Asian Americans’ Challenges to Segregated Schools
In the summer of 1904, the Kentucky state school board found itself faced with an unprecedented question: Are Filipinos “Negroes”? This legal quandary was not part of the conversation earlier in the year when the DuPont Manual Training High School in Louisville agreed to admit four Filipino students into its engineering program. However, come July, the question of Filipinos’ racial classification loomed large over the approaching school year. Based on Kentucky segregation laws, “coloreds” (synonymous at this time in Kentucky with “Negroes”) were not permitted to attend school with whites. That much was clear, but whether or not Filipinos were colored was not so easy to discern. The school board agreed that Filipinos were certainly not white, but did that make them legally black? Throughout the early twentieth century, the state of Kentucky was not alone in its puzzlement over the racial classification of Asian Americans when it came to education.
The interstitial identity of Asian Americans living in the Jim Crow South often created unique challenges and obstacles to their achieving an education. While southern schools were often segregated along the lines of “colored” or “Negro” and “white,” Asian Americans did not always fall neatly into one of these categories.1 As more Asian Americans began to populate areas of the South during the 1920s and 1930s as families grew, the question of which school they should legally attend became more prominent and pressing. Although Asian Americans did not identify as black, southern law often lumped them together with “coloreds,” barring them from attending white schools. However, determining whether or not Asian Americans were colored was also problematic considering the wide range of racial categories, including “Mongoloids,” “Malays,” “Orientals,” or simply “yellows.” These classifications were certainly not “white,” but did they warrant Asian Americans sending their children to all-black schools?2
The answers to this question varied, making southern school segregation both challenging and malleable for Asian Americans. Some (particularly Chinese Americans) who lived in the South used a strategy of “white accommodation” to attempt to gain access to white schools and other areas of white life, sometimes successfully and other times not.3 In many ways, the experiences of Chinese Americans and other Asian Americans in the South were similar to those of other immigrant groups, such as the Italians, who could be simultaneously “white” and “immigrant other,” depending on their location.4 However, flattening the legal strategies and tactics of Asian Americans for attacking school segregation diminishes the complex challenges that Asian Americans presented to school districts, local and state law officials, and even the Supreme Court. “White” was often a murky concept, and Asian Americans living in the South tried to capitalize on the often fluctuating definitions of racial categories. Rather than argue for their whiteness, Asian Americans more often sought to prove their “Orientalness” or strove for a noncolored status, working with their “other” identity rather than fighting against it. Asian Americans believed that access to white schools was a fundamental right, and they challenged the binary racial system by attempting to fashion a third category defined by ethnicity rather than race.
Appealing to their foreign national status was also a legal strategy used by Chinese Americans to avoid sending their children to colored or black schools. In this case, not being an American citizen had benefits, as the Chinese claimed that they were protected under special privileges granted by treaties between the United States and China. Arguing that they were nationally Chinese was in some ways a more straightforward tactic supported with legal documents. Adding immigrant status to the study of school segregation further complicates a history of racism and discrimination that is usually summed up with Brown v. Board of Education. Discrimination in education was never simply about skin color or racial conceptions, but the legal status of Chinese immigrants brought questions of citizenship, national belonging, and political identity into debates surrounding race and ethnicity in southern schools.
The most notable example of Asian Americans’ run-ins with southern segregation is the 1927 Lum v. Rice Supreme Court case. In 1924, Jeu Gong Lum, a Chinese immigrant merchant living in the Mississippi Delta, sent his two daughters, Martha and Berda (the oldest), to the school closest to his house, Bolivar County’s Rosedale Consolidated High School, as he had done the previous year. When the school refused to admit Martha and Berda that year, Gong Lum launched a fight against the local school board, arguing that his daughters were “pure Chinese” and therefore not subject to the local segregation laws because they were neither white nor colored. The case eventually worked its way through the legal system to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the judges declared that Chinese Americans are indeed colored and should attend colored schools in Mississippi.
While the Gong Lum case remains the most cited Asian American experience with school segregation in the South, a companion appeal, the 1927 Bond, State Superintendent of Education v. Tij Fung case is equally important in defining the varied experiences of Asian Americans with Jim Crow education. In 1927, Joe Tin Lun, an American-born boy of Chinese descent, was denied admission to a whites-only school in Dublin, Mississippi, prompting his guardians to sue the school district for denying him his immigrant rights as guaranteed in special treaties between China and the United States. The Mississippi Supreme Court dismissed Lun’s appeal on the grounds that ethnic and immigrant status meant little in terms of racial classifications. The Lun case is often overlooked, but it reveals an interesting point of comparison and contrast with Lum, as do the legal battles of Chinese Americans and other ethnic groups across the South before Brown v. Board.
Placing the legal strategies found in the Lum and the Lun cases alongside those of other Asian Americans in the South exposes the complex picture of ethnicity, immigration, and otherness brought to light by school segregation. Rather than focusing on one group, such as Chinese Americans in Mississippi (the standard example in the existing literature), this chapter places Chinese Americans in Mississippi in a broader context through comparisons with the experiences of Chinese Americans in Georgia, Filipino Americans in Kentucky, and Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans in New Orleans, Texas, and parts of Florida. In some instances, Asian American students attended white schools and colleges without much resistance, even when the law demanded otherwise. In others, Asian Americans chose to construct their own private schools instead of being drawn into the identity games of choosing which “side” to fight on. However, as the Lum and Lun cases as well as the experiences of Chinese Americans of Georgia demonstrate, others emphasized either their “nonblackness” (rather than “whiteness”) or their Chinese ethnicity and/or immigrant status to protest laws that required their children to attend the underfunded colored schools. If Chinese American students were forced to attend the colored schools by law, then Chinese Americans would be classified as colored, threatening the distance that Chinese Americans attempted to maintain between themselves and African Americans. Unlike Brown v. Board, the legal fight against discrimination in education determined the racial status of Asian Americans and cast doubt on their ability to dictate their own identity in the black-and-white South.
Although segregation was certainly not unheard of in other parts of the nation, southern states ardently codified and enforced their Jim Crow laws in education. In the decades before and even after Brown v. Board, a racial line drawn between blacks and whites characterized the educational experiences of generations of children in the South. Asian Americans were also no strangers to school segregation. While there was often no de jure segregation at the state level along the West Coast, there was also no explicit legislation preventing local school boards from prohibiting Asian American and other minority students from attending white schools. In 1906, Japanese American parents in San Francisco objected when the city attempted to segregate their children from whites in public schools. In response to the outcry, the Japanese government entered into the Gentlemen’s Agreement with America in 1907 that secured a guarantee from President Theodore Roosevelt that Japanese in the United States would receive basic rights and protections in exchange for Japan’s limiting the number of visas it approved for laborers seeking to enter the United States. This halted legally enforced segregation in San Francisco for Japanese Americans; but other forms of de facto segregation abounded in California, and the agreement did not address discrimination for other Asian Americans across the country. The terrain of segregation in education was varied on the West Coast: Some Asian American students attended public schools that were majority Asian, others received their education from private tutors or from Chinese- or Japanese-language schools, and many attended integrated schools where possible. However, the stigma of being “Oriental” affected the educational experiences of many students.5
For Asian Americans living in the South, seeking an education at a segregated school was often a conundrum. Not only did Asian Americans experience extreme fluctuations in school policies from one state to the next, but discrepancies often arose at the local levels even within the same state. Take, for example, the cases of a group of Filipino students and a Chinese student who attempted to enroll in white high schools in two separate cities in Kentucky during the early 1900s. In 1904, four pensionados (students from the Philippines invited to attend high schools and colleges in the United States on scholarships from the American colonial government) applied and were initially accepted to the DuPont Manual Training School in Louisville. Filipino and American colonial officials designed the Pensionado Program in 1903 as an opportunity for “Americanization” of Filipinos who chose to pursue their education at American high schools and colleges and universities. In doing so, colonial leaders hoped that Filipinos who took advantage of the government-funded scholarships would develop a deep appreciation of American values, traditions, and democracy and return to the Philippines after their studies in order to assume positions in the colonial bureaucracy. The Pensionado Program was also an attempt to cultivate good relations between the colony and the metropole and overcome lingering revolutionary tendencies after the American victory in the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the subsequent American annexation of the islands. High schools and colleges across the country readily admitted pensionados as an opportunity to bring culture and worldliness to their students. In Kentucky, however, the problem of race far outweighed the potential for cultural growth and improved colonial relations.6
While the DuPont School initially supported the Pensionado Program and agreed to admit the students earlier in the year, by July 1904 questions of the racial status of the Filipino Americans created distress for the local administration as well as the state school board. Under Kentucky law (as in many other southern states), schools were segregated along lines of “white” and “colored.” “Colored” was a catchall term meant to encompass any race that was not considered white. If race was so easily demarcated, then the DuPont administration would have determined the Filipinos to be colored and therefore unfit to attend the white high schools in the state. But such determination was not easy when it came to Filipino Americans. Many southerners in the early 1900s had never before encountered Filipinos beyond pictures and souvenirs sent back from the Philippines or images taken of the “savage” Filipino exhibit at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Filipinos were people to be studied and ogled from afar, and the possibility of them arriving in Kentucky no doubt forced the school board to think carefully about whether or not their decision to admit the students was wise. As the meeting between the colonial subjects and the white students and teachers of DuPont loomed, the administration worried about a potential clash with parents and other white residents.7
In an attempt to solve the problem of the pensionado students, the school board investigated the racial standing of Filipino Americans in a segregated system. More specifically, the debate over the Filipino Americans’ racial status was not whether or not they were white or “colored” but whether or not the pensionados were “Negroes.” Under the revamped Kentucky segregation law (or the Day Law) of 1904, it was “unlawful to maintain or operate any college, school, or institution where persons of the white and colored races are both allowed to attend,” and colored institutions were required to be located at least twenty-five miles from the white schools.8 The Day Law was clear in stating that African Americans were colored, but it was less so regarding Filipinos Americans. Because the school board associated “colored” with “Negro,” it had the task of determining whether or not Filipino Americans were black according to the law. This was no easy undertaking and required the assistance of a professor from the University of Kentucky who investigated the state’s Jim Crow laws to decipher the Filipinos Americans’ standing.9
After analyzing the racial implications of the Day Law, Professor H. Mark declared that while the law ordered schools to separate white from colored or Negro students, “colored” also included “Indians” and “other brown races.” The conclusion that Filipinos were a “brown” race was no surprise: Many Americans often referred to Filipinos as “brown brothers” or, more paternally, their “little brown brothers” in describing their colonial relationship to the United States as well as their skin color. However, the “little brown brothers” presented a challenge to the new Day Law. Was there a difference between “brown” and “colored,” or “brown” and “Negro”? The Filipino American students forced the state school board and scholars to grapple with this puzzle in the state’s segregation and education policies. Apart from Native Americans, the presence of other races besides African Americans was small, with virtually no other Filipinos in the state at the time of the debate over the students’ racial status.10 Essentially, the Filipino American students presented to both the school board and the state of Kentucky the first real technical problem with the supposedly easy segregation of schools between white and colored. However, because the ultimate conclusion was that brown races are indeed colored, the school board refused to admit the Filipino American students and cited the Day Law as justification for their decision. While it is not clear what happened to the four Filipino American students who were turned away from DuPont, the stir they created led to the establishment of a new racial category in Kentucky—other brown races—to be used for any future legal complications that might arise in school policy. The creation of the “brown” race was useful for the school board but lacked any special privileges for the Filipino Americans, who were grouped with African Americans.11
