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 <em>Water Tossing Boulders</em> 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

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

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.

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 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.

Mississippi Supreme Court

The trustees appealed to the Supreme Court of Mississippi, which decided to hear the case en banc, 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.

Ethridge found the most relevant precedent 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.

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, 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, 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. 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. until it was effectively overruled 27 years later by the Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, 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 called Lum "the most racist Supreme Court decision in the twentieth century".