Taft went on to cite Plessy v. Ferguson, the very case that Flowers cited in his brief.
In Plessy v. Ferguson, in upholding the validity under the Fourteenth Amendment of a statute of Louisiana requiring the separation of the white and colored races in railway coaches, a more difficult question than this, this court, speaking of permitted race separation, said: “The most common instance of this is connected with the establishment of separate schools for white and colored children, which has been held to be a valid exercise of the legislative power even by courts of states where the political rights of the colored race have been longest and most earnestly enforced.”
Taft ended his opinion with an added clause, a statement so bold that it would rattle even his strongest supporters. The chief justice of the Supreme Court and former president of the United States gave individual states full constitutional power to segregate public schools and assign students to any race they saw fit: “The decision is within the discretion of the state in regulating its public schools, and does not conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment. The judgment of the Supreme Court of Mississippi is affirmed.”
Without the participation of any person of the Negro race, the Supreme Court rendered a decision that sanctioned racial segregation within all public schools. The Court’s unanimous ruling provided Mississippi with one of its strongest weapons to uphold segregation. A case that could have dismantled the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson now became a pillar for its defense.
“Gong Lum is an ugly, unfortunate case,” legal scholar Jamal Greene later wrote. “Part of the ugliness stems from the fact that this was not a test case; the stakes of the litigation were clear to the Court. . . . Racial division was neither an unintended nor an instrumental consequence of the policy, but was in fact its goal.”
On the morning of November 22, 1927, thousands of Americans opened their newspapers to see Taft’s decision quoted by the Associated Press. “Race segregation of children in public schools was sustained yesterday by the Supreme Court,” the article pronounced. “Chief Justice Taft, in delivering the opinion said it was ‘within the constitutional power of the State legislature to settle without intervention of the Federal courts.’”
It would be four days before the residents of Bolivar County, Mississippi, read an abridged version of the same article, in the back of the paper, between advertisements for estate sales and Standard Motor Oil. The editor removed the article’s last few paragraphs, ending instead with one unyielding sentence: “Material harm would be done by the intermingling of children of all races.”
As the verdict received little coverage at home, the rest of the country was galvanized into debate over its implications. Editorials appeared in both the white and the black press. Liberal and conservative papers were equally fascinated with the significance of the ruling.
Just two days after the verdict was announced, the Los Angeles Times ran an editorial at the front of its paper defending the decision. “In deciding the case the court referred to the ‘Jim Crow’ law which it has heretofore upheld, and thus apparently broadened the basis of the decision so that it seems to cover any sort of reasonable segregation that may be made.” The author went on to praise the court for giving white America a legal precedent to uphold segregation at every level of society.
That the race problem has not been even more acute is due to the fact that segregation, extralegal but fairly effective, already exists. The Supreme Court’s opinion points the way to making it still more effective. So far segregation depends largely upon private agreement, and private agreements sometimes break down when they are submitted to severe strain. It will be better all around when they can be given legal backing.
In black America, the agony was palpable. The Court’s ruling only reaffirmed the reality that constitutional rights afforded to whites did not apply to colored citizens. All men were not created equal before the law. Segregation served as the mores of a society that was inherently unjust.
“Why can [Americans] not educate their children without restriction as to color,” asked the Pittsburgh Courier. “And why can they not occupy any seat in a train for which they are able to pay? If citizens of Chinese descent can be forced to attend jim-crow schools, then it is only logical to suppose that they can be segregated on trains, in hotels, in restaurants, in parks and at theaters, as are the Negroes.”
For many blacks, the true bigotry lay not in the language of the ruling, but in the court’s failure to recognize the indignities created by segregation itself.
“It is the opinion of the Chief Justice William Howard Taft that these opportunities are equal,” read the front page of the Chicago Defender.
The little shacks you attend, in which a large coal stove in the center of the single room furnishes both heat and smoke—the ramshackle, tumble-down contraption, situated far down among the cotton stalks—is equal of the beautiful brick and stone structure attended by whites. You see, the three months you are allowed to attend this institution, between the sowing, chopping and picking of cotton, are equal to the nine months white children go to school. Your teachers, barely out of the primary school themselves, possessing no special training for teachers, are the equals of white teachers all especially trained and prepared for the work they undertake.
No longer was the case about Martha Lum, about Rosedale High School, even about Mississippi. The court’s ruling established a precedent more powerful than the Lum family could have imagined. By fighting, they only made the enemy stronger. Every state in the nation now had legal grounds to exclude students of any race or nationality from its white schools.
CHAPTER X
WINTER, 1927
JEU GONG LUM LOADED a heavy stack of logs into an iron stove. Each piece of timber kicked up a cascade of soot, sending flutters of ash into the kitchen. Katherine stood on a stool beside the table, her sleeves rolled up above her elbows, pounding her fists into a dozen loaves of dough.