But the state school board’s decision in the case of the Louisville Filipino Americans did not match the outcome of a later battle between a Chinese American boy and an all-white school in Covington, Kentucky, which demonstrated that not all Asian Americans were “colored” after all. In 1913, fourteen-year-old American-born Pong Dock sought enrollment in the all-white First District School. What followed after Pong Dock’s request was a debate similar to that involving the Filipino Americans in Louisville. Rather than focusing on whether or not the boy was Negro, however, the main goal of the Covington school board entailed deciphering whether or not Pong Dock fell into the category of “colored.” The population of Chinese Americans in northern Kentucky during the 1900s was small, and most of the inhabitants were single males. But as the number of American-born Chinese children increased, the question of where they should go to school in the segregated state became an obsession. Although Pong Dock was the first Chinese American to request admission to the white school, white parents and residents of Covington argued that he should attend the colored school because he was not of European descent and therefore not white. On the contrary, Pong Dock’s parents argued that he was certainly not black and therefore belonged in the white school rather than the colored school in Covington.12
The question of Pong Dock’s racial status and its effect on which school he attended grew into a statewide problem. “What shall be done with Pong Dock?” became a concern for not only the Covington school board but also the state of Kentucky. An article in the Hartford Herald explained to readers that the “little chubby fellow” was an “oriental” and the first Chinese American to request admission to the Covington public schools. Unlike Pong Dock, other Chinese American parents schooled their own children or sent them to Chinese-language schools in nearby Cincinnati. “Oriental” was a racial category that the author of the news article used and one that, presumably, Kentuckians were aware of, but this classification did little to clarify which school Pong Dock should attend. His background and residential history also added a layer of complexity to his case. While he was born in America, he relocated to China with his parents when he was three years old. In September 1913, his parents sent him back to America to live with family friend Sing Lee so that he would be “brought up and educated as an American citizen.” Because Pong Dock spent a good number of his formative years in China, Kentuckians viewed him as being “educated there as a Chinaman,” negating his American status and emphasizing his Oriental otherness. Not only was Pong Dock’s racial classification up for grabs, but his ethnicity also complicated his educational standing in the state’s attempts to determine his legal race. His predicament had “the state of Kentucky scratching its legal head” over whether or not a Chinese boy belongs in a white or colored school.13
The official determination of Pong Dock’s admission and racial status became a game of hot potato, with various officials eager to avoid ruling on the complicated question. When white parents protested against Pong Dock’s potential admission, First Covington’s Superintendent Homer O. Sluss elected to defer to the authority of the Covington Board of School Commissioners. Unable to come to an agreement on whether or not they should permit Pong Dock to attend the white school, the board then turned the matter over to the Kentucky attorney general, James Garnett. While Sluss, the school board, and other parties focused heavily on determining Pong Dock’s race, the attorney general also concentrated on bringing Pong Dock’s citizenship status into the debate. In a letter to Superintendent of Public Instruction Barksdale Hamlett, Garnett explained that “under the laws of the United States, a Chinese immigrant cannot become a citizen of the United States, therefore, he cannot become a citizen of this state. So far as I’m informed, there are only two races that can become citizens of the United States, i.e., the white race and the negro race.” Garnett emphasized that “there is no provision whereby a Mongolian may become a citizen of this country.”14 Although Pong Dock was an American citizen based on his birth in the United States, his “Mongolian” race more generally was denied naturalization under existing legislation and was also denied admission to the United States under the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in 1882 and renewed indefinitely in 1902.
Unlike African Americans who fought against Jim Crow laws that violated their given rights as American citizens, individuals like Pong Dock had to fight to prove that they had citizenship rights in the first place, struggling to overcome generalized stereotypes that all Asian Americans, even those born in America, were racially and legally others. Despite the 1898 Supreme Court ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that emphasized that the birthright citizenship component of the Fourteenth Amendment applied to all persons born in the United States, including Chinese Americans, many Americans still doubted the citizenship of Asian Americans because of their racial and ethnic backgrounds.15 As such, Mongolians were not and could not become American citizens and were only aliens with limited rights and privileges. As Garnett explained, “Generally speaking, we owe to aliens no duty, except to protect their person and their property, and if the State of Kentucky should deny to a person of the Mongolian race, the right to attend public schools, it could not be said that the State was depriving citizens the equal protection of the laws.”16 For Garnett, Pong Dock’s citizenship and civil rights were irrelevant; it was Pong Dock’s race, specifically his “Mongolian-ness,” that gave Garnett pause.17
Garnett then moved on to a more convoluted explanation of how Pong Dock’s citizenship affected his racial standing in Kentucky by drawing on the significance of states’ rights in relation to education. Despite a Mongolian’s inability to naturalize, “the State has the right to care for and educate the members of alien races if it so desires.” Garnett explained that “it is necessary to consider the Constitution of Kentucky . . . in order to ascertain whether the right to attend the common schools of the State is based upon citizenship or the right to citizenship.”18 In the exceptional case of Pong Dock, who was both a Mongolian and an American citizen, if the state took only his citizenship into consideration rather than his race, then he “would have no right to attend our public schools, because our Legislature has provided for schools only for the white race and the colored race and the word, ‘colored,’ as used in our Constitution and Statute relates to the negro race.”19 While Pong Dock was a citizen (despite being of Mongolian descent), he was, according to the Kentucky constitution, a member of neither the white nor the black race and therefore was not entitled to an education in the state. There were no state-funded Mongolian or Chinese schools, and although Pong Dock did hold American citizenship, he was not a citizen of the state of Kentucky and therefore the state could decide whether or not it wanted to accommodate him. If he were either white or colored (which is how the Louisville district described the Filipinos), it would be easier to decide which school he should attend. In this case, Pong Dock’s in-between racial status and American citizenship did little to advance his case with the attorney general.
Garnett used his labyrinthine reasoning to meditate on the legal puzzles of Pong Dock’s position rather than to offer a clear solution to the problem facing the school district. Despite his argument that Pong Dock’s race meant that he could not attend either a white or a colored school in the state, Garnett emphasized that in Kentucky, “there is no provision for a separate school for any of the races, except the white race and the negro race. If a child belongs to any race and resides within the State of Kentucky, in good faith, and comes within the provisions of the School Law, it is entitled to the benefits of the public school. . . . Children shall all attend the public school, regardless of race.”20 Because public education was a privilege for all children in Kentucky and Mongolians were not specifically mentioned as colored, then “there is nothing in [the] law that would prevent the Chinese boy to whom you refer, from attending either the white or the colored school, and in my opinion, it is left to the Board of Education as to which school he shall attend.”21 Not only did the attorney general rule that the question be returned to the school board; he also suggested that “if the board should be of the opinion that it was not best for [Pong Dock] to attend either of the schools, I think the board might make some reasonable regulation to have the child privately instructed, so that he would receive the equal benefits of the public school.”22 Unlike the school board in Louisville, the attorney general did not consider Mongolians as part of the colored race because they were not black, and in the state of Kentucky, the education decisions for those who were neither white nor black were to be decided at the local level. The Covington school board agreed to allow Pong Dock to attend the white school, and despite the pushback from parents and other white residents of Covington who attempted to persuade the boy to attend the colored school, other Asian Americans were able to attend white or colored schools after Pong Dock’s experience. Although Pong Dock’s racial and citizenship status initially presented a roadblock, his “Mongolian-ness” worked in his favor with the attorney general later on.
The above examples of how two different groups of Asian Americans could be considered “brown/colored” and “Mongolian/not black” within the same state raises an interesting point on the perplexing presence of Asian Americans in the South. Even African Americans across the country took note of Pong Dock’s case and the ruling that he was not colored and placed it in context with other segregation laws. How could Chinese be “noncolored” enough to attend white schools in Kentucky, while in Nebraska and other states around the country, Chinese were considered “colored” and unable to wed whites?23 In many cases, the state and local decisions on education did not always line up with decisions on other matters, including miscegenation. A Chinese American boy might be considered noncolored and able to attend a white school, while in the same state a Chinese American man could be classified as colored for the purposes of preventing interracial marriage. Even in terms of education, there was wide variation from state to state. Under state law in Louisiana, schools were segregated along white and colored lines; however, unlike in the state of Kentucky, there was never a challenge to the binary system by Asian Americans. Legally, for educational purposes, Asian Americans were neither colored nor white, and there was no official ruling or discussion of which school the students should attend. As a result, the few Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans living in New Orleans during the early twentieth century often attended white schools or organized their own private institutions for learning. Similarly, in Tennessee and Arkansas, Asian Americans were legally allowed to attend white schools, unlike in neighboring Mississippi, where Asian Americans were considered colored. In the Jacksonville area of Florida and other communities along the Atlantic coast of the state, small Japanese American farming communities created their own schools for Japanese children because under Florida law “the schools for white children and the schools for Negro children shall be conducted separately.” In some cases, no mention of Asians, Orientals, or Mongolians meant that Asian American children were free to attend white schools, particularly if the population in a given area was small enough to not raise concern among white residents. Unlike miscegenation, allowing Asian Americans into white schools was often not deemed an immediate threat to white society. Jim Crow laws were clear in stating the limitations for black students, but when it came to Asian Americans, there was more maneuverability and access to white schools throughout the South. Such maneuverability, however, only lasted so long as the population of Asian Americans within larger communities remained low.24
The prospect of one or two Chinese American or Japanese American students attending white schools typically did not produce any mass outcries from citizens between the late 1800s and the 1920s, but when the population of Asian Americans in southern communities began to creep up past three or four families and the number of Asian American children grew by the mid-1920s, trouble began for the Asian students. This slight yet noticeable population growth coincided with a growing wave of wariness and suspicion toward Asians and “new” immigrants from southern, central, and eastern Europe. Anti-immigrant sentiment shaped immigration policy between 1917 and 1924, when Congress passed a series of exclusionary and restrictive immigration laws. Although the Chinese Exclusion Act had been in place since 1882, a growing population of Japanese immigrants on the West Coast prompted calls from inhabitants and legislators in California and Washington for exclusion of Japanese and, more generally, Asians. In addition to a variety of acts prohibiting immigrants who were illiterate, suspected of criminal activity, and/or mentally or physical ill from entering the United States, Congress also passed the Immigration Act of 1917, which created the Asiatic Barred Zone and added Indians to a growing list of Asian immigrants who were not permitted to settle in the United States. At that point, Japanese immigrants were exempt from the list due to diplomatic relations between Japan and the United States. In 1924, however, Congress passed the National Origins Act and severely restricted the number of “undesirable” immigrants coming from southern and southeastern Europe in favor of “traditional” immigrants from western and northern European countries. The 1924 act also excluded all Asians (Japanese included) from entering the United States, granting exceptions only for temporary migrants such as students, state officials, and clergy. The rash of exclusionary and restrictive immigration acts following World War I reflected rising anti-immigrant and anti-Asian attitudes across the country that reached the smallest schoolhouses in the South and affected the small bands of Chinese students who attended them.
