Water Tossing Boulders by Adrienne Berard

Author:Adrienne Berard [Berard, Adrienne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-3354-8
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2016-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

Just four days before Judge Alcorn was to hear arguments in Brewer’s case, the trustees of the Rosedale school board filed a demurrer. Their hope was that the case would be thrown out before even going to trial. The justification for excluding Martha Lum, the demurrer stated, was rooted in Mississippi’s own constitution, specifically Section 207, which called for “separate schools for the white and colored races.” The trustees argued that because Martha was colored, she was subject to the same laws that applied to colored children. The race of the child was reason enough to prove there was no legal basis for the suit.

“The bill shows on its face that complainant is a member of the Mongolian, or yellow race,” the demurrer read. “Therefore, [she is] not entitled to attend the schools provided by law in the State of Mississippi for children of the white, or Caucasian race.”

Had any other judge been assigned the case, the demurrer would likely have been granted and the suit discarded. The school board clearly had Mississippi law on its side. But Judge Alcorn was once Willie Alcorn, a fatherless boy of ten, who fell into the care of a cousin who believed that all children deserved to be educated as equals. Judge Alcorn’s ruling on November 5, 1924, reflected that past. He ordered the board of trustees to admit Martha Lum into Rosedale’s segregated white school.

“It is by the court ordered that the demurrer . . . is hereby overruled,” Alcorn wrote in his decision. “The Clerk of the Circuit Court of the First Judicial District of Bolivar County, Mississippi, is hereby ordered and instructed to issue a writ of mandamus as prayed for in the petition . . . to admit petitioner, Martha Lum, as a pupil in the Rosedale Consolidated High School.”

Judge Alcorn gave Brewer the victory he so greatly needed. Martha would be able to return to Rosedale Consolidated. Brewer told his clients they could send their daughter back to school, but he counseled them to wait for a short while, until tensions quieted down. Brewer didn’t want to risk Martha’s safety by sending her into the classroom while emotions ran high. He also had a sinking feeling that the school board would file an appeal to the state supreme court.

The board understood that the longer the litigation continued, the longer Martha would be forced to stay out of school. Without a verdict, she would be trapped in the indeterminate middle between black and white. Martha, and every other Chinese child in Mississippi, would have to wait for a judge to decide their social status, their race, their identity. As long as the case remained in court, Martha was neither black nor white. In a society with room for only two races, Martha belonged nowhere.

On December 5, just as Brewer feared, Rosedale’s school board filed an appeal. The defendants, “feeling aggrieved at said judgment,” demanded the case be heard again in Jackson, before the Mississippi Supreme Court. The appeal was signed by a new lawyer, a man by the name of Rush Knox, the state’s attorney general.

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