Gong Lum v. Rice was a unanimous United States Supreme Court decision issued on November 21, 1927, holding that Mississippi could classify a Chinese-American child as “colored” and bar her from attending a whites-only public school. Chief Justice William Howard Taft wrote the opinion, which stretched the reach of racial segregation in public education past the Black-white framework of earlier cases. The ruling stayed on the books until Brown v. Board of Education dismantled the separate-but-equal doctrine in 1954.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Gong Lum v. Rice
How Martha Lum Was Kept Out of School
Martha Lum was born on January 21, 1915. Her father, Gong Lum, was a resident and taxpayer in the Rosedale Consolidated High School District in Bolivar County, Mississippi. When the school opened for the 1924 term, the family enrolled Martha, then nine years old. She attended briefly. On her first day, at noon recess, the superintendent pulled her out on orders from the board of trustees.
The reason had nothing to do with her grades or behavior. School officials decided her Chinese ancestry made her “colored,” and the Rosedale school was for white children only.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Gong Lum v. Rice
The Argument the Family Made
The Lum family sought a writ of mandamus, a court order that would force the school to readmit Martha. Their petition emphasized that Gong Lum paid the taxes funding the school, that Martha was a native-born United States citizen, and that she was “not a member of the colored race nor is she of mixed blood, but that she is pure Chinese.” Barring her, they argued, violated the Fourteenth Amendment.2Library of Congress. Gong Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78 (1927)
Notice what the family did not argue. They never claimed that segregation itself was unconstitutional. Their position was narrower: the school board had put a Chinese child in the wrong racial box. That framing shaped everything the Supreme Court said, and it mattered again decades later when Brown v. Board was decided.
Mississippi’s Two-Category Rule
Mississippi’s Constitution of 1890, in Section 207, required that “Separate schools shall be maintained for children of the white and colored races.”3Cornell Law School. Gong Lum v. Rice The state ran separate school districts for each group, with separate geographic boundaries and separate funding structures.
The constitutional text recognized only two categories: white and colored. There was no third designation for Chinese, Japanese, Native American, or any other group. When Mississippi’s own supreme court reviewed Martha’s case in Rice v. Gong Lum, it read “colored” broadly to cover the “brown, yellow, and black races,” placed Martha in that category, and told her family she could attend the Black public school or find a private one.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Gong Lum v. Rice
What the Supreme Court Held
The question before the U.S. Supreme Court was narrow: did Mississippi violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause by classifying a child of Chinese descent as “colored” and requiring her to attend the school designated for Black children? The Court’s answer, delivered unanimously through Chief Justice Taft, was no.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Gong Lum v. Rice
Taft’s opinion rested on two earlier decisions. From Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education (1899), the Court took Justice Harlan’s statement that the management of public schools “is a matter belonging to the respective states” and that federal courts should not intervene except where rights were clearly disregarded. That gave the Court a doctrinal reason to defer to Mississippi’s choices about how to sort its students.3Cornell Law School. Gong Lum v. Rice
From Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Court took the separate-but-equal doctrine itself. The Fourteenth Amendment, the justices wrote, “was not intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality.” If separate facilities for Black and white citizens passed constitutional muster, the same logic covered a Chinese-American child grouped with Black students. Mississippi had offered Martha a seat in a public school. In the Court’s view, that ended the Fourteenth Amendment question.3Cornell Law School. Gong Lum v. Rice
What the Family Did After the Ruling
The decision closed off any legal route to a white public school in Mississippi. Martha’s mother, Katherine Lum, refused to accept it. She first sent Martha, her sister, and her younger brother to stay with a relative in Michigan, where the public schools admitted them without objection. The family later moved to Arkansas, where a white school enrolled the children. Martha and her sister graduated from high school in 1933.
The same child ruled ineligible for a white classroom in Mississippi could walk into one across state lines. Segregation laws varied by state not just in severity but in whom they targeted.
How Brown v. Board Overtook the Decision
Gong Lum v. Rice remained part of the legal foundation for school segregation for nearly three decades. In 1954, the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, holding that “in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place” and that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Segregated schools, the Court ruled, violated the Equal Protection Clause.4Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
The Brown Court addressed Gong Lum directly and drew a careful line. It noted that in the 1927 case “the validity of the doctrine itself was not challenged.” The Lum family had contested only Martha’s classification, not the principle of separating children by race. Brown treated Gong Lum as a case about misclassification, which meant the earlier ruling did not have to be overruled head-on. The separate-but-equal reasoning that had sustained Taft’s opinion, however, was now dead law.
A decade later, Congress reinforced the outcome by statute. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in any program receiving federal financial assistance, covering public schools from pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade as well as colleges and universities.5U.S. Department of Education. Education and Title VI A school district that did today what Rosedale did in 1924 would lose its federal funding.
Section 207 of the Mississippi Constitution, the provision the case turned on, was repealed by the state legislature in 1977 and formally deleted by voter ratification on November 7, 1978.6Mississippi Secretary of State. Mississippi Constitution Gong Lum v. Rice retains historical importance for showing how Jim Crow segregation operated beyond the Black-white framework that dominates most accounts, sweeping Chinese-American children, and by extension any non-white child, into a single legal category regardless of ancestry, citizenship, or the taxes their families paid.