RACE RELATIONS: A LEGAL DEFINITION OF COLOR

A Challenge to Segregated Education

In September 1925 Martha Lum, a Chinese American student, was denied admittance to Rosedale High School in Bolivar County, Mississippi, on the grounds that the facility was reserved exclusively for white pupils. School authorities told her father, Gong Lum, that she would have to attend an underfunded, "colored" high school of inferior quality in a nearby county. Gong Lum filed suit against the Bolivar County School District. He did not challenge the basic premise of racially segregated education. Instead his white attorney, Earl Brewer, argued, "Colored describes only one race, and that is the Negro." Martha Lum, he said, was a native-born American of pure Chinese extraction and "without any drop of Negro blood." Further-more, Gong Lum, a local dry-goods merchant, annually paid the county school taxes that provided funds for the maintenance of the all-white Bolivar County school system.

Preserving the "Lily-White" School

State education officials replied that all public schools in Mississippi were segregated institutions by law and that individuals of Chinese extraction must be classified as "non-white." Since students of the "Mongolian race" were so rare in Mississippi, it would be impractical for the state to build schools for their exclusive benefit, and therefore they must attend the schools provided for blacks. After Mississippi state courts ruled against Lum, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to consider the case in autumn 1927, issuing its ruling on 21 November 1927.

The Supreme Court Ruling

Chief Justice William Howard Taft read the unanimous opinion of the court, which accepted the arguments of Rush Knox, the attorney general of Mississippi. The chief justice declared that the term colored clearly designated "all members of the brown, yellow, red, and black races" and that the refusal to admit Martha Lum to an all-white school was not a violation of the "separate but equal" doctrine, which held that segregated education was legal if equal facilities were provided for all races. She had not, therefore, been deprived of her right to equal protection as guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment, Noting that Gong Lum had the means to send his daughter to a private school, Taft observed that the Constitution had reserved to the respective state governments the discretionary power to determine the basic operating guidelines for their public schools. Technically, this case was not a defeat for integrationists because Gong Lum had not opposed the right of white authorities to segregate African Americans pupils in inferior public educational facilities. Yet the case was a victory for white supremacists.