It was barely dawn and Katherine’s body was already streaked with flour and sweat. Ever since the family left Rosedale for Wabash, work started earlier. The days were longer and the pay scarcer. “You work like a darn fool to get a dollar,” Katherine recalled of her days in Wabash, “a darn fool.”
The town was nothing more than a station stop along the Missouri Pacific Railroad, a small patch of cotton land in the northern reaches of the Arkansas Delta. The Lums ran the only grocery in town, an old plantation commissary at the end of a dusty road. There was no running water, no electricity, no indoor plumbing. The days began with the lighting of the woodstove and the hauling of water from the well. They ended with the deafening cry of cicadas and a silence that settled wearily over the empty fields.
The riches of Rosedale did not follow the Lum family over the river into Arkansas. They lived in isolation, thrown back into the poverty that Jeu Gong so longed to escape. Forces far from his control had taken everything he once made for himself, for his family. In the stillness of the early-morning hours, he gathered wood to heat a home he did not build and leaven bread he would not eat.
This was not the life that Jeu Gong had envisioned so many years before, on the night he willed his body to cross a frozen river. This Gam Saan was made of rules that were written in skin. They could not be broken. They could not be won. Jeu Gong’s children inherited his blood, his skin, and no matter what he gave them, it would never be whiteness.
When the judgment came from the Mississippi Supreme Court, Katherine was devastated. She hid her heartbreak in her temper. She wouldn’t speak to the lo fan. She stopped going to church. In order to keep the children in school, Jeu Gong sent them north to live with his brother in Michigan. While they studied, Katherine made the decision to leave Rosedale. She no longer wanted to live in a town that had been so cruel to her family.
Throughout the Delta, dozens of Chinese families made similar decisions, leaving in exodus from Mississippi. They moved to more tolerant cities with greater Chinese populations,
like Memphis or Houston. Many left the South entirely or sent their children elsewhere to be educated. By the late 1920s, the largest demographic to leave the Delta became the children themselves, forced to live in other states with distant relatives.
Some parents made a greater sacrifice and sent their children back to China as the country erupted into war with Japan. In 1933 Katherine’s sister-in-law traveled from Rosedale to China with her three children, the youngest only two years old. She left them in the care of an uncle in Nanking. “It still pains me to recall the agony of our parting,” she later wrote of the four years spent separated from her children.
“Since the Chinese have been excluded from the white schools, the pain and anguish born by their parents can hardly be described in words,” she confided in her native Cantonese. “Living in this unjust society, to what avail is it to complain or worry. Our solution was to send our children back to our home to be educated.”
For a period of twenty years, from the 1925 Gong Lum decision until the end of World War II, the majority of Delta Chinese received little formal schooling of any kind. Those families with younger children who could not travel hired private tutors. Such was the case with the Dongs, the Jees, and the Gees of Ruleville, the Gongs and Lings in Duncan, and the Jues in Indianola. For the older children, there was the option of moving out of state or to towns on the fringes of the Delta, such as Marks, Crenshaw, and Senatobia, which continued to allow Chinese students to attend white schools.
It was not until the 1930s that Chinese families in the Delta began creating their own private schools. In 1930 a one-room schoolhouse in Greenville was reassigned to Chinese students. Residents of Rosedale created a separate Chinese school in 1933. In 1937 a similar school was erected in nearby Cleveland. Due to limited enrollment, the schools remained open only a few years. Greenville became the last school to shutter its doors, in 1947.
As for the Lum family, Katherine eventually found a white high school in Elaine, Arkansas, that agreed to accept the children. Its facilities were not new, nor was its program accredited like that of Rosedale, but the conditions were far better than the rundown, clapboard shacks reserved for colored students. In the spring, Katherine traveled north to Michigan while Jeu Gong bought a grocery six miles from Elaine in Wabash.
Just as the Lums prepared to leave what little remained of their old life, the rains came. The downpours lasted for months. April saw record rainfall, with more than seven inches falling on Arkansas’s capital city in just a few hours. As surrounding lakes, rivers, and streambeds began to fill, the Mississippi continued to swell. Riverbanks struggled to contain the water, causing currents to flow upstream, toward the source of the river itself.
With such pressure, the levees could not hold. One by one, the manmade mounds of earth began to crumble. In Arkansas, every levee between Fort Smith and Little Rock failed under one enormous surge of water. A reporter in Arkansas City wrote that “mules were drowning on Main Street faster than people could unhitch them from wagons.”
By May, nearly 13 percent of the state lay under water, with more than sixty-five hundred square miles of land completely inundated. Almost twice as much farmland was flooded in Arkansas as in Mississippi and Louisiana combined. In Wabash, the planted cotton fields were engulfed in more than five feet of water. Rows of whitewashed sharecropper cabins carried watermarks high above their doorways.
