Gong Lum v. Rice (1927) Chinese School Segregation Before Ole Miss Blocked James Meredith (1962)

Long before Mississippi governor Ross Barnett stood in the doorway to block the admission of James Meredith half a century ago in 1962 as the first African American student to enroll at Ole Miss, Chinese in the Delta faced similar barriers. Back in the fall of 1924 the Rosedale, MS. school administration denied admission of Chinese children to the local elementary school. Gong Lum, a local Chinese merchant, filed a lawsuit on behalf of his two daughters, Berda and Martha, against this ruling. He was initially successful, but the Supreme Court of Mississippi in 1925, and the U. S. Supreme Court in 1927 upheld the decision to deny Chinese admission to whites-only public schools. The family portrait below in 1920 before the girls were old enough to attend school shows Berda in the lower left and Martha near the center.

Photograph Courtesy of Carolyn Hong Chan.

Although the Lum sisters were dismissed from the school on the first day of the fall term in 1924, they had actually, despite the Mississippi law, been attending the school during the previous year, and possibly earlier since they were in the 3rd grade. A recently discovered photograph of a 3rd-4th grade class at Rosedale school, dated April 16, 1924, was posted on Facebook by Linda Gatewood Bassie. The two Chinese girls in the bottom left were identified as Berda and Martha by Carolyn Hong Chan, a relative who grew up in the area. Moreover, the photograph shows another Chinese girl on the right side and two older Chinese boys in the upper left top row. (It might seem odd to have such wide age differences in the same class, but some Chinese children were recent immigrants and not fluent in English) Even though the attendance of these 5 Chinese was in violation of Mississippi law that restricted white schools to caucasians, in practice, different local authorities varied in their adherence to the law and it was not uncommon for some towns to accept Chinese children while a nearby town might not. Gong Lum may have lost the legal battle, but he did realize his goal of his children attending white schools by moving his family across the river to Elaine, Arkansas, where they were admitted.

Chinese Mission School Historic Marker, Cleveland, MS.

           Most discussions, even today, of school segregration in Mississippi, and elsewhere, focus on black and white children with little or no mention of other children such as Chinese.

In an earlier post on Sept. 23, I noted that:

        "Since the late 1800s Mississippi maintained that white schools were for caucasians only, and that since Chinese were not caucasian, it was ruled that they could not attend white schools. Chinese fought this situation in court, a generation before the landmark 1954 decision (Brown vs. Board of Education) that overturned school desegregation nationwide.  The Chinese lost their case, and the ruling was upheld by the U. S. Supreme Court, Gong Lum v. Rice, 1927.  Chinese had to establish their own schools to provide better education for their children with the assistance of local churches until  white schools finally began to admit them during the late 1940s in a few small Delta towns."

Overdue recognition from the State of Mississippi of how Delta Chinese coped with this problem came on Oct. 21, 2012 with the dedication of an historic marker on the site of the Chinese Mission School established in 1937 by the Delta Chinese with the support of the First Baptist Church and Cleveland community leaders to provide a better education for Chinese children than was available to them. Over 200 attended the ceremony, including some alumni from as far away as New York and California to celebrate the recognition given to this vital collaboration to educate Chinese children and to visit the newly created Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum housed at Delta State University.
  It was a joyous homecoming for the Delta Chinese to pay tribute to their rich historic past.

RTHK Documentary on Chinese in North America

RTHK, the Hong Kong television network, produced an excellent documentary on Overseas Chinese in North America consisting of 4 hour-long episodes aired over the late summer of 2012.

This ambitious project, although it could only scratch the surface of the history of Chinese in North America, nonetheless was a significant contribution by providing audiences in Hong Kong with an overview of the many difficulties that Chinese who left for Gold Mountain had to suffer, but were able to eventually overcome. This documentary serves as an invaluable historical resource for Hong Kong Chinese.

Below are links to the 4 programs on YouTube. Some of the commentary is in Chinese, and the subtitles are also in Chinese, but most of the interviews are conducted in English. I was a consultant and interviewee in the fourth episode which focused on Chinese laundries and restaurants.

