Article begins<\/h2>\nLessons on Race, the Supreme Court, and the Legacy of Franz Boas<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCredit: <\/span>
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tNational Archives at San Francisco<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t![\"Hin](\"https:\/\/www.anthropology-news.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/CI-43195-Jow-Hin-Lun_Certificate-of-ID_Page_2-856x357.jpg\")
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tHin Lun Jow, Certificate of Identity 43195, issued after he entered the U.S., 1922 (Required by law for Chinese under the Exclusion Act) (National Archives at San Francisco)\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
One hundred years ago, in fall 1924, a Chinese immigrant in the Mississippi Delta launched the first of two court cases that sought admission for Chinese children into public schools reserved for white children.\u00a0Lum v. Rice<\/em>\u00a0(1927)<\/a>\u00a0was the first challenge to school segregation to reach the U.S. Supreme Court.\u00a0Lun v. Bond<\/em>\u00a0(1929)<\/a>\u00a0followed. In both cases, the U.S. Supreme Court supported the Mississippi Supreme Court\u2019s denial of equal opportunities to the children, and the contorted arguments about racial classifications that justified the decision, thus fixing in national law a more exclusive and rigid definition of \u201cwhite\u201d than had actually existed in everyday practice in the Delta. One hundred years later, history is echoing itself as immigration and racial categorization\u2014and the Supreme Court\u2019s role in adjudicating them\u2014have again become critical issues. In both eras, a populist politician helped to inflame public sentiments\u2014a Mississippi governor and senator in the 1920s, and a U.S. president in the 2020s.\u00a0<\/p>\nNine-year-old\u00a0Martha Lum<\/a>, a Mississippi-born child of Chinese immigrants, was denied admission to the new Rosedale Consolidated High School despite having attended the white public school the previous year. San Francisco-born Chew Howe, who owned a grocery store in a small town eight miles away, sued the school\u2019s trustees and the state superintendent of schools on Martha\u2019s behalf. Howe and Martha had standing to sue because both were American citizens according to the birthright clause in the Fourteenth Amendment\u2014which no one challenged at the time.\u00a0<\/p>\nIn a nearby county, the same thing happened to seventeen-year-old Hin Lun Jow when the new Dublin Consolidated High School opened. A year later, his father, Tsee Fung Jow, sued on his son\u2019s behalf. He had immigrated in 1916 and brought over his son in 1922, and both were still non-citizens; they cited the 1868 U.S.-China Burlingame Treaty, which stipulated that Chinese citizens in America had the same rights as American citizens. No one challenged that claim, either, although Congress had already violated the treaty by passing the\u00a01882 Chinese Exclusion Act<\/a>\u00a0banning the immigration of Chinese laborers. Months before Martha\u2019s suit, the U.S. Congress had responded to a growing public panic by passing the\u00a0Johnson-Reed Immigration Act<\/a>\u00a0in an attempt to protect the dominance of the white race by setting nationality-based immigrant quotas and banning Asian immigrants altogether.\u00a0<\/p>\nThe two lawsuits were supported by the United Chinese Merchants Association \u2013 Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, which had been established a few years prior by business leaders of the\u00a0Delta Chinese<\/a>\u00a0community, an enclave that dated back to the 1870s and numbered over 300 by the time of the lawsuits. These men were able to legally enter the country and remain because they owned small\u00a0grocery stores<\/a>, which qualified them as \u201cmerchants\u201d\u2014a category exempted from the Exclusion Act. They exploited a unique economic niche created by the Jim Crow segregation laws that prevented grocers from serving both white and black customers. They sold basic necessities\u2014such as flour, cornmeal, sugar, molasses, and meat\u2014to the black tenant farmers who constituted nearly eighty percent of the Delta\u2019s population. As one octogenarian grocer said of the elite white owners of the cotton plantations, \u201cThey needed workers, and the workers needed us, so they needed us.