Adrienne Berard points out in Water Tossing Boulders that their reason for choosing to avoid black schools was motivated by racism.

He was able to win the writ of mandamus they sought, but then the school district appealed to the Mississippi Supreme Court, which heard the case en banc and unanimously reversed the lower court, holding that Mississippi's constitution and laws clearly distinguished Asians ("Mongolians", it called them) from whites, so the Lums could not attend white schools.

Chief Justice William Howard Taft's unanimous opinion ended with a pronouncement that all racial segregation in schools was constitutional; while it was overturned by Brown v. Board of Education a quarter-century later, it gave greater legal foundation to educational segregation in the short term and set back efforts to end it.

In the late 19th century, following the Civil War, the United States began to deal with the place in society of two racial minorities: Blacks, especially those newly freed from slavery, and Chinese, who had begun emigrating to the West Coast in large numbers first to try their luck in the California Gold Rush and later to work on railroad construction and mining.

Both came to be seen as a threat to an existing social hierarchy dominated by whites: Blacks for their newly free status, and the Chinese as cheap labor.

[6] In 1896's Plessy v. Ferguson, which went further and upheld the constitutionality of laws that mandated segregation in private facilities open to the public such as rail transport, Justice John Marshall Harlan, the sole dissenter as he had been in the Civil Rights Cases, noted the dissonance between the legal treatment of Blacks and Chinese: There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States.

Lum, too, opened a general store in the small Bolivar County town of Benoit that primarily served the area's Black population, barred from many business establishments by strict racial segregation laws.

1, 2  While Berda resisted her parents' efforts to educate her, desiring to leave the Delta region when she grew up, Martha consistently earned good grades in the local school.[3]: Ch.

They retained local lawyer Earl L. Brewer, a former governor who had just overwhelmingly lost an election to the U.S. Senate, to represent them in legal action against the district.

5 A lower court granted the plaintiff's request of a writ of mandamus to force the members of the board of trustees to admit the Lums.

Assistant attorney general Elmer Clinton Sharp argued the case for the school district, reiterating the history of segregation in the state and saying that Asians and Native Americans were not considered white.

[10] Justice George Ethridge, a former teacher to whom his colleagues generally deferred in matters related to education, wrote for a unanimous court that considered the case as a question of whether the Lum children were within the statutory definition of white.

"[11] Ethridge found the most relevant precedent to be Moreau v. Grandich, a 1917 case where, in an opinion he had also authored, a unanimous court upheld the dismissal of several children of a white couple from the Bay St. Louis schools after it was learned that they had a Black great-grandmother.

He added that a pair of U.S. Supreme Court decisions[14] had both held that Asians were not white or Caucasian in the historical sense of how that word had been understood in the United States.

Justice Louis Brandeis, who believed the Fourteenth Amendment allowed too much federal interference with state authority yet was open to arguments that discrimination against members of minority groups violated their due process rights under the Fifth Amendment, to the point that he had written several majority opinions to that effect (most recently Ng Fung Ho v. White,[16] another case involving Chinese petitioners) was deeply disturbed by the brief; he asked a friend, Felix Frankfurter (himself later appointed to the Court), if it might be possible to find more competent counsel for the Lums.[3]: Ch.

9 The Lums themselves, realizing that the case had implications for all Chinese Americans, had similar concerns, and had arranged for a longtime friend of theirs, not a lawyer, to travel to Washington and be present at oral argument.

In a nine-page unanimous opinion, with no footnotes, written by Chief Justice and former U.S. President William Howard Taft, it affirmed the Mississippi Supreme Court's ruling and thus the position of the board of trustees.

In 1936 he successfully argued Brown v. Mississippi before the Supreme Court, which held that confessions obtained through beatings and torture were inadmissible as evidence, reversing the convictions of several of his clients.

9 The Chicago Defender, a prominent Black newspaper, also ran a front-page editorial, condemning the decision as ignoring the "separate but equal" provisions supposedly governing segregation in light of the conditions found in many schools for Black children only: It is the opinion of Chief Justice William Howard Taft that these opportunities are equal ...

An important part of the decision still stands—the power of the state to make racial distinctions in its school system, and to determine the race of its students.

"The Court's ruling had established a precedent more powerful than the Lum family could have imagined", observed Adrienne Berard, in Water Tossing Boulders, a history of the case.