Roots Old and New, Stories of Chinese Emigrants - North America -#1 Angel island

https://podcast.rthk.hk/podcast/item.php?pid=469&eid=30029&year=2013&lang=en-US#

 

Roots Old and New, Stories of Chinese Emigrants - North America - #2 Chinese, Railroad, and Head Tax

https://podcast.rthk.hk/podcast/item.php?pid=469&eid=30030&year=2013&lang=en-US#

Roots Old and New, Stories of Chinese Emigrants - North America    #3 Chinese laundries and restaurants     

https://podcast.rthk.hk/podcast/item.php?pid=469&eid=30028&year=2013&lang=en-US

Roots Old and New, Stories of Chinese Emigrants - North America  #4    WWII Veterans

https://podcast.rthk.hk/podcast/item.php?pid=469

Before There Was "Lin-sanity"

        The meteoric and sudden rise of Jeremy Lin to professional basketball stardom last year is of historic importance for Americans of Chinese, and other Asian, ancestry.  The attention he deservedly received should give interest to the story of the Hong Wah Kues, a Chinese professional basketball team that barnstormed the country in 1939-1940 playing the likes of the Harlem Globetrotters.

Sociologist Kathleen Yep published a book, Outside the Paint: When Basketball Ruled at the Chinese Playground.   that documents in rich detail the story of the brief shining moment of this band of spirited and talented Chinese athletes with an unconventional style that relied on speed and aggressive play to offset their size disadvantage against taller opponents.

Immigrants Stayed Connected With China Through Music

       Chinese immigrants stayed culturally connected to their homeland in many ways, bonds that were especially vital in the face of the hostility and discrimination they suffered historically in America. Those living in Chinese communities that came to be referred to as "Chinatowns" had access to theaters when they flocked to see live Chinese opera on stage, as suggested in a documentary, A Moment in Time by Ruby Yang, showing how meaningful this experience was for them in a time before television.



        Unfortunately, many Chinese lived in areas across the United States where their numbers were too few to have access to such cultural experiences. I grew up in Macon, Georgia, for example, where our family was the only Chinese in town.  My parents received Chinese newspapers in the mail, probably once a week, that was their window on news from China and about Chinese issues in the United States. Still, we did have ONE Chinese phonograph record, the Chinese National Anthem, that provided a smidgen of contact with China. When I was around 4 or 5 years old, my brother and I, would crank up the old manual phonograph to play this marching music known also as the "March of the Volunteers" and we would march around the room enthusiastically even though we didn't understand the Chinese lyrics.
       A friend in Chicago, Bill Tong, recently told me about his more extensive contact with Chinese music in listening to his parents' records and tapes of Chinese music as he was growing up.  His father listened to Cantonese opera as well as Chinese pop music that his mother favored. In the Hoisan dialect it was called "see oy cook," or Shidaiqu (in Mandarin).  This Mando-pop  style of music based in Shanghai and sung in Mandarin fused Chinese folk songs with American jazz and enjoyed enormous popularity from the 30's through the 50's.  Among its biggest stars were Zhou Xuan, one of his father's favorite singers and Wu Ying Yin (one of his mother's favorites).

       Wu Ying Yin's most famous song "Acacia Moon, Trinidad Sent" recorded in 1948. Wu Ying Yin (1922-2009) enjoyed a long career, singing into her 80's. In 2003, she performed this song in Shanghai that she popularized during the 1940's. 

        Despite separation by thousands of miles across an ocean from their homeland, Chinese immigrants sought ways to experience familiar and treasured aspects of their Chinese culture. Anti-Chinese sentiment was often based on their apparent unwillingness to assimilate to American culture. However, having nostalgia for one's homeland should not be seen as incompatible with acceptance of the host culture.  Furthermore, which is the chicken, and which is the egg?  Had Chinese been afforded equal opportunity, perhaps they would have more easily come to embrace American culture.

Mississippi Delta Chinese Grocery Stores

Mississippi Public Broadcasting aired several interviews in 2011 about the Delta Chinese grocery stores. 