\u201d<\/p>\nEarl Brewer vs. Theodore Bilbo<\/strong><\/h2>\nThe merchants hired\u00a0Earl LeRoy Brewer<\/a>\u00a0(1869-1942), a self-made man, lawyer, and cotton planter who had been governor of Mississippi from 1912 to 1916. The court fees for both cases ultimately amounted to the equivalent of $24,520 in today\u2019s dollars, no small sum in a time when the Delta was in deep recession due to a crash in cotton prices. As governor, Brewer had been known for his attempts to reign in government corruption and lynching, and to attract immigrants to his labor-starved state\u2014positions that made him many political enemies, foremost among them\u00a0Theodore Bilbo<\/a>, his (separately-elected) lieutenant governor. Bilbo\u2019s political ascent was propelled by his base of lower-class white farmers and workers who, like him, proudly claimed the identity of \u201credneck.\u201d Despised by the elites for his inflammatory rhetoric, sexual immorality, and corruption, he was investigated or prosecuted multiple times but escaped consequences. With consecutive terms prohibited, Bilbo succeeded Brewer as governor from 1916 to 1920, then a second term from 1928 to 1932, and then three terms as a U.S. senator from 1935 until his death in 1947. White supremacism was on the rise, with Bilbo as the epitome of its worst excesses. Brewer left politics in frustration at his inability to stop Bilbo and \u201cBilboites.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCredit: <\/span>
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSusan Brownell<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t![\"Earl](\"https:\/\/www.anthropology-news.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/Earl-Brewer-Portrait_enhanced-856x1276.jpg\")
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tEarl Brewer in 1935 at the wedding of his daughter, Claudia Brewer Strite (with permission of Susan Brownell)\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
Anthropology and Race<\/strong><\/h2>\nThe State Constitution of Mississippi stipulated that \u201cseparate schools shall be maintained for children of the white and colored races.\u201d But it did not define \u201ccolored.\u201d In many towns, whites often tolerated a few Chinese children in the white schools, but even a slight increase in numbers could spark opposition. So-called \u201cnegro schools\u201d were few and far between, and inferior. Chinese parents, who held the Confucian belief in the utmost importance of education, always improvised better options.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Racial segregation and immigration were intertwined political issues, and the discipline of anthropology was thick in the middle. In 1908, the\u00a0Dillingham Commission<\/a>, a congressional joint committee, was formed to make recommendations on immigration policy. It hired Franz Boas, a professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, and his students to conduct research on immigrant populations. Applying the methods of both physical and cultural anthropology, they demonstrated that races did not exist as physical realities, clear dividing lines between races did not exist, and ideas about race were nothing but rationalizations for the belief that white races were superior. The Commission largely ignored their scientific findings, and its own conclusions later justified the Johnson-Reed Act. However, Boas and his students, including Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, reached an ever-larger audience through their teaching and publishing. During World War II, Benedict co-authored a public service pamphlet,\u00a0The Races of Mankind<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(1943), whichargued, more strongly than Boas had, that there is only one \u201cuniversal Human Race.\u201d It became one of the most widely distributed pamphlets of its time.<\/p>\nInequality and Race in the Court Cases<\/strong><\/h2>\nIn 1924, Brewer submitted a succinct brief to his friend, Eleventh District Circuit Court Judge William A. Alcorn, centered on two arguments. First, the right to attend a public school is a valuable right, and \u201con account of her race or descent [Martha Lum] is being denied the equal protection of the law\u201d guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Second, the school board had made \u201can unreasonable and arbitrary classification of the residents based solely upon color,\u201d\u00a0and, \u201cThe Chinaman is not a \u2018colored person\u2019 within the meaning of our laws.\u201d\u00a0He did not cite Boas, but he sounded like a Boasian when he pointed out that \u201cthis classification made by the school authorities exclusively for the benefit of the white race is a discrimination against the other race.\u201d Judge Alcorn agreed, citing legal precedents and stating that he had never heard the term \u201ccolored\u201d applied to \u201cthe Indian, who is red, the Mongolian, who is yellow, or Malay, who is brown.