In total, an estimated forty thousand Arkansans were driven from their homes during the flood of 1927. Ninety percent were tenant farmers. In the Lums’ new home of Phillips County, the number of refugees exceeded seventeen thousand. For many farmers, the prospect of rebuilding their plantation seemed futile. The crop had been washed away in the flood. For the sharecroppers, a year’s earnings disappeared under the water. They took what they could carry and abandoned the fields. By summer, the Delta was a mud-swept desert, without any cotton or labor remaining at harvest.
Most of Jeu Gong’s customers left with the waters. Their preachers told them the Lord had leveled the land on account of man’s sin. Under steeples in Harlem, Saint Louis, and Chicago, they sang gospels of redemption and recited the Book of Genesis.
The words God once spoke to Noah, they now took for themselves. I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. He told Noah to build an ark of cypress, for within him was all that remained of man’s righteousness. I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it.
They carried north their Bibles, clutched against breasts when the levees caved, when the river boiled under the fields, when they lifted their children to the ginnery roof and prayed to the raining heavens for strength. When, at last, the land was dry, they boarded boxcars, a thousand arks made of steel, and fled the South.
As the waters receded, Jeu Gong awaited a decision from the US Supreme Court. He left the Rosedale store in the care of his nephew, Lee, with the hopes that maybe one day his family could return to the brick house he built for them on the east end of Bruce Street. When the verdict came in early November, Jeu Gong learned his family would never return.
The decision that tore his children from him, forced them north to Michigan, the decision that left his family without a business, without a home, was now upheld by the highest court in America. The fight was over. The Lums had lost.
Still, Jeu Gong gave his children the best life he could make for them in Arkansas. He enrolled them all in school and promised Martha she would one day go to college. He taught his son to hunt waterfowl and rabbits in the sloughs between river and levee. He and Katherine bought a boat and taught Berda how to fish for turtles. As the Lum family moved on with their lives, the verdict became a tragedy relegated to the past, a story they did not tell, a memory they refused to keep.
Decades later, when Martha had children of her own, the war she’d waged in childhood returned to grip the nation. In June of 1953, the justices of the US Supreme Court ordered a rehearing for five school-desegregation cases, known collectively as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The justices wanted to rehear each case in order to determine the original intent of the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment. The question that Earl Brewer first asked inside the Rosedale courthouse in 1924 was now posed, twenty-nine years later, to the lawyers of Brown.
“What evidence is there,” the justices wanted to know, “that the Congress which submitted and the State legislatures and conventions which ratified the Fourteenth Amendment contemplated or did not contemplate, understood or did not understand, that it would abolish segregation in public schools?”
The question could not be answered easily. The team responsible for the five cases, the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, knew they would need help. To strengthen their argument, the organization’s chief counsel, Thurgood Marshall, enlisted more than two hundred lawyers and historians to research the framers’ intent.
It was in this context that John Hope Franklin, then a visiting professor of history at Cornell University, received a frantic phone call late in the summer of 1953. The man on the line was a lawyer Franklin had known for years, from when he first taught history at Howard University. The two had worked together back in 1947 to bring a lawsuit against the University of Kentucky for denying admission to a black graduate student named Lyman Johnson. Although Franklin did not end up taking the stand as an expert witness, Johnson’s lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, won the case, and the student was admitted into graduate school at the University of Kentucky.
“What are you going to be doing in the fall?” came Marshall’s voice on the other end of the telephone.
“There’s nothing else I’m going to do in the fall,” Franklin replied. “Except go back to Howard University and teach.”
“You know what else you’re going to be doing?” Marshall asked.
“Oh, no.” He suspected what was coming next.
“You’re going to be working for
me,” Marshall announced.
“Doing what?”
“Doing what you’ve done before. You’ve got to work and help to shape the argument in a case.”
Marshall explained that his team had to provide answers to questions that were raised by the United States Supreme Court. Rather than render a decision on a series of school desegregation cases, the court instead asked Marshall’s team to answer a number of additional questions. Only historians or people trained as historians could answer such questions, Marshall told the professor impatiently. This was not an offer he was extending to Franklin. It was an order.
“He threatened me in a way that I knew that I was going to be in danger if I didn’t accept his invitation or his command,” Franklin recalled years later. “So . . . I decided to join forces with him.”
By late August, Franklin was spending between four and five days a week at Marshall’s office in New York. For months, Marshall’s team of historians, social scientists, psychologists, and lawyers worked and reworked the Brown v. Board of Education brief. Finally, in November of 1953, less than a month before the case was to be reheard in December, the team produced a 235-page manifesto. Its language, depth, and persuasiveness exceeded all expectations, said Franklin.
Hours before dawn on December 7, 1953, scores of black Americans were already lining up outside the Supreme Court with hopes of witnessing history. Franklin, as a member of the team’s research staff, was not ranked high enough to earn one of the courtroom’s coveted seats. He never heard the arguments. Instead, Franklin was issued copies of the team’s brief. In reading his research on the page, Franklin felt a strong sense of pride. His work was present in court that day, despite his absence.
Water Tossing Boulders Page 17