    Chinese in the Delta

     AIR DATE 09/19/11

   An isolated group of Chinese Americans managed to maintain a vital, albeit small community in the  Mississippi Delta for roughly a hundred years. Now largely forgotten, Chinese groceries once dotted small Delta towns, serving mostly the black community. They  also provided the essential ticket to survival for the Chinese immigrants in a society strictly segregated between black and white. MPB's Sandra Knispel spoke with California State University professor emeritus John Jung.  Jung is the author of four books about the life,

Magnolias and Chopsticks: The Mississippi Delta Chinese Experience Part 1

PUBLISHED BY SANDRA KNISPEL ON 21 SEP 2011 04:25PM

The Chinese of the Mississippi Delta are an often-overlooked part of the history of the Deep South. In part one of our two-part series, MPB’s Sandra Knispel tells the story of what made them come all the way to the small towns of the Delta.

China is a long way from the United States. Yet many made the voyage, hoping for a better life. In the late 1860s, the first Chinese reached the Mississippi Delta. According to data collected by the University of Mississippi's Center for Population Studies, in 1870 only 16 Chinese lived in the Magnolia state.

Magnolias and Chopsticks: The Chinese Experience in the Mississippi Delta Part 2

PUBLISHED BY SANDRA KNISPEL ON 22 SEP 2011 08:55AM

The Chinese of the Mississippi Delta are an often-overlooked mosaic in the history of the Deep South. In the second installment of our two-part series, MPB’s Sandra Knispel looks at their rapid economic and social ascent -- from grocery store owner to professional. She interviews three Chinese in the  MississippiDelta, Harold Lum, Luck Wing, and Frieda Quon whose families owned grocery stores .

                         

Luck Wing

                             r  

Kit Lum

                                      L 

Handbook of Chinese in America (1946)

          Published in 1946, the Handbook of Chinese in America, is an invaluable resource for examining the primary businesses and organizations of Chinese across the United States.  I could find no information about how the listings were gathered but I assume the businesses in the Handbook paid a fee to be included.  (My parents had a copy of this hardbound 646 page book, which as I recall had a red cover.)
         I was 'disappointed' to discover that our laundry was not listed. Since then I have discovered several other laundries that were not in the list. My assumption, perhaps speculative, is that many laundry owners did not see any advantage in being listed and did not bother being listed.  In contrast, restaurants and grocery stores, listed in large numbers across the country, would stand to benefit from having their businesses listed.)

         I had not thought about this book until I was at the Association of Asian American Studies in Chicago a few years ago.  Steve Dao, a dedicated collector and vendor of Chinese American history ephemera, had a table at the conference. As I was talking with him, a book on the table that looked strangely familiar caught my eye.  As it had been about 50 years since I last saw our copy, I was not certain at first. Upon closer examination, I was excited to realize that it was a copy of the very same Handbook I last saw half a century ago.  I immediately called it to the attention of a historian friend who eagerly shelled out $50 for it, which turns out to be a bargain as I found a copy online in Vermont recently that was going for $100!
          I must confess that I borrowed a copy from a library and shamelessly xeroxed it (at 646 pages, maybe I should have just bought the book).   At the time I wasn't sure I would ever find much use for it.  Although I had a sentimental feeling about the book, I wondered if was it worth $50 to me.  Today, in retrospect, it has proved to be a great resource for identifying the types of businesses Chinese were operating, where they were located, and in what number, across the entire country. Since the addresses are listed, one could use the information to map out where "Chinatowns" were located in many towns with Chinese communities.  Examination of the names chosen for businesses back then is also interesting since many of them reflect the times, e.g., New China Cafe, New Republic Cafe, Good Earth Cafe.
          To give you some sample listings, I uploaded the listings of the Chinese grocery stores in the Mississippi River Delta in Mississippi and Arkansas which have proved to be very helpful to my research on Chinese in these communities.