\u201d He used the five-color racial categories (white, black, red, yellow, brown) first put forward by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in\u00a01776<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\nAlcorn ordered the school board to admit Martha. A year later, he did the same for Hin Lun. Both school boards appealed the decisions to the Mississippi Supreme Court, which overturned Alcorn\u2019s decision, ruling that all people who are not white or \u201cCaucasian\u201d are \u201ccolored,\u201d based on the reasoning that \u201cthe dominant purpose of the Constitution in providing for the separation of the races was to preserve the purity and integrity of the white race.\u201d\u00a0The court opinion<\/a> started by acknowledging that there is no clear way to divide humans into races, because \u201cthe color test alone\u201d (i.e., classification based on skin color) would eventually result in a gradual merging of the races. This was evidently unthinkable to the court because, \u201cRace amalgamation has been frowned on by Southern civilization always.\u201d After this disclaimer, the court launched into a meandering, fourteen-page discussion, explicitly citing Blumenbach, about how \u201cjudicial decision and the science of ethnology\u201d classify humans into races.<\/p>\nBut the important issue was that Martha had been deprived of equal opportunities under the law. When neither the state nor federal supreme court seriously engaged with this fact in her case, Brewer doubled down on demonstrating the inequality between white and \u201cnegro\u201d schools in the circuit court hearing for\u00a0Lun v. Bond<\/em>, examining white witnesses in excruciating detail about the inferior quality of \u201cnegro schools.\u201d He asked the County Superintendent of Education whether Hin Lun could obtain an education at a \u201cnegro school\u201d equivalent to that in the white public schools of the county. The Superintendent replied, \u201cUnquestionably he could not.\u201d Judge Alcorn used this as a major reason for his decision, stating, \u201cTo hold that this was a school in the meaning of section 201 of the [Mississippi] Constitution would be a farce.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCredit: <\/span>
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tNational Archives at San Francisco<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t![\"Tsee](\"https:\/\/www.anthropology-news.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/Jow-Tsee-Fung_cropped.jpg\")
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tTsee Fung Jow, photo attached to certification of merchant status by the American Consulate General in Hong Kong, August 15, 1916. In Jow Tsee Fung, Case file #15559\/6-27; Immigration Arrival Investigation Case Files, 1884\u20131944; Record Group 85 (National Archives at San Francisco)\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
Everyday Racial Prejudice<\/strong><\/h2>\nThe testimony of the authorities who excluded the Chinese children revealed that they felt threatened by people whom they regarded as outsiders, and had given little thought to convoluted legal or academic arguments about what the state constitution meant by \u201ccolored.\u201d Six years later, the state attorney general, Rush H. Knox, described his attitude under oath when Brewer dragged him into\u00a0court<\/a>\u00a0with accusations of illegal meddling and financial corruption in the two cases. He explained that he had intervened because, if the U.S. Supreme Court were to allow \u201ccolored\u201d children into white schools, \u201cThey would soon have some yellow kinks there and I could not see that.\u201d\u00a0He was exonerated by the Mississippi Supreme Court.<\/p>\nIn the circuit court hearing, Brewer asked a trustee of the Dublin school why he excluded Hin Lun. His first answer was that it was because he was Chinese. In addition, \u201cFilth. He was filthy, and I didn\u2019t feel like our children were there for that.\u201d When Brewer probed further, he explained, referencing the remittances that the Chinese sent to their home villages in Guangdong province,<\/p>\n
\n\u201cThey don\u2019t have anything to do with us, they don\u2019t associate with us, they get all the money they can and send it to China, or somewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Brewer asked, \u201cIn other words, competition in business?\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\u201cAbsolutely.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd this is the reason he was excluded from the school?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, sir.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