No greater example of the increasing challenges to Asian Americans pursuing their education in white schools can be found than in the case of Chinese Americans. They were the Asian American group with the largest population across southern states during the early to mid-twentieth century, and their slowly increasing numbers bred growing resentment against their children attending white schools. Chinese Americans were once seen as an acceptable oddity, a group of others who tended to their businesses in the black sections of town and generally kept to themselves, save the one or two children who attended white schools, but their racial identities came under fire during the mid-1920s and early 1930s. Suddenly, school boards began to bar Chinese Americans from attending the schools where they had been fellow students with white children, forcing them into the colored schools for African Americans. Chinese Americans were once racial others, but now local schools and white parents attempted to reclassify them as colored. Although previous skirmishes between students such as Pong Dock and the Kentucky school board were settled informally through reviews by the attorney general or local school boards on a case-by-case basis, in states with larger Asian populations, local, state, and federal courts were increasingly tasked with enumerating the specific legal rights of “in-between” people.25
Before there was Oliver Brown, the father from Topeka, Kansas, who would become the figurehead in the battle against school segregation with the 1954 Brown v. Board Supreme Court case, there was Jeu Gong Lum, a Chinese immigrant grocery store owner from Rosedale, Mississippi. Like other Chinese living in the Mississippi Delta region in the 1920s, Gong Lum had a comfortable life. Gong Lum entered the United States through the Canadian border in the Pacific Northwest in an attempt to avoid immigration officials after the Chinese Exclusion Act and eventually found his way to the Mississippi Delta, where a distant relative lived. Once settled, Gong Lum met and married a Chinese woman, Katherine Wong, who had lived in the Delta since she was a child. Gong Lum traveled a route similar to that of other Chinese looking to leave the West Coast and its stringent anti-alien land laws that prohibited Asians from owning property.26 No such legislation existed in Mississippi, and Chinese seeking new business ventures in the state (the home of the largest Chinese population in the South at the time) joined other Chinese who were descendants of the hired Chinese laborers who came to Arkansas during the late 1800s to work in agriculture. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Chinese population was low (only 243 Chinese were counted in the entire state of Mississippi, according to the 1900 census), and Chinese were generally tolerated by both white and black residents. They filled an economic niche by living and setting up shop as grocers in the black neighborhoods of Delta towns and earning the toleration if not the outright respect and acceptance of the local white population. So long as the Chinese were not competing for labor or business with whites and abided by the rules and customs of the state and local communities, they were often prosperous and comfortable in their new homes.27
The relative economic comfort of Chinese American merchants in the Delta allowed families to grow and raise American-born children, as the Lums did when their daughters, Berda and Martha, were born in Rosedale in 1913 and 1915, respectively. Between 1900 and 1920, the Chinese American population in Mississippi increased to 364, a growth attributed to more settlement but also to a rising number of children born to Chinese immigrants in the state. In accordance with the Mississippi constitution of 1890, all children were to attend public schools, and throughout the early twentieth century the few Chinese Americans in Mississippi towns often attended the local white schools with few objections from white parents. As in other states, Mississippi state law segregated white students from colored students, but residents and school officials presumed “colored” to mean “black.” Since Chinese American students were not black, they initially attended white schools throughout the Delta and the state. No school boards or state officials had formally ruled at this point that Chinese Americans were colored, and for Chinese American parents, sending their children to the white schools was not a choice as much as a reaction to Mississippi culture and racism. While the white schools were better-maintained than the colored schools and had obvious advantages for achieving a higher level of education, Chinese American parents’ desires to keep their children out of the black schools also reflected the often uneasy tensions between Chinese and blacks in Mississippi. Although blacks were often customers at Chinese groceries and Chinese Americans willingly accepted their money, the relationship between the two races rarely went beyond that of clerk and customer. Chinese Americans were well aware of the stigma that African Americans carried, and, also aware of the prejudice against Asian Americans as demonstrated on the West Coast, they believed that generally avoiding personal interactions with African Americans was a smart strategy in the South. More personal relationships between Chinese Americans and African Americans developed, particularly among the early male Chinese settlers, who intermarried with black women in the Delta, but by the 1920s, such behavior was shunned by the Chinese American community. Chinese Americans who willingly entered into relationships with African Americans could expect to be ostracized by the rest of their small, tight-knit community, a fate that could spell social and economic ruin. One Chinese American woman explained that “there are two circles of Chinese in the town between which a decided line is drawn. The set who are 100 per cent Chinese do not associate with those who mingle with Negroes or intermarry with them.”28 Chinese American parents attempted to maintain the distance between themselves and African Americans by avoiding the colored schools. Their self-segregation was not so much an attempt to classify themselves as white as much as it was a way to be sure that they were not classified as black or colored by the rest of society. For Chinese Americans, their Orientalness took them far in Mississippi, and they tried to hold on to this status and the social and economic benefits it provided for as long as possible, be it through preserving their ethnic purity or by keeping their children away from the colored schools.
Students and instructor Miss Mary Ethel Dismukes at the Greenville Chinese School, established by Superintendent E. E. Bass following his concern for the lack of education opportunities for Chinese Americans, March 29, 1938. Courtesy of the Archives and Records Services Division, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.
As Gong Lum would find out, however, sending his children to white schools became more difficult as the Chinese American population grew in the Delta. When the number of American-born Chinese in Mississippi increased, more whites noticed the subsequent increase in the number of Chinese Americans attending their schools. Although growth was modest, it was noticeable, and white parents grew wary of a potential Asian American population explosion on the model of the West Coast and increased interaction between their children and Chinese American students. White parents began to object to the presence of Chinese Americans in their children’s schools, and principals and other school administrators noted the complaints. Rapidly, local schools began to classify Chinese Americans as colored and barred them from attending white institutions. In the case of young Martha Lum, the transformation from Oriental to colored happened not overnight but, rather, within a few hours.29
On September 2, 1924, Gong Lum’s daughters, nine-year-old Martha and her older sister, Berda, prepared for their first day at the Rosedale Consolidated High School (a combination of elementary, junior high, and high school levels for white Rosedale residents). This was both Martha’s and Berda’s second year at Rosedale, and upon arriving at the school that morning, they registered and attended their first lessons. The day was uneventful until after lunch, when their teacher sent them to the main office, where Martha and Berda learned that they would have to return home because they could no longer attend Rosedale. Superintendent J. H. Nutt informed Martha and her sister that Rosedale was for white students, and since they were not white, they would have to attend the colored school. Martha and Berda began their school day as Chinese American or Oriental pupils and left as colored students.30
When Martha and Berda returned home and explained to their puzzled father and mother what had happened, Gong Lum and his wife became furious. What had changed? Martha and Berda were not colored when they left for school that morning. Also, Gong Lum’s daughters had attended Rosedale Consolidated the year before with no problems. Gong Lum was a quiet man who tended to his own affairs and did not go looking for trouble, so he could not imagine any personal reasons for the school sending his children home. Perhaps the newly enacted Immigration Act of 1924, which barred Asians from entering the United States, combined with anti-Asian hysteria on the West Coast convinced the school officials that now Martha and Berda were of a different ethnic or racial class. All he knew was that by kicking Martha and Berda out of the school, Superintendent Nutt declared them to be colored, which was an affront to Martha and Berda, their father, and their family’s identity and respectability. While it is difficult to uncover Gong Lum’s personal opinions on African Americans, his desire not to be considered colored and to continue sending his children to white schools demonstrates that Gong Lum was content with the level of tolerance that he received from both white and black residents of Rosedale. Now, however, the school’s decision to send Martha and Berda home challenged his racial standing in the community and, as he would argue, his and his children’s basic civil rights. Gong Lum began his three-year battle against the school’s actions in 1924 and initiated a fight for Chinese American rights in the United States by challenging Mississippi’s Jim Crow laws.31
Undated photo from the Works Progress Administration study of Chinese Americans in Mississippi depicting a Chinese Sunday school in Bolivar County, Mississippi. Courtesy of the Archives and Records Services Division, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.
Unlike later civil rights activists who would argue for school integration, Gong Lum’s strategy rested on pursuing his own rights, not those for all minorities. He understood the ramifications for his family if they were designated as on par with African Americans. Gong Lum knew that he could never be seen as white in Mississippi, but he could legally fight to be seen as Chinese, a race not specifically mentioned in statewide segregation laws and unclassifiable according to Mississippi’s binary racial system. In order to challenge Rosedale Consolidated, Gong Lum turned to respected law firm Brewer, Brewer, and McGeehee, based in nearby Clarksdale and known for taking on more controversial cases. As a noted merchant, Gong Lum was able to afford his attorneys and work closely with them to file a lawsuit against the Rosedale school board on October 29, 1924. Gong Lum’s attorney chose to focus on Martha’s right to attend Rosedale Consolidated, as she was the more “gifted” pupil among the two girls.32
Gong Lum and his attorneys appeared before Judge William Alcorn Jr. at the Circuit Court of Bolivar County on November 5 and presented an argument against the school board that emphasized Martha’s right to attend white schools based on her ethnicity. Martha’s citizenship was not in dispute. Both the judge and the Rosedale school board knew that the young girl was a citizen of both the United States and Mississippi and, as such, was entitled to a public education. What was at stake in this case was determining if Rosedale was correct in sending Martha home from the white school because she was supposedly colored. Gong Lum’s attorneys argued that Martha was indeed not white, but she was also “not a member of the colored race nor is she of mixed blood, but she is of pure Chinese origin or descent” as well as a “good, clean, moral girl” and deserving of a just education. Because Martha was not colored, she did not belong in the colored school, and there were no schools established and maintained by Bolivar County solely for Chinese American children. By denying Martha admission, the Rosedale school board discriminated against her and denied her an education, which was a violation of the “privileges and immunities” granted to her under both the U.S. and the Mississippi state constitutions. The school board’s actions also violated Martha’s right to equal protection under the law as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. As was a Chinese American living in Mississippi, Martha’s ethnicity allowed her to attend white schools, and her citizenship ensured her access to an education equal to that of other noncolored residents of Bolivar County and Mississippi. Gong Lum and his attorneys did not argue that Martha should be considered white (which would be impossible to prove) but, rather, that she was of “pure” Chinese descent and unqualified for the colored schools. Gong Lum and his lawyers also avoided using “Oriental” or “Asiatic” or any other terms that would group Martha with others of Asian descent. Her identity rested not on being seen as Oriental but as being seen by the court specifically as Chinese to prevent anyone from classifying her as part of the colored race. Martha’s ethnicity bought her options that her race did not. Because “Chinese” was a classification that Mississippi state law did not address, Martha was uncolored. Socially and culturally, Chinese Americans may have desired to blend in with white society, but legally they were well aware that making such an argument for the sake of defying Jim Crow laws was foolish and unpromising.33
As Martha’s father, Gong Lum also argued that the Rosedale school board violated his own rights and privileges as a Chinese national living in the United States. Although he was not a citizen, the Mississippi constitution, the U.S. Constitution, and previous treaties between China and the United States provided him with the right to send his daughter to school. Since the Rosedale school expelled Martha, Gong Lum was prevented from fulfilling his duty to the state of Mississippi by educating his children. In this instance, not only did Rosedale Consolidated force Gong Lum to violate Mississippi law, but it also denied him rights and privileges guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Gong Lum argued that he did not receive equal protection under the law when Rosedale Consolidated refused to admit his daughter. Because Rosedale was the only school in the area that Chinese American students could attend (since they were not colored, according to the plaintiffs), Gong Lum was not allowed to practice his fatherly duties and rights as did other parents who lived in Bolivar County.
Gong Lum also argued that as a Chinese immigrant, he held special privileges, beyond constitutional protections and rights, that were also violated by Rosedale Consolidated’s decision. Gong Lum referred to rights “guaranteed . . . by the treaties of the United States with the Chinese government.” Although he did not specify, Gong Lum referenced the Burlingame Treaty, an 1868 agreement between the United States and China that granted “most favored nation” status to Chinese immigrants who came to America. This treaty ensured that like Americans living in China, Chinese in the United States would “enjoy entire liberty of conscience and shall be exempt from all disability or persecution on account of their religious faith or worship.” While the religious lines of the treaty were designed to protect Christian missionaries and Americans living in China, there were also guarantees to protect Chinese against discrimination, exploitation, and violence in America. Rosedale Consolidated also violated, along with the general provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment, this treaty by denying specific rights granted to Chinese from the American government. While the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was in effect by the time of the case, Gong Lum argued that the privileges and rights mentioned in the Burlingame Treaty still applied to Chinese who did live in the United States. Rosedale’s decision to send Martha home not only went against Gong Lum’s citizenship rights and duties but also undermined federal authority over the rights of Chinese immigrants.34
Gong Lum’s contributions as a taxpayer to the state of Mississippi also played a role in his case. Public schools in Mississippi were funded by a combination of poll taxes, property taxes, and other various taxes at the time. Gong Lum did not vote or pay a poll tax, but he did pay property and business taxes that contributed to the state and local funds for education. Because he was a taxpayer and helped to maintain Rosedale Consolidated, he was entitled to send his daughter there regardless of her ethnicity. As a working and contributing resident, Gong Lum had economic rights for providing Martha with an education. A denial of his right to do so would be to discount the role of Lum in the local economy, which ordinarily few others in Rosedale would object to. Gong Lum was a productive, taxpaying, and law-abiding member of society, an identity that, similar to the emphasis on Martha’s good and moral character, Gong Lum and his attorneys emphasized in order to downplay any suspicion or prejudice that might be harbored against the Lums because they were Chinese.35
In response to Gong Lum’s claims, Superintendent Nutt, the other members of the Rosedale Consolidated school board, and the superintendent of education of the state of Mississippi insisted that they had done nothing wrong or illegal by dismissing Martha. E. C. Sharp, the assistant attorney general of Mississippi, represented the school board in court and argued that “the complainant is a member of the Mongolian, or yellow race, and therefore, not entitled to attend the schools provided by the law in the State of Mississippi for the children of the white, or Caucasian race.”36 Here Martha was not Chinese (as her father hoped she would be seen by the court) but, rather, “Mongolian,” making her clearly not white and therefore unqualified to attend Rosedale Consolidated. She may not have been colored in the sense of being black, but according to Sharp and the school board, she was colored as part of the “yellow” race. While Gong Lum was fighting to have his daughter recognized as Chinese rather than colored, Sharp relied on convincing the court that Martha’s Chineseness made her colored. Because Martha was colored, the school board’s decision to send Martha home and prohibit her return was a “full, complete, and adequate remedy at law,” and to do otherwise would be “contrary to the statutes and violation of the constitution of the State of Mississippi.”37 If the school board allowed Martha to go to school at Rosedale, it would be committing an illegal act under Mississippi law that forbade colored children from attending white schools. Plus, there was “within the reach of Martha, and accessible to her, a school of equal facilities and advantages which she might attend.”38 The school board’s defense rested on proving that Martha was not Chinese but, rather, colored, and thus the school board simply followed the proper procedure for ensuring segregation.
Judge Alcorn ruled in favor of Martha Lum. The court determined that Martha was not a member of the colored race under Mississippi law, and therefore she was entitled to attend the white school, particularly because there were no publicly funded schools for Chinese American students in the state. Simply put, Rosedale was “the only school conducted in the said district available to her as a pupil,” and to deny her admission would be to deny her the rights and privileges guaranteed to her by the Fourteenth Amendment. The court also called into question Rosedale’s initial agreement to let Martha attend the school and then their sudden dismissal of the girl, pointing out irregularities in the reasoning of the school board. The Bolivar County Circuit Court recognized that Martha was Chinese American, was not colored, and therefore was allowed to attend Rosedale in spite of the school board’s erroneous decision.
Gong Lum’s success in Bolivar County was similar to that of the Tape family in 1885. Two Chinese immigrants, Joseph Tape and Mary Tape, became furious when the San Francisco school board prevented their daughter, Mamie Tape, from attending the local white school. In response, the Tapes sued the school board and won their case: Mamie was allowed to attend the white school because California state law only listed “filthy or vicious habits” and “contagious or infection diseases” as reasons for prohibiting a student from attending a school. Mamie Tape possessed neither of these qualities, and when the school board appealed the lower court’s decision to the California Supreme Court, the higher court upheld the ruling in favor of the Tapes. Gong Lum’s insistence that his daughter was of good character and a pure girl reflected some of the anxieties that Chinese American parents had when it came to their children being perceived as dirty or foul. For Gong Lum, however, his success in proving that his daughter was Chinese and not colored is what led to a favorable ruling.39
While the Bolivar County Court’s decision was a victory for Gong Lum, it was not a victory for all Chinese Americans in Mississippi and certainly not a victory for all Asian Americans. This case focused specifically on Martha Lum and her right or lack thereof to attend a white school. Geography, demographics, and her father’s ability and desire to hire a legal team to fight on her behalf were contributing factors to this case, possibly more so than race. The Chinese American community in Rosedale was small, Gong Lum held a certain amount of economic standing in the community, and the white residents typically tolerated his presence. He had the means to hire an attorney and the social capital to use the court system to his advantage in order to send his daughter to a white school. Gong Lum fought for Martha and his own personal rights and privileges as a Chinese immigrant with an American-born child living in the South; he did not fight for all Asian Americans or even all Chinese. Gong Lum did not so much wish to challenge the system of segregated education in Mississippi as much as he wished to challenge the racial classification of his daughter. Similar to African Americans who initiated lawsuits for private property, educational access, and other rights prior to Brown v. Board, Gong Lum was an individual with his own series of complaints directed toward the Rosedale school board. An affront to his daughter’s Chineseness was an attack on his own standing in the community. If white schools in Bolivar County continued to admit Chinese American students following Gong Lum’s case, then the court’s decision might usher in more opportunities for minority students; however, Gong Lum’s victory at the moment was his alone.40
Unfortunately, Gong Lum’s justice would be short lived. Following the decision on the Lum case, state attorney general Rush Knox filed an appeal on the Bolivar County Court decision and was granted a motion to advance before the supreme court of Mississippi in January 1925. Knox argued that Alcorn’s decision should be reconsidered as soon as possible because “many children are now being prevented from attending their schools” as a result of Martha’s readmission to Rosedale Consolidated.41 Knox’s concern for the white children of Rosedale stemmed from the outrage of white parents over the county court’s ruling. An article from the Bolivar Democrat described the resentment growing among Rosedale residents not only for the court’s trying to “force the white children of Mississippi to share their schools with the Chinese” but also for the colored schools who refused to accept Chinese American students.42 White parents argued that Assistant Attorney General Sharp’s arguments in the original case overruled the Bolivar County Court’s decision and that Judge Alcorn had greatly misread the situation and underestimated the potential problems of allowing Chinese American children to attend school with whites. While there are few written sources that fully explain the specific reasons why white parents objected so vehemently to Chinese Americans in white schools, the general arguments rested on upholding the law and a sudden shift in seeing Chinese Americans as colored as soon as their population increased. Few newspapers or other sources reveal anti-Asian sentiments or fears over land or job competition from Chinese Americans. The backlash against the Bolivar County Court’s decision was a reaction to a challenge to the white racial, political, and social order in Mississippi. Preventing Martha from attending Rosedale Consolidated was about finally determining the legal and racial standing of Chinese Americans as well as maintaining lily-white schools. The Rosedale school board’s decision to pursue an appeal represented the frustrations of the white community as well as the school’s disagreement with the lower court’s ruling.43
When the case finally reached the supreme court of Mississippi in March 1925, the judges issued a unanimous overturn of the lower court’s ruling. According to the state supreme court, Judge Alcorn greatly erred in his support of the Lums. Not only did Alcorn expect the Rosedale school board to go against Mississippi law by allowing Martha to attend Rosedale Consolidated, but Alcorn also incorrectly concluded that Martha was not colored. Under the state’s miscegenation laws, marriages between whites and persons of at least one-eighth Asian blood were prohibited. Therefore, as the supreme court argued, Chinese Americans were legally colored. This legal racial classification naturally carried over to education, making Martha ineligible to attend Rosedale Consolidated. The purpose of segregated schools was to “preserve the integrity and purity of the white race,” and the state was not legally obligated to provide separate schools for all races. The only option for Martha and other Chinese American students in the state was to attend a colored school or be privately tutored. There was no argument that Martha deserved a public education as an American and Mississippi citizen; however, that education, under existing Jim Crow laws, would not be provided in a white school.44
Still, Gong Lum would not rest with this decision and appealed the Mississippi Supreme Court’s decision to the Supreme Court of the United States in 1927. While Martha was privately tutored by friends of the family in Rosedale, her father worked with local attorneys Earl Brewer (also a former governor of Mississippi) and J. Flowers to craft an argument that would center on Martha’s loss of rights and privileges to an education because of the state supreme court’s ruling. Brewer was especially interested in cases resting on the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections for racial minorities and eagerly took to interrogating and investigating Gong Lum’s plight (although Gong Lum was more concerned with how the Fourteenth Amendment upheld his rights as a Chinese man living in the South).45 The goal was to convince the U.S. Supreme Court that the state had violated basic Fourteenth Amendment rights by defining Martha as colored and to prove that Martha was allowed to go to the white school because she was Chinese ethnically. Because there were no publicly funded schools for Chinese Americans, Martha was unable to attend school in Mississippi, forcing Gong Lum to renege on his duties as a parent. Gong Lum and his attorneys presented their appeal to the Court in the hopes that a ruling in favor of Martha and the rights of Chinese Americans to attend white schools would result.46
Gong Lum’s hopes would once again be short lived. In November 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the ruling of the Mississippi Supreme Court, establishing a precedent that would shape hearings on school segregation through the Brown v. Board decision. Chief Justice William Taft delivered the opinion of the Court and explained, first, 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,” drawing on the 1899 Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education decision that affirmed the state’s right to oversee its own system of public education.47 Second, the justices turned to the problem of whether or not the state’s classification of Martha as colored denied her rights and privileges accorded by the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court ruled that all Chinese Americans were members of the “yellow” race and, as such, were correctly classified as “colored” in Mississippi, thereby negating the argument that Martha’s basic rights to an education were in jeopardy. For the Court, this was a relatively straightforward issue, stemming from Plessy v. Ferguson and the separate-but-equal doctrine that governed any disputes that arose over the years in relation to school segregation. The Court did not find the debate over whether or not Martha’s classification as colored and its subsequent effect on her education and rights to be unique. “Were this a new question, it would call for very full argument and consideration, but we think that it is the same question which has been many times decided to be within the constitutional power of the state legislature.”48 While Martha’s case was different in that it involved a member of the “yellow” race, the Court stated that there was no indication that “the question is any different or that any different result can be reached, assuming the cases above cited to be rightly decided, where the issue is as between white pupils and the pupils of the yellow races.” In its decision on the Lum v. Rice case, the Supreme Court declared that Chinese Americans were yellow, that they could be classified as colored, and that education was a state’s right and the state could deal with its own system of public education accordingly.49
