| Lum v. Rice | ||||||
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Supreme Court of the United States |
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| Submitted October 12, 1927 Decided November 21, 1927 |
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| Full case name | Gong Lum, et al. v. Rice et al. | |||||
| Citations | 275 U.S. 78 (more) 48 S. Ct. 91; 72 L. Ed. 172 |
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| Prior history | Trial court ordered writ of mandamus. Reversed by Supreme Court of Mississippi, 139 Miss. 760, 104 So. 105. | |||||
| Subsequent history | Affirmed, 139 Miss. 760. | |||||
| Holding | ||||||
| A child of Chinese blood, born in and a citizen of the United States, is not denied the equal protection of the law by being classed by the state among the colored races who are assigned to public schools separate from those provided for the whites when equal facilities for education are afforded to both classes. | ||||||
| Court membership | ||||||
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| Case opinions | ||||||
| Majority | Taft, joined by unanimous | |||||
| Laws applied | ||||||
| U.S. Const. amend. XIV | ||||||
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Overruled by
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| Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) | ||||||
Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78 (1927), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that the exclusion on account of race of a child of Chinese ancestry from a state high school did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The decision effectively approved the exclusion of minority children from schools reserved for whites.
Contents |
In 1924, a nine-year old Chinese-American named Martha Lum, daughter of Gong Lum, was prohibited from attending the Rosedale Consolidated High School in Bolivar County, Mississippi solely because she was of Chinese descent. There was no school in the district maintained for Chinese students, and she was forced by compulsory attendance laws to attend school.
A lower court granted the plaintiff's request of a writ of mandamus to force the members of the Board of Trustees to admit Martha Lum. Gong Lum's case was not that racial discrimination as such was illegal, but that his daughter, being Chinese, had incorrectly been classified as colored by the authorities.
Since the ruling went against them, the Board of Trustees became the plaintiff and Lum was named the defendant in the case Rice v. Gong Lum, which was heard in the Supreme Court of Mississippi. The state Supreme Court reversed the lower court's decision and allowed the Board of Trustees to exclude Martha Lum from the school for white children. Gong Lum appealed the state Supreme Court's ruling to the federal Supreme Court.
In an opinion written by Chief Justice William Howard Taft, the Supreme Court affirmed the state supreme court's ruling and thus the position of the Board of Trustees. In the unanimous opinion, Taft held that the petitioner had not shown that there weren't segregated schools accessible for the education of Martha Lum in Mississippi:
Taft further stated that, given the accessibility of segregated schools, the question then was whether a person of Chinese ancestry, born in and a citizen of the United States, was denied equal protection of the law by being given the opportunity to attend a school which "receive[d] only children of the brown, yellow or black races." In reference to Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education, Taft concluded that "[t]he right and power of the state to regulate the method of providing for the education of its youth at public expense is clear." Additionally, Taft pointed to a number of federal and state court decisions, most prominently Plessy v. Ferguson, all of which had upheld segregation in the public sphere and particularly in the realm of public education. Accordingly, Taft concluded:
The judgement of the Supreme Court of Mississippi was affirmed. Martha Lum was not allowed to go to the school for white children.
Lum was effectively overruled by the Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which outlawed segregation in public schools.