The U.S. Supreme Court issued unanimous decisions in both cases affirming\u00a0that school segregation was within the constitutional power of the state, a position that was not reversed until\u00a0Brown v. Board of Education<\/em>\u00a0in 1954. The opinion in\u00a0Lum v. Rice<\/em>\u00a0was written by former U.S. president William Taft, Chief Justice\u00a0at the time. In\u00a0Lun v. Bond,<\/em>\u00a0the court reaffirmed its decision in\u00a0Lum v. Rice<\/em>\u00a0and added that, since \u201cnegroes\u201d were citizens, there was no violation of the Burlingame Treaty in giving Chinese citizens the same rights as American \u201cnegroes.\u201d<\/p>\nTheodore Bilbo died in 1947, while the U.S. Senate was blocking him from taking his seat during an\u00a0investigation<\/a>of his suppression of black votes. He left behind\u00a0Take Your Choice: Separation Or Mongrelization<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>a self-published manifesto that contained a rant against Franz Boas, \u201cthis immigrant from Germany\u201d and Jew. Boas\u2019s \u201cdisciples,\u201d he maintained, had been \u201cvaccinated with the virus of poison of Boas\u2019s teachings,\u201d namely, his \u201cevil, disastrous, and racial suicidal preachments and his insane and corrupt doctrines of miscegenation, amalgamation, intermarriage, and mongrelization.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCredit: <\/span>
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tLaurence J. Howe<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t![\"Chew](\"https:\/\/www.anthropology-news.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/immigration-document-Chew-Howe-1917-856x353.jpg\")
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tChew Howe, certificate of identity, 1917 (with permission of Laurence J. Howe, grandson of Chew Howe)\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
Lessons<\/strong><\/h2>\nWhat lessons can we take away from this history? Yes, the Boasians lost the battle of the moment, and Blumenbach\u2019s hoary racial categories were applied in state and federal cases from 1870 to the 1950s. But Boas\u2019s ideas eventually took root in a different era, and today he is recognized as the founder of American anthropology. Scientific ideas about race still compete with the centuries-old articles of faith that justified colonialism and slavery. Nevertheless, we should never underestimate the power of anthropology\u2019s ideas: anthropology has\u00a0changed the world<\/a>, and still has the potential to do so.<\/p>\nPostscript<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCredit: <\/span> \t\t\t\t\t\t \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tHin Lun Jow, Certificate of Identity 43195, issued after he entered the U.S., 1922 (Required by law for Chinese under the Exclusion Act) (National Archives at San Francisco)\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n One hundred years ago, in fall 1924, a Chinese immigrant in the Mississippi Delta launched the first of two court cases that sought admission for Chinese children into public schools reserved for white children.\u00a0Lum v. Rice<\/em>\u00a0(1927)<\/a>\u00a0was the first challenge to school segregation to reach the U.S. Supreme Court.\u00a0Lun v. Bond<\/em>\u00a0(1929)<\/a>\u00a0followed. In both cases, the U.S. Supreme Court supported the Mississippi Supreme Court\u2019s denial of equal opportunities to the children, and the contorted arguments about racial classifications that justified the decision, thus fixing in national law a more exclusive and rigid definition of \u201cwhite\u201d than had actually existed in everyday practice in the Delta. One hundred years later, history is echoing itself as immigration and racial categorization\u2014and the Supreme Court\u2019s role in adjudicating them\u2014have again become critical issues. In both eras, a populist politician helped to inflame public sentiments\u2014a Mississippi governor and senator in the 1920s, and a U.S. president in the 2020s.\u00a0<\/p>\n Nine-year-old\u00a0Martha Lum<\/a>, a Mississippi-born child of Chinese immigrants, was denied admission to the new Rosedale Consolidated High School despite having attended the white public school the previous year. San Francisco-born Chew Howe, who owned a grocery store in a small town eight miles away, sued the school\u2019s trustees and the state superintendent of schools on Martha\u2019s behalf. Howe and Martha had standing to sue because both were American citizens according to the birthright clause in the Fourteenth Amendment\u2014which no one challenged at the time.