With a swift stroke of the pen, Gong Lum’s fight came to an end, and the U.S. Supreme Court established a groundbreaking precedent in relation to Asian Americans and school segregation in the South. Prior cases involving Asian Americans had rested on determining issues of citizenship and/or property rights rather than racial status. In 1886, the Supreme Court heard the case of laundry owner Yick Wo, who fell victim to a San Francisco tax targeting Chinese immigrants, and the justices concluded that a law that was “race-neutral” but prejudicially enacted violated basic Fourteenth Amendment rights. Such a ruling did not hold up in Gong Lum’s case because segregation was applied equally to all who lived in Mississippi. Although the federal courts previously declared in 1878 that Mongolians were not Caucasians, there was a wide variety of definitions of “Mongolian” that left loopholes and questions pertaining to which groups of Asian Americans fell under this racial classification. The only other cases that specifically addressed the issue of race were Ozawa v. United States (1922) and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923). Both Ozawa (a Japanese immigrant) and Thind (an Indian immigrant) argued that Japanese and Hindus were Caucasians and deserved the right to naturalization, a right they were barred from under the Naturalization Act of 1906. However, the Court ruled in both instances that Asians are not white and therefore were ineligible to become citizens. With Gong Lum, the Court once and for all determined that Asians were “yellow” and therefore “colored.” As Gong Lum found out, legally there were no “in-between” or “interstitial” identities in this case: For Mississippi and the Supreme Court you were either colored or you were white.50
Following Gong Lum’s failed attempts in the courts, another lesser-known case wended its way through the Mississippi court system in 1927. While Gong Lum and his family packed up and moved to Elaine, Arkansas, following the Supreme Court’s decision, other Chinese living in Mississippi, including fourteen-year-old Joe Tin Lun and his family, continued to fight for access to white schools. Unlike Martha Lum, Joe Tin Lun was an immigrant from China and had arrived in the United States with his merchant family in the years immediately after World War I. The Luns settled in Dublin, Mississippi (not far from Rosedale in the Delta), and privately tutored their son until the beginning of the 1917 school year, when they wished to enroll him in Dublin Consolidated High School, which was maintained for white students. Undeterred by Gong Lum’s failed attempts, the Luns believed that their situation would be different: They lived outside Rosedale and they were Chinese immigrants with basic rights and protections. Regardless of whether or not the state had previously ruled that Chinese were colored, the Luns were immigrants, they were Chinese nationals, and they therefore were governed by a different set of federal policies than Martha Lum. Much to their surprise, Dublin school superintendent H. P. Taylor did not agree with them and immediately dismissed Joe Tin Lun’s application for enrollment in late August 1927 and advised him to go to the nearest colored school.51
In retaliation, the Luns enlisted Joe Tij Fung, a local legal advisor to the Chinese American community and friend, to file a writ of mandamus forcing the school to admit their son. Whereas Gong Lum only listed his rights as a Chinese immigrant in passing in his appeal, Tij Fung crafted his legal argument for Lun’s right to attend Dublin on the centrality of the Burlingame Treaty. Tij Fung argued that Lun was “not granted the privilege of most favored nation in accordance with the Burlingame Treaty,” particularly Article 7, which states that “Chinese subjects shall enjoy all . . . of the public educational institutions under the government of the United States.”52 Because the Dublin schools failed to admit Lun, there existed clear proof that Taylor discriminated against Chinese children and failed to uphold the main tenets of international agreements between China and the United States. Unlike the Lum case, Tij Fung maintained that this was an issue that rested on foreign diplomacy, and Lun and other Chinese immigrants were not beholden to the same Jim Crow laws as American-born children such as Martha Lum.53 Interestingly, the Coahoma County Court granted Tij Fung the mandamus and ordered Taylor to admit Joe Tin Lun.
The county court’s decision did not rest well with Taylor. He responded by enlisting the help of Assistant Attorney General Sharp and State Superintendent of Education W. P. Bond in appealing the decision to the supreme court of Mississippi. Taylor dismissed Tij Fung’s argument that Lun’s rights under the Burlingame Treaty had been violated. Dublin Consolidated did not deny Lun an education; it merely followed previously established laws and procedures when dealing with colored children. Although Taylor admitted that “the type of instruction [at the colored school] is very much inferior to the white school,” he explained that this was because Dublin Consolidated benefited from an extra tax levy in addition to regular funding and that, if they chose to do so, colored schools could also consolidate and achieve additional resources. “Negroes were not possessed with such qualifications as whites and therefore their teachers do not rank with white teachers,” but at bare minimum, they were licensed and assigned the same books as the white schools. As a result, Lun would be at a minor disadvantage if he attended a colored school, but all things taken equally, he would receive a state- and locally funded education. Lun’s rights under the Burlingame Treaty had not been violated because he received the same treatment as colored American citizens. There were perfectly fine schools for colored students to attend, and it would be erroneous to treat Lun differently than other colored children born in the United States.54
Tij Fung’s rebuttal returned to the issue of the funding of Mississippi schools. As a provision of the Land Ordinance Act of 1785, the federal government provided plots of land to be used for education in what would later become the state of Mississippi. Each plot was 360 acres and became known in Mississippi as Sixteenth Section Lands. These lands were overseen by the Mississippi secretary of state, but school boards served as the trustees. Sixteenth Section schools received their funding from typical sources, including property and poll taxes, but Tij Fung argued that because Dublin Consolidated was a Sixteenth Section institution and such schools were technically a legacy of the 1785 land ordinance, the federal government had the final word in the maintenance and operation of the school. The history of the Sixteenth Section program meant that federal law overrode state and local laws, making the Burlingame Treaty applicable to this situation and Lun qualified to attend Dublin Consolidated as a “most favored” immigrant. Tij Fung also incorrectly claimed that Sixteenth Section schools were the benefactors of federal funding and were beholden to the federal government, not merely the Mississippi state government.55
The supreme court of Mississippi was unimpressed by Tij Fung’s legal arguments. First, as far as the court was concerned, the question of whether or not Chinese Americans could attend white schools had been settled with Lum v. Rice. Chinese Americans, regardless of their citizenship status, were colored and therefore were entitled to an education at the colored schools. The purpose of separate schools for white and colored students in Mississippi was to “prevent amalgamation and to preserve, as far as possible, the social system of race segregation.”56 By refusing to admit Lun, the Dublin Consolidated school board was complying with Mississippi state law, which guaranteed a basic education at either school for citizens. Lun, “as a Chinaman,” was certainly entitled to an education under the law, but he was only entitled to a colored education—nothing more, nothing less. If Lun was able to attend a colored school, “then, how can an alien Chinaman complain when he is assigned to a school provided, under our law for the colored races?” Joe Tin Lun was not deprived of any Fourteenth Amendment rights; the state of Mississippi was generous enough to permit him to “enjoy all of the benefits and privileges” accorded to citizens of the United States and Mississippi.57
Second, the court found Tij Fung’s argument that Lun deserved special treatment because he was a Chinese immigrant to be weak and unfounded. Not only did Lun basically receive special treatment because he benefited from the same rights to an education as colored citizens of Mississippi, but Tij Fung misunderstood the relationship between the state and federal governments. States maintained the right to regulate education under the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution because it was not specifically mentioned in the document, and under Mississippi law, local governments operated and oversaw the functions of schools. The court corrected Tij Fung’s assumption that because Dublin Consolidated was a Sixteenth Section school it was maintained by federal entities. Sixteenth Section schools did not receive federal funding and were the responsibility of local school boards, who could regulate their students as they saw fit. Lun had the right to “institute proper proceedings to require the school authorities to furnish a colored school equal and uniform, in every particular, for the colored race,” but that is where his rights ended in terms of challenging the segregated system of education in Mississippi. Lun’s status as an immigrant did little to convince the court that he had the right to attend a white school, because the court did not believe that “alien Chinamen” deserved any special treatment above or beyond what colored citizens in the state received. The Burlingame Treaty, created prior to the Chinese Exclusion Act, was not the Gentlemen’s Agreement, although it is difficult to determine if the state of Mississippi would have issued a different ruling if this case had involved a Japanese immigrant.58
The supreme court of Mississippi did not see a difference between Martha Lum and Joe Tin Lun. Citizenship in this situation meant little, and an American-born child and a Chinese immigrant faced the same fate because they were legally colored. “The testimony of the county superintendent of education in this case shows that equal facilities are furnished to the two races, white and colored, and, in our opinion, that is all that is required under the Fourteenth Amendment. In its main features, this case is on ‘all fours’ with the case of Rice v. Gong Lum, supra.”59 The court also used the Lun case as an opportunity to affirm the opinion that school segregation was “designed to promote the peace, quietude, and happiness of all the races, by eliminating close and intimate contact, during the hot season of youth, between the white and colored races, so that the prejudices and passions engendered by race consciousness might be avoided,” as if educating Tij Fung, an alien, on the power and purpose of the Mississippi system that promoted a “higher degree of peace and happiness.”60 Perhaps aware of the failure of Gong Lum’s federal Supreme Court case, Tij Fung did not attempt to appeal the state supreme court’s overturn of the mandamus granted by the Coahoma County Court, confirming Mississippi’s views that Chinese were colored, that attempts to argue for their rights based on ethnicity or immigrant status were futile, and that Asian Americans deserved discrimination at the hands of local school boards.61
Gong Lum’s and Joe Tin Lun’s attempts to fight the segregation of Chinese Americans in southern education were not so much lead-ups to the future battles found in the Brown v. Board decision as they were unique results of the meeting of Jim Crow and immigration and ethnicity. Both Lum and Lun tried to argue their way around discrimination by invoking special immigrant privileges (in the Lun case) and citizenship based on birth and “good moral character” (in the Lum case). Martha Lum’s citizenship did not work in her favor, just as Joe Tin Lun’s special privileges under the Burlingame Treaty did not convince the courts that he deserved to attend the white school. These were not simple cases that came down to the Fourteenth Amendment or even basic rights, but rather, they were complicated scenarios that highlighted the holes in segregation policies as well as the perpetual foreignness of Chinese Americans in the South. Chinese Americans in these cases did not form a united front, choosing instead to take on the system of southern segregation individually through different strategies. As a result, the courts did not rule in favor of Gong Lum and Joe Tin Lun, and these cases would not necessarily pave the way for the later Brown decision. However, they served as examples of the limits of citizenship, ethnic identity, and policy privileges for Chinese Americans and the power of southern law over immigration policies.
