On September 15, 1924, Martha Lum and her older sister Berda were barred from attending middle school in Rosedale, Mississippi. The girls were Chinese and therefore colored; the school was for whites. This event would lead to the first US Supreme Court case to challenge racial division within Southern public schools, thirty years before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education brought down walls of segregation in the South. In the first case to confront the separate but equal doctrine, the Lum family along with an eccentric Mississippi lawyer fought for the right to educate Chinese Americans in the white schools of the Jim Crow South. Through extensive research in historical documents and family correspondence, Berard illuminates a vital, hidden chapter of America's past.