Update, March 18, 2019.
I just searched the National Central Library, a site in Taiwan with many online documents but mostly in Chinese, for information on another topic following a link provided by Chao Chen, a reference librarian at Tufts University. I was pleasantly surprised to discover a beautifully scanned copy of the 600+ pages of the Handbook available for free access online!
   

Americans As Seen By A Chinese Visitor

        Accounts of Chinese immigrants written by Americans often smugly dwell on the strangeness of their customs, behaviors, and beliefs. Rarely do we find accounts of how Americans might appear to the Chinese, but one exception is a book by Zongren Liu, Two Years in the Melting Pot (1984).

        Liu came as a visiting scholar to study English in Chicago and in this book he describes his mostly depressing stay there and in other parts of the country.  Among his observations,  he described some American behaviors that we might not think of as out of the ordinary but which he found to be perplexing, if not downright irrational.
        Here is one charming example that shows that the Chinese do not have the corner on irrational behaviors.

An "Undercount" of Mississippi Delta Chinese

        Historian Charles Bolton published The Hardest Deal of All in 2005, an analysis of school desegregation from1870-1980 in Mississippi. While it is quite understandable that the struggle between blacks and whites would receive the preponderance of the book's coverage, it unjustifiably fails to make any mention of the contest that the Delta Chinese fought in an attempt to gain admittance to the state's white schools.  

        Since the late 1800s Mississippi maintained that white schools were for caucasians only, and that since Chinese were not caucasian, it was ruled that they could not attend white schools. Chinese fought this situation in court, a generation before the landmark 1954 decision (Brown vs. Board of Education) that overturned school desegregation nationwide.  The Chinese lost their case, and the ruling was upheld by the U. S. Supreme Court, Gong Lum v. Rice, 1927.  Chinese had to establish their own schools to provide better education for their children with the assistance of local churches until  white schools finally began to admit them during the late 1940s in a few small Delta towns.

       A computer search of the book for "Chinese" and "Gong Lum" found "0 results" for both terms.  Like the denial of their access to schooling for almost half of the past century,  this historical account of Mississippi schools also short-changed the Chinese in Mississippi by ignoring their struggles.

"Over Count" of Chinese in the 1940 Census?

The U. S. Census is an invaluable resource for historical and genealogical research. I was excited when the 1940 U. S. Census was released earlier this year, but frustrated because it was released without a name index, which made it virtually impossible to use and maintain sanity. Fortunately, it is now much more functional with the addition of a name index generated with the help of hundreds of volunteers who transcribed information from the original handwritten record sheets collected in the field to create a searchable online digitized database.

I gave it a test run by first trying to locate the record of our family in Macon, Georgia.

That test was not a difficult search since we were the only Chinese in the entire city at the time. This initial success led me to make several additional searches which, much to my surprise, suggested that the U. S. Census may have over counted the number of Chinese in many states. Before I explain why I reached this conclusion, I first need to retrace the process to show how I discovered the errors. So, be patient!

How to Use Ancestry.com to Search the Census Database

On the initial search screen shown below, you enter as many of the listed fields as possible: first and last name, birth year, exact or within a range, location (where they were born and location and approximate year of “any event” (marriage, divorce, for example).

Choose “match all terms exactly” to prevent finding too many cases, but if that fails, you can then widen the yield by removing that constraint.

Depending on how unique your target is, you might locate that person by entering only part of the requested information.



  SUCCESSFUL SEARCH FOR THE JUNG FAMILY

On lines 42-47 of the census record shown below, our family is listed for 1940 at 519 Mulberry Street. I highlighted in bright green how our race was coded, "C 4."



Failure Locating My Uncle

I also wanted to find my uncle who came to Atlanta in 1937, but I had no success finding him. Possibly, he was not in his laundry on the days when the census taker came. Or, I used the wrong spelling of his name or the census taker, or transcriber, entered it differently from the way I spelled it.

If you examine a sample of original record sheets, you can easily understand why these errors occur because some of the handwriting is poor or the record sheet did not scan clearly.

