A New History of Mississippi by Mitchell Dennis J.;

Author:Mitchell, Dennis J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi

Chinese-owned groceries attracted black customers with better treatment and provided a place where all three races might have a beer together. Courtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History from the Farm Security Administration Collection.

Later Chinese immigrants found operating small grocery stores for mostly black patrons to be the best occupation for them because the Chinese could make a profit and provide a middle ground acceptable to the three races. They lived in back of the store, saved their money, and gradually grew prosperous. Men found ways to send for their wives, and fewer followed Wong’s course of marrying a black wife. The Chinese store owners did not require blacks to use titles in speaking with them, and they treated blacks better than white merchants did. Good salesmen, the Chinese mastered their customers’ buying habits and squeezed every possible penny out of them by keeping inexpensive items at the register so that no change left the store. They provided a racial middle ground where poor whites and blacks could sit around the store and drink a beer together. Given the ancient history of China, the store owners brought with them the assumption that, as inhabitants of the Middle Kingdom, they possessed a superior culture, but when they tried to send their children to white schools, the whites demurred. Some white schools admitted Chinese, but because of mixed-race children such as Wong’s, whites began to resist, fearing they might admit a Chinese person with a drop of black blood.

In order to gain admission for their children to white schools, the Chinese grocery owners began to move out of the back of their stores in black neighborhoods and established their own Baptist church. They shunned Wong, the 20 percent of men like him, and the children of interracial marriages as the price whites demanded for acceptance. Through social pressure, refusing loans, and boycotts, they rid their small society of its racially mixed members by encouraging them to move out of the Delta. At the same time, the Chinese ingratiated themselves with whites. In the midst of this process in 1924, Gong Lum, a successful Chinese merchant in Rosedale, sued when his daughter, Martha, was asked by the Rosedale school board to leave the white school she attended. He claimed that his daughter was not “colored” or of mixed ancestry, but “pure Chinese” and therefore should not attend the black school. The Mississippi district court ordered the school board to readmit Martha, but the Mississippi Supreme Court overturned the ruling on the grounds that Mississippi had divided the state’s pupils into Caucasian and colored categories and since Martha was “yellow,” she rated colored status. In 1927 Lum’s wife continued the appeals process to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld the Mississippi decision on the rationale argued by the Mississippi Supreme Court.

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