By the turn of the century, racially segregated schools were legal not just in California but nationwide. In the landmark case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the U.S. Supreme Court ratified racial segregation as constitutional by accepting the doctrine of “separate but equal,” saying that states had the right to exclude nonwhites from public schools and other publicly supported services as long as equal facilities were created for them. Separate but equal remained the law of the land until the Supreme Court overturned Plessy in 1954 in another landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education.

Despite Plessy, the Chinese continued to challenge segregation in several court cases, but with little success. One of the most notable was a suit filed in 1924 by Lum Gong, a grocer whose daughter Martha was rejected by the local white school in Rosedale, Mississippi. The case eventually went to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the state of Mississippi had the prerogative to reserve white schools for white children alone.

(Chang 177)