\u00a0<\/p>\n In a nearby county, the same thing happened to seventeen-year-old Hin Lun Jow when the new Dublin Consolidated High School opened. A year later, his father, Tsee Fung Jow, sued on his son\u2019s behalf. He had immigrated in 1916 and brought over his son in 1922, and both were still non-citizens; they cited the 1868 U.S.-China Burlingame Treaty, which stipulated that Chinese citizens in America had the same rights as American citizens. No one challenged that claim, either, although Congress had already violated the treaty by passing the\u00a01882 Chinese Exclusion Act<\/a>\u00a0banning the immigration of Chinese laborers. Months before Martha\u2019s suit, the U.S. Congress had responded to a growing public panic by passing the\u00a0Johnson-Reed Immigration Act<\/a>\u00a0in an attempt to protect the dominance of the white race by setting nationality-based immigrant quotas and banning Asian immigrants altogether.\u00a0<\/p>\n The two lawsuits were supported by the United Chinese Merchants Association \u2013 Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, which had been established a few years prior by business leaders of the\u00a0Delta Chinese<\/a>\u00a0community, an enclave that dated back to the 1870s and numbered over 300 by the time of the lawsuits. These men were able to legally enter the country and remain because they owned small\u00a0grocery stores<\/a>, which qualified them as \u201cmerchants\u201d\u2014a category exempted from the Exclusion Act. They exploited a unique economic niche created by the Jim Crow segregation laws that prevented grocers from serving both white and black customers. They sold basic necessities\u2014such as flour, cornmeal, sugar, molasses, and meat\u2014to the black tenant farmers who constituted nearly eighty percent of the Delta\u2019s population. As one octogenarian grocer said of the elite white owners of the cotton plantations, \u201cThey needed workers, and the workers needed us, so they needed us.\u201d<\/p>\n The merchants hired\u00a0Earl LeRoy Brewer<\/a>\u00a0(1869-1942), a self-made man, lawyer, and cotton planter who had been governor of Mississippi from 1912 to 1916. The court fees for both cases ultimately amounted to the equivalent of $24,520 in today\u2019s dollars, no small sum in a time when the Delta was in deep recession due to a crash in cotton prices. As governor, Brewer had been known for his attempts to reign in government corruption and lynching, and to attract immigrants to his labor-starved state\u2014positions that made him many political enemies, foremost among them\u00a0Theodore Bilbo<\/a>, his (separately-elected) lieutenant governor. Bilbo\u2019s political ascent was propelled by his base of lower-class white farmers and workers who, like him, proudly claimed the identity of \u201credneck.\u201d Despised by the elites for his inflammatory rhetoric, sexual immorality, and corruption, he was investigated or prosecuted multiple times but escaped consequences. With consecutive terms prohibited, Bilbo succeeded Brewer as governor from 1916 to 1920, then a second term from 1928 to 1932, and then three terms as a U.S. senator from 1935 until his death in 1947. White supremacism was on the rise, with Bilbo as the epitome of its worst excesses. Brewer left politics in frustration at his inability to stop Bilbo and \u201cBilboites.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCredit: <\/span> \t\t\t\t\t\t \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tEarl Brewer in 1935 at the wedding of his daughter, Claudia Brewer Strite (with permission of Susan Brownell)\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n The State Constitution of Mississippi stipulated that \u201cseparate schools shall be maintained for children of the white and colored races.\u201d But it did not define \u201ccolored.\u201d In many towns, whites often tolerated a few Chinese children in the white schools, but even a slight increase in numbers could spark opposition. So-called \u201cnegro schools\u201d were few and far between, and inferior. Chinese parents, who held the Confucian belief in the utmost importance of education, always improvised better options.