Following the rulings on the Lum and Lun cases, the options Chinese Americans had for receiving an education in the South were limited. There were reports from Chinese Americans that colored schools would not accept their children, but there were also Chinese parents like the Lums who chose to relocate to nearby Arkansas or Tennessee, where Chinese Americans were allowed to attend white schools. Other parents sent their children to live with friends or other family members farther north or even back West instead of subjecting them to the black schools. A more popular choice, however, was either to hire private tutors if they were affordable and available or to create Chinese American schools for their children to attend. Because Mississippi did not offer any state funding for Chinese schools, members of the Chinese American community would often pool their resources to purchase old buildings and hire teachers. Others in the Delta, such as the Chinese Americans of Greenville, received assistance from the local Baptist churches and created Chinese mission schools. In 1930, Greenville school superintendent E. E. Bass expressed concern for the Chinese verbally (although not enough to admit them into his school), though not financially, and encouraged Chinese parents to establish schools for their children. The Chinese Mission School in Greenville became one of the most well-known institutions in the region, with Chinese parents from around the Delta sending their children to Greenville to live in dormitories in order to receive what they identified as a proper “white” education. The school in Greenville was staffed by two white teachers who were assigned to different age groups, and the students learned the standard Mississippi curriculum (English composition and reading and basic math skills) in the morning and Chinese language in the afternoon (taught by local community members). Many Chinese Americans joined the Baptist church in Greenville and had good relations with the white members who did not object to lending money if it meant forming a separate school for Chinese Americans. In other instances, Chinese Americans established their own churches and used a designated room for daily school instruction. Although the state of Mississippi and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Chinese Americans were colored, Chinese Americans disagreed, formed their own schools, and continued to function in a social state that existed between white and black.62
By the late 1930s, however, Chinese Americans living in the Delta had gone through a fascinating racial transformation, from “colored” to “Chinese” in the eyes of Mississippians within just a few years. When fighting between China and Japan broke out in 1937 over the territory of Manchuria, many Americans sympathized with the Chinese and identified them as the benevolent victims of an aggressive, expansionist, and belligerent Japan. American sympathy for China transformed perception of Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans. Between the 1920s and the 1930s, the Chinese went from being part of a yellow peril to being brave, courageous, and hardworking people attempting to carve out a living for themselves in the United States. Such attitudes did not translate into total acceptance among Americans, but in the Delta, the idea of welcoming Chinese American children into white schools became more appealing and acceptable to some. The small Delta town of Louise was one of the first to integrate schools between whites and Chinese in 1939, and other schools followed suit; but not all white townsfolk were immediately thrilled. In 1941 when the Clarksdale school board members weighed the possibility of admitting the handful of Chinese American students who lived in town, white parents responded with petitions requesting that “no person or child or children of the Chinese or Mongolian race” be allowed to attend school with their white children.63 The parents were concerned that the school board had forgotten that although the Chinese were suffering at the hands of the Japanese across the Pacific, their friends and family living in the United States were still Mongolian. The petition “respectfully invite[d]” the school board to return its attention to the ruling of the supreme court of Mississippi in the Lum case and questioned whether or not the superintendent remembered the tenets of that decision.64
While the white parents argued that the Chinese of Clarksdale were still colored no matter what transpired in Asia, local white clergy counterprotested by writing letters to the school board arguing on behalf of Chinese Americans in their community and their desire to attend white schools. In such letters, the petitioners (similar to the argument Gong Lum presented before the U.S. Supreme Court), argued that their parishioners were Chinese, a distinct ethnic, rather than racial, group. N. D. Timmerman, pastor of the Clarksdale Baptist Church, wrote on behalf of Mrs. Henry Jue and her daughter May, who wished to attend the Clarksdale public schools. Timmerman explained that Mrs. Jue and May regularly attended the Clarksdale Baptist Church with other white members and that they “are a distinct and particular Chinese family” that deserved to be in the public schools with white children.65 When public sympathies for the Chinese were turning as a response to Pacific and rising international tensions in the wake of World War II, Timmerman argued that the Jues and other Chinese in Clarksdale were not colored but ethnic. Their courageous stand against the Japanese proved them to be an honest, strong, and hardworking strain of Orientals. In other words, the ruling of the supreme court of Mississippi was incorrect and out of touch with the present: Chinese Americans were ethnically Chinese. The Clarksdale school board agreed in 1941 to allow Chinese to attend white schools, signifying a shift in the way Mississippi society viewed Chinese Americans when it came to education. Also, in 1938, the Greenville, Mississippi, school district established a public Chinese school (staffed by white teachers) that operated with funds from the state. By the late 1930s, Chinese Americans were no longer colored; they had taken on the distinct ethnic identity of being Chinese, which allowed them to move into white schools or attend state-funded schools that did not serve black or “colored” children. Well before blacks could attend school with whites in Mississippi, Chinese Americans were able to do so (in spite of rulings stating otherwise at the state and federal levels) with the assistance of those who could attest to their ethnically “pure” Chineseness in a segregated society.66
It would be far too simple to argue, however, that Mississippians and Mississippi law accepted Chinese American students as white because they could attend white schools in some Delta towns and cities by the late 1930s. The reality was that the Chinese racial and ethnic identity was still somewhat in flux by World War II. Opinions on Chinese Americans did begin to change once the fighting between China and Japan broke out and China allied with the United States during World War II. While Japanese Americans were imprisoned in internment camps following Pearl Harbor and racist political cartoons and propaganda furthered the anti-Japanese hysteria that existed along the West Coast and elsewhere across the country, Chinese Americans in Delta towns like Greenville, Clarksdale, Louise, and Gong Lum’s Rosedale became more accepted in certain areas of local life. Japanese Americans imprisoned in the Rohwer and Jerome detention centers in nearby Arkansas received less-than-welcoming receptions from Governor Homer Adkins and other residents who viewed them as dangerous traitors and “Jap fiends.” At the same time, Chinese Americans in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1941 were officially welcomed into the white public schools. But they were not accepted because the school board or the residents considered them any closer to being “white” than they were before the war broke out. In 1942, a Chinese American mother who lived outside Cleveland, Mississippi, petitioned the local school board to let her daughter attend the white school because gas was rationed during the war and she did not have the resources to drive to the nearest Chinese mission school in Greenville. Despite the mother’s position, the school board denied admission to her daughter, and the mother became upset: “We were law-abiding people, so we didn’t fight them. I just couldn’t understand it. The Bok Guey [whites] would take our money to build a church or something, but they wouldn’t let us go to their schools. It was unfair, that’s all. But we had to hold back our bitterness.”67 In other school districts in the Delta and across Mississippi, Chinese valor in the face of Japanese threats across the Pacific did little to help the Chinese Americans living in the South come closer to being considered white. The issue of Chinese American segregation in Mississippi schools became a transpacific concern for the Chinese government during the war. Not only did Chinese consulates across the country petition Mississippi governor Theodore Bilbo to force white schools to admit Chinese students, but Madame Chiang Kai-shek, first lady of the Republic of China, traveled to Jackson to speak before the Mississippi legislature in 1942 to urge school districts statewide to recognize the rights of Chinese Americans to attend white schools.68 There was no uniformity in policies regarding Chinese Americans attending white schools during the war, and in many cases, Mississippians still considered Chinese Americans as colored.
Even though some white schools admitted Chinese American students during the war, their reasoning does not provide proof that they saw Chinese Americans as being closer to white than they were before. In fact, school boards identified them as more Chinese than ever, an ethnic identity that distinguished them from African Americans but still prevented them from being accepted as white. In 1945, the Greenville school district decided to admit Chinese American students to the white schools after meeting with local Chinese American community and religions leaders. The board made it clear, however, that “Chinese residents of the Greenville district only will be admitted to the schools and a strict understanding was had concerning racial strains, only native children of pure blood being considered. None other will be permitted.”69 President of the school board Henry Starling informed parents and Greenville residents that “the children of native Chinese strain are pupils of high scholastic and character standards” and that “it is purely a matter of democracy” that the Greenville schools admit “pure” Chinese students during a time when America was fighting for liberty and democracy abroad. Starling played upon concepts put forth by proponents of the Double V Campaign, who urged Americans to fight for a victory against fascism abroad and a victory against fascism (in the form of discrimination and racism) at home. For Starling and other school administrators who agreed with him, the war and China’s role in it made it difficult for schools to deny access to Chinese American students—but only American-born, ethnically “pure” Chinese would be accommodated. In other words, schools could still deny admission to Chinese immigrants and to Chinese who may be the products of mixed racial relationships, from either white/Chinese or white/black marriages and relationships. Such measures were more than likely meant to work in cooperation with the state antimiscegenation laws that barred interracial marriages, but they also clarified the school board’s beliefs that American-born children of pure Chinese stock were scholastically prepared to attend white schools (something akin to a forerunner of the model minority myth).70
One could argue that by admitting Chinese Americans to the white schools, the officials and citizens of Greenville accepted Chinese Americans and began the process of “whitening” them; however, to do so overlooks the fact that the designation of “pure” Chinese created yet another ethnic and racial category that further separated Chinese Americans from whites. The pureness of the Greenville Chinese denoted that they were not colored, but that same pureness separated them from Caucasians. Increased tolerance did not translate to a complete assimilation for Chinese or other Asian Americans, despite the new and more inclusive practices in education during World War II. The Greenville school board’s decision only reified the “otherness” and Orientalness of Chinese Americans; it did not make them “white.” Gong Lum’s argument that Martha should attend white Rosedale Consolidated based on her pure Chineseness would, in the end, convince school districts to accept Chinese American students. Gong Lum’s reasoning lacked only the war to encourage school boards to see his point of view.
In the Delta, Chinese Americans could only go so far in arguing for their unique position in the South and the accompanying benefits. Outside influences such as the war and changing international relations would help school officials to finally heed the call of Chinese American parents and community leaders to integrate Chinese American students into white schools. By 1950, white schools across Mississippi had opened their doors to Chinese American students, while black students were still relegated to colored schools. However, outside schools, Chinese Americans still faced isolation and stigmas from both black and white neighbors and residents. As more Chinese Americans were born in the Delta and came of age, the level of toleration among whites rose, but discrimination or other more social and cultural forms of segregation did not completely end. Many Chinese Americans who received education degrees from universities such as Delta State in Cleveland, Mississippi, and Mississippi State wanted to work in the Mississippi public education system but were often denied such opportunities. One woman described an interview with a Greenville superintendent for a teaching position in 1956 as a “slap in the face” when he told her that she could not teach in the white schools because those jobs were reserved for Caucasians.71 Another qualified candidate for a teaching position in Jackson, Mississippi, was denied an opportunity for an interview because despite his special certifications, the Jackson schools would “never hire anyone like [him]” because he was Chinese.72 In other cases, students who were eventually accepted into white schools during the 1950s remembered “always [being] singled out because of race” and never being fully accepted socially by their white peers and their teachers.73 “Chineseness” was an evolving racial category that even the Chinese themselves were not entirely capable of defining in the face of Jim Crow segregation and Mississippi law.
