1920's Law and Justice | Race Relations: A Legal Definition of Color

A Challenge to Segregated Education.

In September 1925 Martha Lum, a Chinese American student, was denied admittance to Rosedale High School in Bolivar County, Mississippi, on the grounds that the facility was reserved exclusively for white pupils. School authorities told her father, Gong Lum, that she would have to attend an underfunded, "colored" high school of inferior quality in a nearby county. Gong Lum filed suit against the Bolivar County School District. He did not challenge the basic premise of racially segregated education. Instead his white attorney, Earl Brewer, argued, "Colored describes only one race, and that is the Negro." Martha Lum, he said, was a native-born American of pure Chinese extraction and "without any drop of Negro blood." Further-more, Gong Lum, a local dry-goods merchant, annually paid the county school taxes that provided funds for the maintenance of the all-white Bolivar County school system.

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