![]() The Supreme Court has effectively outlawed affirmative action using two court cases brought on by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Today, the fantasy is that regular college-admissions metrics are race-neutral and that affirmative action is unnecessary, if not harmful. Then, the fantasy was that separate facilities for education afforded to the races were equal and that actions to desegregate them were unnecessary, if not harmful. Rice-as a judicial decision based in legal fantasy. Rice on November 21, 1927.Ī century from now, scholars of racism will look back at today’s Supreme Court decision on affirmative action the way we now look back at Gong Lum v. “A child of Chinese blood, born in and a citizen of the United States, is not denied the equal protection of the law by being classed by the state among the colored races who are assigned to public schools separate from those provided for the whites when equal facilities for education are afforded to both classes,” the Court summarized in Gong Lum v. Imani Perry: Lessons from Black and Chinese relations in the Deep South All nine justices ruled in favor of school segregation, citing the “separate but equal” doctrine from 1896’s Plessy v. Gong Lum sued, appealing to the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause. The school superintendent notified her that she had to leave the public school her family’s tax dollars supported, because “she was of Chinese descent, and not a member of the white or Caucasian race.” Martha was told she had to go to the district’s all-Black public school, which had older infrastructure and textbooks, comparatively overcrowded classrooms, and lower-paid teachers. But instead of picking cotton, many Chinese immigrants, like Gong and his wife, Katherine, opened up grocery stores, usually in Black neighborhoods, after being shut out of white neighborhoods.Īt noon recess, Martha had a visitor. To replace them, white landowners were recruiting Chinese immigrants like Martha’s father, Gong Lum. But that was before Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, banning immigrants from Asia and inciting ever more anti-Asian racism inside the United States.Īt the time, African Americans were fleeing the virulent racism of the Mississippi Delta in the Great Migration north and west. This 9-year-old had attended the public school the previous year. ![]() The mission-style building had been built three years earlier for white students in Rosedale, Mississippi. On the first day of class in the fall of 1924, Martha Lum walked into the Rosedale Consolidated School.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |