Lum v. Rice

Lum v. Rice
Supreme Court of the United States
Submitted October 12, 1927 Decided November 21, 1927
Full case name	Gong Lum, et al. v. Rice et al.
Citations	275 U.S. 78 (more) 48 S. Ct. 91; 72 L. Ed. 172; 1927 U.S. LEXIS 256
Case history
Prior	Trial court ordered writ of mandamus. Reversed by Supreme Court of Mississippi, 139 Miss. 760, 104 So. 105.
Holding
Chinese children do not meet the statutory definition of "white" and thus may lawfully be denied admission to schools reserved for children of that race only; attendance at school for Black students is constitutional as long as facilities are equal to those provided whites. Classifying students by race and segregating them is within state authority under Fourteenth Amendment. Mississippi Supreme Court affirmed.
Court membership
Chief Justice William H. Taft Associate Justices Oliver W. Holmes Jr. · Willis Van Devanter James C. McReynolds · Louis Brandeis George Sutherland · Pierce Butler Edward T. Sanford · Harlan F. Stone
Case opinion
Majority	Taft, joined by unanimous
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. XIV
Overruled by
Brown v. Board of Education (1954, in part)

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.^[1]

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, 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; instead 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.