buildings, passed ostensibly as a safety measure. The Court found the statute invalid because it used an arbitrary classification aimed at Chinese launderers because that was where they all (practically alone among those in that occupation) were located.

Implicit in Gong Lum's 1927 claim that his Chinese daughter was illegally classified as "colored" and was entitled to go to a white instead of "Negro" school was the latter's inferiority. However, the Court held in Gong Lum v. Rice that the classification was within the right of Mississippi in regulating the education of its youth at public expense. Chief Justice Taft noted, however, that "(h)ad the petitioner alleged specifically that there was no colored school in Martha Lum's neighborhood a different question would have been presented."

That point was not overlooked by counsel in obtaining a writ from the Maryland courts to admit a black litigant to the University of Maryland law school in Murray v. Pearson (1937) because there was no equivalent "colored" law school.

The required attendance in 1946 of Mexican descendants at separate schools in Orange County, California, was successfully challenged by them in Mendez v. Westminister. The U.S. District Judge found the practice to be in violation of the Constitution without a finding of unequal facilities in the schools they had to attend. On review, the Ninth Circuit affirmed, pointing out that such segregation was contrary to California law and thus violated 14th Amendment Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses. The Court did not reach the point urged by amicus counsel that segregation per se was unconstitutional.

(The foregoing point urged by amicus counsel in the Mendez case, in which amicus briefs were filed by counsel for both the NAACP and ACLU, is discussed in more detail on page 51, Chapter Four above.)

The same point was pressed in 1950 by counsel