Sorting the Children: Mississippi's Black Codes, Gong Lum v. Rice and the Citizens' Councils

Mississippi's Long Project

Mississippi's white leadership spent a century deciding which children would learn, which would labor, and who would be punished for objecting. Three November moments from the Equal Justice Initiative's calendar trace that project.

The Apprenticeship Law, November 1865

In November 1865, months after emancipation, Mississippi passed the first of the postwar Black Codes. Its apprenticeship law required sheriffs and other officials to report Black children under 18 who were orphans, or whose parents were judged unable or unwilling to support them. Courts then bound those children as "apprentices," with former owners given preference. In practice, it returned thousands of Black children to the people who had enslaved them, often over their parents' objections. Freed families fought the system through the Freedmen's Bureau and the courts.

Read HistorianSpeaks free, every week. Subscribe free for new history and analysis in your inbox, or become one of our first 50 founding members at $9.99 a month for life. Join the founders

Gong Lum v. Rice, November 21, 1927

Martha Lum, the daughter of Chinese immigrants in Rosedale, Mississippi, was sent home from the white school because she was not white. Her father, Gong Lum, sued. On November 21, 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously, in an opinion by Chief Justice William Howard Taft, that Mississippi could classify her as "colored" and assign her to a Black school. The decision extended Plessy v. Ferguson to public schools and showed that Jim Crow was a system for ranking every group against whiteness. It stood until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

The Citizens' Councils, 1955

After Brown, white business and civic leaders formed Citizens' Councils, first in Indianola, Mississippi, in 1954. They used economic pressure rather than hoods: firing Black parents who signed desegregation petitions, cutting off credit, and punishing white dissenters. In Durant, Mississippi, in 1955, a white minister was driven from his pulpit after speaking against the Council. Even white clergy were not allowed to question the order.

The Pattern

Control the children, control the schools, and punish anyone who objects. That was Mississippi's formula. It is worth remembering whenever school policy is used to decide whose history counts.