\u00a0<\/p>\n Racial segregation and immigration were intertwined political issues, and the discipline of anthropology was thick in the middle. In 1908, the\u00a0Dillingham Commission<\/a>, a congressional joint committee, was formed to make recommendations on immigration policy. It hired Franz Boas, a professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, and his students to conduct research on immigrant populations. Applying the methods of both physical and cultural anthropology, they demonstrated that races did not exist as physical realities, clear dividing lines between races did not exist, and ideas about race were nothing but rationalizations for the belief that white races were superior. The Commission largely ignored their scientific findings, and its own conclusions later justified the Johnson-Reed Act. However, Boas and his students, including Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, reached an ever-larger audience through their teaching and publishing. During World War II, Benedict co-authored a public service pamphlet,\u00a0The Races of Mankind<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(1943), whichargued, more strongly than Boas had, that there is only one \u201cuniversal Human Race.\u201d It became one of the most widely distributed pamphlets of its time.<\/p>\n In 1924, Brewer submitted a succinct brief to his friend, Eleventh District Circuit Court Judge William A. Alcorn, centered on two arguments. First, the right to attend a public school is a valuable right, and \u201con account of her race or descent [Martha Lum] is being denied the equal protection of the law\u201d guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Second, the school board had made \u201can unreasonable and arbitrary classification of the residents based solely upon color,\u201d\u00a0and, \u201cThe Chinaman is not a \u2018colored person\u2019 within the meaning of our laws.\u201d\u00a0He did not cite Boas, but he sounded like a Boasian when he pointed out that \u201cthis classification made by the school authorities exclusively for the benefit of the white race is a discrimination against the other race.\u201d Judge Alcorn agreed, citing legal precedents and stating that he had never heard the term \u201ccolored\u201d applied to \u201cthe Indian, who is red, the Mongolian, who is yellow, or Malay, who is brown.\u201d He used the five-color racial categories (white, black, red, yellow, brown) first put forward by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in\u00a01776<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Alcorn ordered the school board to admit Martha. A year later, he did the same for Hin Lun. Both school boards appealed the decisions to the Mississippi Supreme Court, which overturned Alcorn\u2019s decision, ruling that all people who are not white or \u201cCaucasian\u201d are \u201ccolored,\u201d based on the reasoning that \u201cthe dominant purpose of the Constitution in providing for the separation of the races was to preserve the purity and integrity of the white race.\u201d\u00a0The court opinion<\/a> started by acknowledging that there is no clear way to divide humans into races, because \u201cthe color test alone\u201d (i.e., classification based on skin color) would eventually result in a gradual merging of the races. This was evidently unthinkable to the court because, \u201cRace amalgamation has been frowned on by Southern civilization always.\u201d After this disclaimer, the court launched into a meandering, fourteen-page discussion, explicitly citing Blumenbach, about how \u201cjudicial decision and the science of ethnology\u201d classify humans into races.<\/p>\n But the important issue was that Martha had been deprived of equal opportunities under the law. When neither the state nor federal supreme court seriously engaged with this fact in her case, Brewer doubled down on demonstrating the inequality between white and \u201cnegro\u201d schools in the circuit court hearing for\u00a0Lun v. Bond<\/em>, examining white witnesses in excruciating detail about the inferior quality of \u201cnegro schools.\u201d He asked the County Superintendent of Education whether Hin Lun could obtain an education at a \u201cnegro school\u201d equivalent to that in the white public schools of the county. The Superintendent replied, \u201cUnquestionably he could not.\u201d Judge Alcorn used this as a major reason for his decision, stating, \u201cTo hold that this was a school in the meaning of section 201 of the [Mississippi] Constitution would be a farce.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCredit: <\/span> \t\t\t\t\t\t \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tTsee Fung Jow, photo attached to certification of merchant status by the American Consulate General in Hong Kong, August 15, 1916. In Jow Tsee Fung, Case file #15559\/6-27; Immigration Arrival Investigation Case Files, 1884\u20131944; Record Group 85 (National Archives at San Francisco)\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n The testimony of the authorities who excluded the Chinese children revealed that they felt threatened by people whom they regarded as outsiders, and had given little thought to convoluted legal or academic arguments about what the state constitution meant by \u201ccolored.