Compared with Gong Lum, the Chinese Americans of Augusta, Georgia, serve as an example of the more successful strategy of Chinese Americans assuming a nonblack or noncolored rather than Chinese status. Similar to Mississippi’s, Georgia’s codes on miscegenation were clear in that the terms “Mongolian” and “Asiatics” were added to a ban on interracial marriage in 1927. However, this language did not extend to school segregation laws. Georgia lawmakers made school segregation official in 1872 when they passed a Jim Crow law establishing separate white and colored schools. As more Chinese merchants settled in Georgia towns and cities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their children presented a new challenge to the ban on integrated schools. At first, local school boards decided for themselves whether or not Chinese American children could attend white schools, but this method created wide variations in allowances for integrated schools with Chinese American and white students. The vagueness of the Georgia laws on school segregation created holes in Jim Crow education in the state that legislators attempted to manipulate and fill. These legal maneuvers came to a head in 1931 when the Augusta school board and state representatives decided to take up the question on whether or not Chinese Americans were colored. White parents, however, urged local school officials to consider the nonblack status of Chinese Americans, rather than their Chineseness as Gong Lum had done, and allow Chinese American children to attend white schools statewide. Remaining isolated from racial or ethnic distinction was the social survival tool of the Chinese Americans in Augusta and enabled them to exist independently of racial classification in Georgia until the 1920s.74
During the late nineteenth century, the presence of Chinese in the state of Georgia raised little concern among whites, particularly with regard to education. The earliest wave of Chinese migration to the Peach State followed the Civil War, when investors and merchants in Augusta set about rebuilding an existing canal in 1869. Manual labor was needed, since slaves were not an option, and similar to planters in the Mississippi Delta who acquired Chinese as cheap employees, construction companies sought out Chinese from the West Coast as well as southern cities like New Orleans to come to Augusta.75 In November 1873, 35 Chinese came from Indianapolis to Augusta with the assistance of labor contractors to begin work on the canal. By 1875, 165 Chinese laborers resided in Augusta, and residents reacted cautiously to the newcomers, intrigued by their “child-like” and “effeminate” appearance and “celestial” customs and culture. Articles in the Augusta Chronicle marveled at the ability of the Chinese to be thrifty with their $35-a-month salary and even argued that “some of us ‘outside barbarians’ could learn to subsist on such sums.”76 Augustans greeted the initial Chinese laborers who arrived in their city with an Orientalist appreciation of their exotic culture and awe at their hardworking and responsible nature.
In Augusta and in other towns and cities in Georgia, the Chinese American population increased slightly through the late 1800s, as did the tensions between whites and the “Asiatics.” Workers completed the Augusta canal in 1875, and although many Chinese returned to the West Coast after collecting their pay, others remained in the city. Similar to the Chinese laborers who erected groceries in the Mississippi Delta when planters no longer required their services, Chinese Americans who chose to settle permanently in Augusta turned to business ventures and filled a niche in the local economy. By 1880, there were five Chinese-operated groceries catering to both white and black clientele. Most Chinese Americans lived above their stores by themselves if they were bachelors or with their families if they married in the United States or later brought their wives and/or children from China. The Augusta Chinese Americans resided in the black neighborhoods and therefore generally avoided confrontations with local whites. The Chinese were economically accepted until the 1880s, when more Chinese migrated to cities such as Savannah and Macon to take advantage of business opportunities and a thriving Chinese American community. Many of the new Chinese migrants established groceries in addition to laundries, but their presence became more problematic when William Loo Chong, an immigrant Chinese merchant from Augusta, moved to nearby Waynesboro, Georgia, with his white wife, Denise Fulcher. Loo Chong, a respected and wealthy tea merchant, married Fulcher in Augusta in 1882 and set about enlisting the help of Fulcher’s relatives to open a farmer’s market and grocery store in Waynesboro. When Waynesboro residents found out that Loo Chong was married to a local white woman, they “Ku Klux Klanned” him by boycotting his business and threatening him with violence.77 Loo Chong relocated with his wife to Augusta, but his willingness to cross the racial line reflected rising tensions between the white and Chinese American populations of the city and surrounding towns. Although there were only forty-one Chinese Americans in Augusta by the early 1900s, the relatively small increase in Chinese Americans throughout the late nineteenth century incited fear of further interracial mixing. By crossing the racial line, Loo Chong broke the level of tolerance that Augustans had granted to Chinese Americans.
In 1882, legislators in Georgia supported the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in hopes that it would stem the tide of the “Mongolian pests” and their tastes for drugs and polygamy. The exclusionary act as well as Loo Chong’s marriage inspired, for the first time, negative reactions to Chinese Americans from Georgia residents throughout the 1880s. In 1885, white merchants argued that Chinese American businessmen created unfair competition by catering to the “ignorant” classes (the poor and African Americans) and urged the Augusta city council to stop issuing business permits to Chinese Americans who resided there. The city council denied the request, but reactions to the presence of the Chinese Americans and their attempts to merge into white life resulted in other legal protests. In 1884, legislators (with the backing of Augusta residents) attempted to alter the 1865 Georgia antimiscegenation law that prohibited white and black marriages to include provisions for “marriages between persons of Mongolian descent and persons of the white race.”78 Just like the call for limiting the business ventures of Chinese Americans in Augusta, the bill to include Asian Americans in the antimiscegenation law failed to pass in the Georgia House of Representatives because outside Richmond County (Augusta’s location) there were not enough Chinese men to rouse ire or suspicion. The Loo Chong incident and the various legislative efforts to discourage permanent Chinese American settlement in Augusta were representative of national events in anti-Chinese sentiments at the time. By the 1890s, however, the actions taken by Georgia residents and legislators in the previous turbulent decade faded, and Chinese American life in Augusta, Savannah, and Atlanta (the sites of the three largest Chinese communities in Georgia) appeared to return to normal. The Chinese American merchants, so long as they kept to themselves and did not attempt to intervene too directly in white society, were free to thrive and go about their lives as they pleased. This cautious and at times uneasy compromise between Chinese Americans and whites remained until the 1920s.
The education of Chinese American children was an example of the functional social segregation that both Chinese Americans and whites accepted in Georgia through the early twentieth century. Georgia’s 1872 Jim Crow law on education established separate schools for whites and “coloreds” and omitted language on where Chinese children were to go for their education. So long as few Chinese American children lived in Georgia, the question of school segregation for Chinese Americans was not a pressing concern. White schools in Savannah barred Chinese American children, but in Augusta and Atlanta they were allowed to attend otherwise all-white schools. There was little concern from white residents when the few Chinese American children who lived in their communities attended schools with their children, and most did not see white/Chinese integrated schools as serious threats to the racial order of Georgia.
Another opportunity for education was found in the Chinese schools operated by the Chinese Benevolent Association. Initially, the only options available for many Chinese American students were Chinese Sunday and vacation Bible schools offered through either Chinese Baptist churches in Augusta and other cities or through affiliations with majority-white Baptist and Methodist churches. These schools were staffed by whites and offered an education anchored in the general curriculum, but in the 1920s, Chinese American parents in Augusta desired more autonomy in what their children learned, particularly Chinese language instruction. In 1927, the Chinese American community of Augusta formed a chapter of the National Chinese Benevolent Association and established its own Chinese school in the First Baptist Church of Augusta. A local Chinese immigrant who was once a professor in China but who had relocated to Augusta with his family served as the lead instructor for the school and offered courses in Chinese language and Chinese history in addition to arithmetic and a more general English curriculum. Between the Chinese schools like those in Augusta and the opportunity for Chinese American students to attend selected white schools in other cities, both Chinese Americans and whites accepted the Jim Crow situation for what it was in Georgia. So long as Chinese Americans were not classified as “colored” under social and legal definitions, they were able to move relatively easily between white and black society.79
As was the case for Chinese Americans and other Asian Americans across the country, the status of the Chinese Americans in Augusta and in Georgia more generally changed during the 1920s as anti-immigrant and especially anti-Asian sentiment resurged. Just as legislators from Georgia approved the Chinese Exclusion Act, they also supported drastically reducing the number of Asian immigrants allowed to enter the country. Increasing nationwide concern over the growing population of Japanese along the West Coast resonated with southerners in general and Georgians who feared a “yellow invasion” of Asian Americans searching for new homes in the South after fleeing the prejudice and discrimination found in California, Oregon, and Washington.
In Georgia, the anti-Asian sentiments of the post–World War I era also manifested in a strengthened antimiscegenation law that included bans on white/Asian marriages. In 1927, Georgia successfully passed a bill that added “Mongolians” and “Asiatics” to the growing list of those who were barred from intermarrying with whites. Unlike the attempt to pass such an act in 1884, this time legislators were successful in garnering more support as the populations of Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, and Filipino Americans in the state continued to grow in small increments. As more stories of interracial marriages filled the Georgia newspapers, the need for a legislative remedy to the existing noncolored status of Asian Americans became more pronounced. When the 1927 law reclassified Chinese and other Asian Americans as “colored” because of their “Mongolian” and “Oriental” racial makeup, the legal classification of Chinese Americans in Georgia also changed. Now that Chinese Americans were colored, Georgia legislators were eager to follow the lead of antimiscegenation law in prohibiting Chinese/white integrated schools and the potential for more race-mixing.80
In Augusta, the question of school segregation and its relationship to local Chinese Americans was influenced by the Lum and Lun cases. Following the Supreme Court’s decision, the Augusta Chronicle covered the education situation in Mississippi, providing Augustans a view of how another southern state handled Chinese Americans. In October 1927, the Chronicle reported on the rulings for both Lum and Lun, carefully describing how and why the state of Mississippi declared Chinese Americans to be colored. Since the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled in both cases that “any race other than Caucasian” was colored, it appeared to be common sense that Chinese Americans were, in fact, colored.81 The Chronicle also noted that “Mississippi was the only state in the South that excludes Chinese from white schools,” an interesting fact that raised questions about Chinese Americans in Georgia.82 Now that Mississippi considered Chinese Americans to be colored and therefore subject to the Jim Crow laws of education, other states like Georgia had an example to follow. The question of the racial status of Chinese Americans was no longer a puzzle; Chinese Americans were “yellow” and belonged in colored schools. Georgia legislators wondered why it had taken them so long to consider revising their own laws and state constitution to define Chinese as colored. Moving between the worlds of black and white on a social or business level was one thing, but schools required more uniformity when it came to ensuring that white children could be properly educated. The Mississippi examples created momentum for other states to redesign their Jim Crow laws and reclassify Chinese Americans as colored.
