Image Above: "Lum Family-Berta, Biscoe, and Martha, front row. Gong and Kate, back row." Courtesy of Alvin Gee and the Lum Family.
For the 2016 National History Day project, I studied Gong Lum v. Rice. I chose this case because as a Chinese immigrant, I wanted to learn a little more about the Chinese in America. I wanted to find a topic that hadn’t been studied a lot before, and that related to me, personally. What surprised me about this topic was learning that the Chinese were the only immigrant group specifically excluded by America, and that the Gong Lum case is so unknown, it may as well not have happened.
I conducted my research first by doing internet searches to find a story about Chinese immigrants, and then by searching for books and articles on the topic. I went to a local university library to do online database searching, contacted the Library of Congress for historical newspaper articles, looked for blogs and images online, and found the online archives at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi for primary interviews. My parents took me there to explore the Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum, to interview their archivist, Emily Jones, and to see where this case took place. I also interviewed Adrienne Berard, a researcher who just released Water Tossing Boulders, a comprehensive book on the case. I found the video documentary, Honor and Duty, which helped me understand the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Mississippi Delta Chinese society, and how the Chinese-American soldiers in World War II helped change Chinese discrimination.
The form of presentation I chose was a website, because I thought it would be fun to learn how to make one. I would be able to put in photos to show the Lums, Rosedale, Chinese groceries, and cartoons about the Exclusion Acts, and could make it interactive with both words and audio-visual information. I used the building tool, Weebly, to create my website and NoodleTools for research. I used Garage Band to include interview audio clips and DVDFab 9 and iMovie to extract and trim video clips. I created an outline of the story, from the 1800s until today, and built the website around telling that story. I included all my sources to make it easier to study the Lum v. Rice case.
My project relates to the NHD theme of “Taking a Stand,” because Gong and Kate Lum stood up for their daughters’ right to education when the local school board banned them, based upon their race. The Lums argued that Bolivar County’s segregated black public school was not equal in resources or education to the white school, and that his daughters were neither black nor white, so they couldn’t be forced to attend a black school. They took their case all the way to the Supreme Court, to get the school to stop discriminating against their children and the other Mississippi Delta Chinese. Although they did not win their case at the national level, they did take a stand against racism, school segregation, and discrimination, and helped the cause of desegregation for future students.