\u201d Six years later, the state attorney general, Rush H. Knox, described his attitude under oath when Brewer dragged him into\u00a0court<\/a>\u00a0with accusations of illegal meddling and financial corruption in the two cases. He explained that he had intervened because, if the U.S. Supreme Court were to allow \u201ccolored\u201d children into white schools, \u201cThey would soon have some yellow kinks there and I could not see that.\u201d\u00a0He was exonerated by the Mississippi Supreme Court.<\/p>\n In the circuit court hearing, Brewer asked a trustee of the Dublin school why he excluded Hin Lun. His first answer was that it was because he was Chinese. In addition, \u201cFilth. He was filthy, and I didn\u2019t feel like our children were there for that.\u201d When Brewer probed further, he explained, referencing the remittances that the Chinese sent to their home villages in Guangdong province,<\/p>\n \u201cThey don\u2019t have anything to do with us, they don\u2019t associate with us, they get all the money they can and send it to China, or somewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Brewer asked, \u201cIn other words, competition in business?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAbsolutely.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAnd this is the reason he was excluded from the school?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes, sir.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The U.S. Supreme Court issued unanimous decisions in both cases affirming\u00a0that school segregation was within the constitutional power of the state, a position that was not reversed until\u00a0Brown v. Board of Education<\/em>\u00a0in 1954. The opinion in\u00a0Lum v. Rice<\/em>\u00a0was written by former U.S. president William Taft, Chief Justice\u00a0at the time. In\u00a0Lun v. Bond,<\/em>\u00a0the court reaffirmed its decision in\u00a0Lum v. Rice<\/em>\u00a0and added that, since \u201cnegroes\u201d were citizens, there was no violation of the Burlingame Treaty in giving Chinese citizens the same rights as American \u201cnegroes.\u201d<\/p>\n Theodore Bilbo died in 1947, while the U.S. Senate was blocking him from taking his seat during an\u00a0investigation<\/a>of his suppression of black votes. He left behind\u00a0Take Your Choice: Separation Or Mongrelization<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>a self-published manifesto that contained a rant against Franz Boas, \u201cthis immigrant from Germany\u201d and Jew. Boas\u2019s \u201cdisciples,\u201d he maintained, had been \u201cvaccinated with the virus of poison of Boas\u2019s teachings,\u201d namely, his \u201cevil, disastrous, and racial suicidal preachments and his insane and corrupt doctrines of miscegenation, amalgamation, intermarriage, and mongrelization.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCredit: <\/span> \t\t\t\t\t\t \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tChew Howe, certificate of identity, 1917 (with permission of Laurence J. Howe, grandson of Chew Howe)\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n What lessons can we take away from this history? Yes, the Boasians lost the battle of the moment, and Blumenbach\u2019s hoary racial categories were applied in state and federal cases from 1870 to the 1950s. But Boas\u2019s ideas eventually took root in a different era, and today he is recognized as the founder of American anthropology. Scientific ideas about race still compete with the centuries-old articles of faith that justified colonialism and slavery. Nevertheless, we should never underestimate the power of anthropology\u2019s ideas: anthropology has\u00a0changed the world<\/a>, and still has the potential to do so.<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tNational Archives at San Francisco<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\nEarl Brewer vs. Theodore Bilbo<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSusan Brownell<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\nAnthropology and Race<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Inequality and Race in the Court Cases<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tNational Archives at San Francisco<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\nEveryday Racial Prejudice<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tLaurence J. Howe<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\nLessons<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Postscript<\/strong><\/h2>\n