An alternative approach is to use Advanced Search, which allows you to specify several filters such as GENDER, and more importantly for my purpose, Race/Ethnicity. By adding CHINESE to the Race/Ethnicity field (see bright green field) I was able to retrieve only the Chinese cases for a specific Location (you can specific a City, State, or Both). I specified Georgia (See bright green field).



 Since there were very few Chinese in Atlanta in 1940, my thought was that my uncle’s name would come up even if they misspelled his name. Then since I knew the street address where he lived, I should have been able to locate him even if his name were misspelled. Of course, this method would not work easily for cities where there were hundreds of Chinese.
(My brother George was listed as "Georgia" and my sister Eugenia as "Eugennia," and Joe Yip in Mississippi was listed as "Qck Zip")

However, even this approach failed to locate my uncle in Atlanta in the 1940 census. He must have been out of his laundry when the census taker came.

Searching For Trends or Totals

Instead of trying to find a specific person by name, one might be interested in seeing patterns or trends in the number of Chinese over decades. Thus, I looked at changes in the total number of Chinese in Georgia for each decennial census.

Results for Chinese Living in Georgia

When I searched for CHINESE in Georgia for all decennial Censuses, I found a gradual increase from 203 in 1900 to 445 in 1940.


I then restricted my search to Chinese in Georgia who were born in China. The percentage declined with successive decades. Only about half, or 222, of the Chinese living in Georgia in 1940 were born in China. In contrast, a decade earlier in 1930, around 80% or 206 of the 253 Chinese in Georgia were born in China and in 1900, 100% of the 203 Chinese in Georgia were born in China.

Some Strange Findings

When I examined some of the cases classified as Chinese on the index lists, many of their surnames, e.g., ADAMS, did not seem to be Chinese. Nor were their occupations typical of Chinese immigrants such as laundryman, restaurant cook. or waiter.

I therefore examined images of the original census record sheets for these suspicious cases.

Below is a 1940 census record for one Adams family in Missouri that was indexed as Chinese.

The original handwritten census record appeared with the searched name highlighted in yellow, and family members in green. Beneath this info shows how it was entered in the searchable database.



On the original sheet for the Adams family, RACE had a code of “C 2“ but they were recorded in the Index as “Chinese.”[See the Column I highlighted in bright lime green] In other words, in the 1940 Census many “C 2” cases that should have been recorded as Colored or Black were counted as Chinese.

The same error occurred in other states I sampled including Missouri, Mississippi, Delaware, North Carolina, Nebraska, and Alabama. This error did not show up in Minnesota, at least for the the cases I sampled!

Other support for this conclusion is that the RACE code on the original sheet (See the first image on this post) for my own family was not "C 2," but "C 4." [Actually, it seems to have been “Chi” but that was lightly crossed out and replaced with ”C 4.”

As a type of 'reverse' check, for RACE/ETHNICITY I searched for COLORED (the term in 1940 for Blacks). When I examined the original record sheet for cases retrieved in this search, the code was usually “C 2.” [In one state it was “Col” and in another, “Neg.”]

Birth Rates for Chinese in Georgia

The misclassification error also occurred for birth data.
I did a a search for Chinese births in 1939 in Georgia on the 1940 census.

Given that the majority of Chinese in Georgia, as elsewhere, were single men, or men with wives in China, one would not expect them to have had many babies born in Georgia.

[Therefore to get a fair-sized sample, I used a range of years from 1929-1939] In this decade, there were 56 Chinese females born (and roughly the same number of males).

[Note: the point of this analysis is not to determine the number of Chinese babies but to examine the accuracy of the coding.]

A look at the Table below shows many of the surnames of the babies did not "look like" Chinese surnames.



You get definitive evidence of errors if you examine a sample of the original record sheets for births with a non-Chinese looking surname. The RACE column for these cases shows a code of “C-2” or Colored (the prevalent term for Blacks in that era) as in the record shown below for Bessie Butler and her relatives. In other words, these babies got misclassified in the index as Chinese, for whom the correct code is “C-4.”



While one hopes for, but does not expect 100 percent accuracy for such a complicated undertaking as taking a national census, egregious errors such as the ones described above simply should not have happened and could have been caught with minimal review.