The case effectively ruled that minority children were entitled to attend public school in California.

Tape v. Hurley is widely regarded as the starting point when Asian Americans began challenging school segregation and educational inequality.

The result of the case gave greater legal foundations for eliminating segregation in the school system later on.

In 1884, Joseph and Mary Tape challenged San Francisco's practice by enrolling their daughter, Mamie, in the all-white Spring Valley School[6][7] at 1451 Jackson Street.

[11] Most Chinese immigrants were young males with poor financial backgrounds working on mining and railroad constructions.

Hundreds of Anti-Chinese riots and protests broke out in the 1870s, and such sentiments of hatred led to legal discrimination against Chinese immigrants extending throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century.

[13] Starting from 1870, state and local law placed a myriad of social and economic restrictions on Chinese immigrants.

The Page Act of 1875 was the first restrictive federal immigration law that effectively prohibited Chinese women from entering the United States.

[20] In 1860, California amended the 1855 law to bar "Negroes, Mongolians, and Indians" from public schools, and granted the California State Superintendent of Public Instruction, then Andrew J. Moulder, the authority to withhold state funds from districts violating the amended code.

The potential exceptions for the enrollment of Indian children living with white families or with the written consent of a majority of other parents also disappeared.

[3] In 1880, the Political Code was modified to lift the restriction of enrollment to white students (§1662) and the sections requiring separate but equal (§1671) segregated schools (§1669) were repealed.

The opening of the new Chinese school was not until September 1859, as the education board of San Francisco attributed the delay to lack of funding.

[29] Joseph Tape was born in Guangdong province in China and arrived in the United States at the age of twelve.

Mary Tape lived in the Ladies' Protection and Relief Society,[30] in her early life, where she learned English and American culture.

They lived as a prosperous middle-class family and settled in the Cow Hollow neighborhood of San Francisco, a predominantly white community.

[32] In 1880, the California state legislature passed the Political Code, which prevented school districts from refusing admission of non-white students.

[34] Together with the Chinese vice-consul, Frederick Bee, Joseph Tape wrote a letter to Superintendent Andrew Moulder, expressing that the denying of admission violates the constitution of the United States, given that Mamie Tape is a native-born citizen of the United States.

[26] However, the San Francisco Board of Education and Superintendent Andrew Moulder insisted that they conformed with relevant laws.

The San Francisco Board of Education supported Miss Hurley as they believed that she fulfilled her school principal duties.

[26] California Supreme Court justice John Sharpstein then claimedRespondent here has the same right to enter a public school that any other child has.

[37] To deny a child, born of Chinese parents in this state, entrance to the public schools would be a violation of the law of the state and the Constitution of the United States.In response to the ruling, Mary Tape sent an incensed letter to the San Francisco school board expressing her outrage: May you Mr. Moulder, never be persecuted like the way you have persecuted little Mamie Tape.

May of the California State Assembly on March 4, 1885, urging passage of pending bills to reestablish a separate school system for Chinese and other "Mongolian" children.

[41] With the law rewritten, Mamie Tape could no longer enroll in the white-dominated public school near her home.

[43] Tape v. Hurley is both temporally and substantively similar to the landmark case Plessy v. Ferguson, which in 1896 justified the legality of segregated schools on the premise of "separate but equal."