The changes in views on Chinese Americans in the South directly affected the white and Chinese American citizens of Augusta in 1931 when a proposal to formally segregate white from Chinese American students in the Richmond County schools created a firestorm. In early July, the Georgia House of Representatives introduced a resolution denying funds to schools that admitted both white and colored students. The bill did not specifically mention Chinese Americans or Asian Americans but was more general in its desire to prevent colored children from mingling with whites. Representative Henry Messer argued that integrated schools were unconstitutional according to Georgia law and that there was a widespread problem across the state with individual school districts allowing minority children to attend school with white children. He also explained that the ban on integrated schools was a way to create more uniformity among the various school districts within Richmond County and throughout the state, thereby solving the problems of uneven applications of various policies of taxation and curriculum in addition to segregation. In order to assess the supposed problem of violation of Georgia’s rules of segregation in schools and gain more information on Messer’s claims, the Georgia House of Representatives created a special committee to investigate the racial composition of school districts.83
Despite the atmosphere of suspicion of Asian Americans and the recent changes in state antimiscegenation laws to include Asian Americans, there is little evidence that white Augusta or Georgia citizens more generally supported the proposed legislation. Editorials and letters in the Augusta Chronicle indicate that Augustans saw through the bill’s vague language on colored students and knew that the bill specifically targeted Chinese American children, and they were not happy with this provision. “Without a doubt,” a Chronicle editorial from July 10, 1931, began, “this bill . . . is designed to close the doors of the public schools in Augusta and in Atlanta and in Savannah to the Chinese people.”84 Furthermore, after interviewing local school officials, “the authorities have given the testimony that there has been no objection from any of the patrons of the schools to the enrollment of the Chinese children . . . and the pupils have been most sympathetic in their dealing with the little folk.”85 The editors at the Chronicle could not find any indication that there was a problem with the approximately twenty Chinese American students enrolled in white schools in Augusta and throughout Richmond County. “The Chinese are taxpayers, own property, and are no trouble to the authorities.”86 Although the Chinese were an extreme racial minority in Augusta, they were the good type of minority—the ones who worked hard and were not involved in any unsavory behavior. The Chinese had “lived in Augusta long enough to have convinced the great majority of Augustans that they are deserving of the privilege of attending our schools on the same basis as always.”87 To deny Chinese American children admission to white schools would be an “injustice” that, as the editors explained, most in Augusta did not support. The editorial disagreed with the bill, not because it was a violation of racial equality, but because it was a violation of the “privilege” to attend white schools that the Chinese had earned. Chinese American children should be allowed to continue their education at white schools because they were not black—neither racially not socially. Chinese were still Chinese and were not accepted socially as white, but their backgrounds and successful history in Augusta convinced white citizens that they were noncolored. Unlike Gong Lum, the editorial did not emphasize the ethnic or immigrant status of the Chinese; there was no need to do so because the Chinese did not engage in significant resistance to Jim Crow. Chinese Americans did not have to distinguish themselves from blacks or coloreds because the rest of the white Augusta community had already made up their minds that they were a respectable minority that understood their place in southern society. Lum was also a taxpayer and upstanding citizen, but he crossed the line when he insisted on defying school segregation by attempting to use his ethnicity and immigrant status to create a new racial classification for Chinese Americans.
Other Augustans agreed with the editorial and voiced their opinions on the negatives of the proposed bill. Local preacher W. M. Rowland submitted a letter to the editor on Sunday, July 12, commending the Chronicle for its views on the prohibition of Chinese American students from white schools. Rowland emphasized the “unheathen” nature of the local Chinese and of China in general, calling upon its missionary history and the bravery of the Chinese in defending themselves from the Japanese during the crisis in Manchuria.88 Rowland urged parents in Augusta to rest assured that they “have nothing to fear from the Chinese children attending our schools” and provided the examples of two Chinese girls who came to study in Georgia and delighted locals in Macon with their “pleasant acquaintance” and “beautiful dress.” One of these young women, a “Miss Soong,” studied at Wesleyan University in Macon, Georgia, and went on to become Madame Chiang Kai-shek.89 Rowland railed against the “prejudice and injustice” of the bill but also emphasized in his letter that the Chinese Americans of Augusta and elsewhere were a good, Christian people who deserved access to white schools based on these characteristics, not because segregated schools themselves were wrong. Chinese Americans were on the socially acceptable side of the black/white divide in Augusta and should therefore not be denied permission to attend the white schools. Rowland and others did not argue that Chinese Americans should not attend colored schools, but that the few Chinese Americans living in Augusta and other Georgia cities should not be prohibited from attending white schools.90
While the editorials provide a general overview of the position of Augustans on the proposed bill, there are a number of silences that speak volumes and help to create a more complete picture of the situation. First, the voices of the Chinese Americans in response to the bill are practically nonexistent. There are no direct letters or other sources that provide an indication of the responses of Chines Americans to either the legislators or the school board. Why this is so is uncertain, but the fact that many white Augustans jumped to defend Chinese Americans serves as one explanation. Second, although Augustans did not publicly or explicitly state this in any letters or editorials, another reason for supporting the Chinese Americans could be the nature of the bill. The bill was not reclassifying Chinese Americans as colored to send them to colored schools but threatening the funding and operations of white schools that admitted Chinese American children. Georgia had a smaller population of Chinese Americans when compared with towns and cities in the Mississippi Delta, and as a result, many white parents may not have immediately felt threatened by the idea of their children sharing a desk with a Chinese American boy or girl; however, the idea of shutting down a public school that primarily served whites was a more troubling prospect. By railing against the bill and its proposed budget cuts, Augustans cried out against the injustices of denying admission to the good Chinese Americans in order to keep their children’s schools open and functioning. Third, based on the tone of the responses as published in the paper, a gulf existed between Augustans and the state legislators and representatives. Although Georgians and legislators agreed on antimiscegenation, school segregation was a separate issue. Following the Lum and Lun decisions, legislators jumped at the opportunity to pass new legislation that would indirectly reclassify Chinese Americans as colored for the sake of dismantling schools that ignored Jim Crow laws. Augustans, however, viewed the matter differently, potentially seeing it as a growing infringement on the local solutions to school segregation. While the ability of Chinese Americans to continue to operate as noncolored was at stake in the debate over the bill, various inhabitants of Georgia were also attached to the outcome.
In the end, the 1931 bill proposing funding cuts to Chinese American and white integrated schools failed. Representative Messer was an undying devotee to the bill, but others (including the original supporters of the bill) became disillusioned with the measure. Passing such a harsh bill would inflict unnecessary harm on Chinese Americans, but more importantly, the legislators’ attempts to make a statement on the racial category of the Chinese Americans would end up hurting innocent white children. A local labor association with an anti-immigrant flare, the Junior Mechanics League of Augusta, drafted a resolution to submit to the Richmond County school district, hoping that a more local approach would achieve the goal of classifying Chinese Americans as “colored” and ending the “unconstitutional” practice of integrated schools. Once again, however, the resolution failed, and Chinese Americans continued to attend white schools as the population grew throughout the mid-twentieth century.91
Similar to the Chinese Americans in Mississippi, the Chinese American population of Augusta thrived after World War II. As more Chinese Americans were born in the city and in other areas of Georgia, Asian Americans moved toward being accepted as “white” by residents, although this claim is difficult to evaluate, since Chinese Americans were generally allowed to attend white schools in many areas in the state long before the end of the war. Chinese Americans became economically and socially successful by the 1960s in Georgia, but amid the rising civil rights movement, their noncolored status would create problems. African American boycotts of discriminatory businesses in the late 1960s and early 1970s in Augusta often targeted Chinese stores. Chinese Americans were so accomplished at building their noncolored image that other racial and ethnic minorities came to believe it as well. Although Chinese Americans certainly were not white, their desire to distance themselves from African Americans backfired by creating tensions between blacks and Asian Americans in Augusta. And during the late 1960s and 1970s, few whites defended the noncolored status of Chinese Americans. Although Chinese Americans in Augusta and in Georgia succeeded in obtaining a white education for their children and encountered a different trajectory to acceptance and toleration than that of the Lums or the Luns in Mississippi, in the end, much like Chineseness, being noncolored would only get Chinese Americans so far in relation to both blacks and whites in the Peach State.92
The differences between the outcomes for the Chinese Americans of Augusta in 1931 and Gong Lum and Joe Tin Lun in the late 1920s with school segregation were based on the success of Chinese Americans in creating working racial classifications for themselves according to southern law. It would seem as though the Augustan Chinese Americans did everything right: They attended white churches, established families and successful businesses, and generally obeyed the laws and kept low profiles. These would be clear reasons explaining why whites in Georgia responded so negatively to a proposed bill to prohibit Chinese American students from attending white schools. However, such explanations do not hold up when we consider Gong Lum or Joe Tin Lun. By and large, Lum and Lun exercised the same strategies but achieved different results. Gong Lum had many of the characteristics of the Augustan Chinese Americans, but he stepped outside the lines when he challenged Mississippi law that defined him and his family as “colored.” The Chinese Americans in Augusta, however, did not attempt to create a new ethnic category to avoid Jim Crow in education. They strove to be seen as “noncolored,” a category distinct from “Chinese” in this case. Chinese Americans were not accepted as white in Augusta, but they were seen as being separate and different from black. In other words, Chinese Americans in Mississippi were colored regardless of their ethnicity; Chinese Americans in Georgia were not.
School segregation laws provided the first opportunities for southern states to establish a racial classification for Chinese Americans and other Asian Americans, with varied and often confusing results. Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, and other Asian Americans attended white schools prior to the Brown v. Board decision, and 1954 was not a significant turning point for Asian American education. By the 1960s, white Americans identified Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans as the model minorities, and many second- and third-generation Asian Americans reported feeling somewhat uncomfortable at times in their majority-white schools but were generally accepted and had many white friends. But the struggles of Chinese Americans and others to establish the position of their children are central to understanding southern history. Brown v. Board is not the only major milestone in the battle against school segregation and leaves out the more complicated issues of citizenship and immigration. Although the 1931 Roberto Alvarez v. the Board of Trustees of the Lemon Grove School District case in San Diego (which ruled that Mexican and Mexican American children should be integrated with white students to promote assimilation and “Americanization”) and the 1947 federal Westminster v. Mendez case (which resulted in a victory for Mexican parents who wanted to send their children to white schools in Orange County, California) followed the Gong Lum and Joe Tin Lun cases and also centered on race, ethnicity, and cultural citizenship and assimilation, these are only a few examples of legal battles against school segregation beyond Brown. Although sweeping and controversial, Brown v. Board overshadows the legal strategies attempted by men like Gong Lum and Joe Tin Lun.
The landmark 1954 Brown decision was not a victory for Chinese Americans in Mississippi and those elsewhere in the South who previously pursued equality with whites on the basis of ethnicity or argued for special treatment based on immigration privileges that were not granted to other minorities in the region. Mexican laborers living in Mississippi (in the same county as the Lums and during the same time period) also used a similar strategy to allow their children to attend white schools by appealing to the Mexican government and the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago (which afforded Mexicans “the enjoyment of all the rights of citizens of the United States”) for protection and successfully petitioning Mississippi governor Theodore Bilbo to integrate schools for Mexican American children in order to promote good relations between the United States and Mexico. Mexican immigrants appealed to Mexican nationalism and sovereignty as well as to foreign relations just as Chinese Americans in Mississippi appealed to special ethnic and immigrant status. The main difference between the two groups was that the Mexicans in Mississippi were successful in that their children were attending white schools by the 1930s, while Chinese Americans would retain their “other” identity and attend Chinese schools until the post–World War II era, when some stigmas against Asian Americans became outdated.
Examining the experiences of Chinese Americans in Mississippi and in Georgia (where no legal battle ensued) connects the Lums, the Luns, and other Chinese Americans and Asian Americans to other ethnic and racial minorities in the South, thereby forming a web of legal activism that exposes the limits of the Brown v. Board decision in helping to understand citizenship, foreign policy, and immigration influences on segregation decisions. Similar to the alien land laws, definitions of racial identity and international politics shaped school segregation policy in the South for Asian Americans and resulting Asian American judicial activism. Asian Americans approached discrimination in schools as an opportunity to fashion an ethnic and racial position in southern society that defied traditional classification, with varying levels of success.93