it, until it was effectively overruled 27 years later by the Court's decision in ''
Brown v. Board of Education ''Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka'', 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the ...
'', which outlawed segregation in public schools. An important part of the decision still stands—the power of the state to make racial distinctions in its school system, and to determine the race of its students. It has not been overturned because it was not an issue in ''Brown''. It is remembered today for increasing the scope of permissible segregation. Historian and educator
James Loewen James William Loewen (February 6, 1942August 19, 2021) was an American sociologist, historian, and author. He was best known for his 1995 book, '' Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.'' A 2005 book, ''Sund ...
called ''Lum'' "the most racist Supreme Court decision in the twentieth century". Legal scholar Jamal Greene has called it an "ugly and unfortunate" decision. "The Court's ruling had established a precedent more powerful than the Lum family could have imagined", observed Adrienne Berard, in ''Water Tossing Boulders'', a history of the case. "By fighting, they had only made the enemy stronger."


See also

*
1927 in the United States Events from the year 1927 in the United States. Incumbents Federal government of the United States, Federal government * President of the United States, President: Calvin Coolidge (Republican Party (United States), R-Massachusetts) * Vice ...
* List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 275 * List of United States Supreme Court cases by the Taft Court * Chinese Americans in the Mississippi Delta


Notes


References


Further reading

* * White, G. Edward. "The lost episode of Gong Lum v. Rice." ''Green Bag'' 18.2 (2015): 191–205
online


External links

* * {{US14thAmendment, equalprotection United States school desegregation case law United States Supreme Court cases United States equal protection case law 1927 in United States case law Education in Bolivar County, Mississippi Overruled United States Supreme Court decisions Anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States Asian-American issues Legal history of Mississippi United States Supreme Court cases of the Taft Court Education segregation in Mississippi United States racial discrimination case law 1927 in Mississippi