Before Brown: The Lum Family's Fight for School Equality

Decades before Brown v. Board of Education, the Lum family challenged segregation in public schools on behalf of their daughter Martha. There are many amazing immigrant mothers out there, but Katherine Lum stands out and should be better known.

A Family’s Fight Against Segregation Before Brown v. Board of Education

Martha had been going to school with white children for years, and she was a straight-A student.  But on her first day of high school, she was told that she, her sister, and two other girls had to leave.  Mississippi’s constitution at the time required separate schools for “children of the white and colored races,” and the school policy treated Chinese as “colored.”

There were not many Asian Americans in the South in the 1920s, but there were a few hundred Chinese in Mississippi along with two Hindus and one Filipino, according to 1920 census data.  Katherine Lum had come to be a servant for a Chinese merchant.  Jeu Gong Lum had entered the country illegally and had come to the South for work.  They met, married, and had their children in Mississippi.

Other families accepted the school’s policy, but Katherine Lum would not back down.  She and her husband convinced former Mississippi Governor Earl Brewer to bring a case. 

The Lum Legal Battle and Its Aftermath

“The state collects from all for the benefit of all.  Martha Lum is one of the state’s children and is entitled to the enjoyment of the privilege of the public school system without regard to her race,” Brewer argued before the Mississippi Supreme Court in 1925.

The Lums lost their case – the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of school segregation.  They then appealed to the United States Supreme Court, but a different lawyer handled the appeal.  His brief was so bad that one of the justices asked about getting the Lums a better counsel, but this lawyer stayed on and even waived oral argument. 

The United States Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the Mississippi Supreme Court’s decision in 1927, letting stand racial segregation within public schools until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.  

As for Martha, her sister and her younger brother, Katherine Lum sent them to a relative in Michigan, where they were able to attend public schools with other immigrant children, albeit in very difficult family circumstances.  Katherine then found a white school in Arkansas that agreed to take her children and moved the family there.  Martha and her sister graduated from high school in 1933.

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Stephen Chahn Lee has written about Asian American legal history throughout his time as a lawyer, illuminating the pivotal legal battles fought by Asian Pacific Americans and their role in shaping the rights and freedoms we uphold today. This article was one of a series that Stephen wrote in 2023 and that grew out of an event that Stephen organized for the United States District Court of the Northern District of Illinois, the Federal Bar Association Chicago Chapter, the Asian American Bar Association of Greater Chicago, and other bar associations.

For further insights into the story of the Lum family’s fight for school equality or for legal guidance with healthcare fraud defense, please contact Stephen Lee Law.

Source Acknowledgement

This article draws extensively from Adrienne Berard's insightful book, Water Tossing Boulders: How A Family of Chinese Immigrants Led the First Fight to Desegregate Schools in the Jim Crow South. Special thanks to Adrienne Berard for her invaluable book and assistance.