In 1924 in Rosedale, Mississippi, one of many towns scattered along the 150 miles of Mississippi River alluvial plain known as the Mississippi Delta, the local white public school denied admission to Chinese American student Martha Lum and her sister Berda. The Lum family was one of many Chinese American families in the Delta occupying a fairly marginal space in Delta plantation society and engaged predominantly in the grocery store business that catered to African American sharecroppers. Living and working in African American neighborhoods, Chinese Americans in the Delta often associated with white society through church, developing close relationships, albeit often paternalistic, with many white leaders who helped advocate for improved treatment of Chinese American.

After Martha and Berda were sent home from school for not being a “white person,” their parents, Jeu Gong and Katherine Lum, hired Democrat and former Mississippi governor and lawyer Earl Brewer to represent their case in court. Adrienne Berard's Water Tossing Boulders: How a Family of Chinese Immigrants Led the First Fight to Desegregate Schools in the Jim Crow South attempts to explore how the Lum family and Brewer challenged Chinese exclusion from white public schools in Mississippi in Gong Lum v. Rice (1927). Berard's book provides rich imagery of the early twentieth-century Mississippi Delta and provides valuable research about the Lum family and their legal representation. Brewer, a skilled politician and lawyer with ample local connections, asserted a variety of arguments against Chinese exclusion from white public schools. He argued for the moral character of Martha Lum, an exemplary student of no mixed blood, and for the consideration that Chinese were not “colored” or “Negro” based on science—Chinese were more intelligent and enterprising than the “Negro race.”

Most importantly to Berard's narrative is that Brewer also argued that Chinese exclusion from white public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause that guaranteed the same rights, privileges, and protections to all citizens. The Mississippi Supreme Court was not swayed by Brewer's argument. They easily dismissed the Fourteenth Amendment argument; “separate but equal” was firmly established as constitutional in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). The Mississippi court also contended that “colored” in the state of Mississippi applied not only to the “Negro race,” but any group that might endanger white purity or encourage race mixing. The Lum children and other Chinese American children could attend private schools or “colored” public schools but were not welcome at white public schools. The Lums appealed the case to the US Supreme Court, which affirmed the Mississippi Supreme Court ruling, claiming the case asked the “same question which has been many times decided” (p. 137). As ruled in Plessy, racial segregation was at the discretion of the state and did not conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment. The Lums eventually moved to Arkansas, where their children could attend white public schools.

Though Berard's account of Gong Lum provides well-researched local historical context, it fails to illuminate the most important and compelling contributions of the case. Gong Lum was not a case of Chinese Americans fighting to desegregate the US South, as Berard boldly proclaims. Segregation in the US South was founded not only on white supremacy but black oppression, and Brewer and the Lum family cared little to advocate against either. Despite Brewer using the Fourteenth Amendment in his argument against Chinese exclusion in 1924, his claims had little impact, if any, on the landmark Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which successfully argued that school segregation violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Furthermore, Brewer and the Lums relied on claiming racial distance and distinction from African Americans to argue for Chinese American inclusion. The arguments for their inclusion in white public schools relied on upholding African American disenfranchisement and Jim Crow white supremacy in the Delta.

Gong Lum was a case of Chinese Americans attempting to claim citizenship and associated rights by interrogating the parameters of “white” and “colored,” legal identities that denoted privileges and rights in society. During the 1920s, this was a common argument Asian Americans made, as evidenced in Ozawa v. United States (1922) and United States v. Thind (1923), when Asian American immigrants challenged the 1790 Naturalization Law and the category of “free white persons.” Such arguments do not lessen the significance of Gong Lum but instead illuminate the differences that exist between the history of African American and Asian American disenfranchisement, civil rights, and struggle for access to public education. Bearing significance today, the disparate histories of the African American and Asian American struggle for equal access and rights is integral to understanding disparate Asian American and African American views in debates regarding race-conscious admissions programs in Fisher v. University of Texas (2013, 2016) and California Senate Constitutional Amendment No. 5 (SCA 5), which attempted to repeal California's ban on affirmative action.

Berard's book is the story of segregation in public schools told through the eyes of one Chinese American family seeking privilege and opportunity for their children and the white legal experts who shaped the Gong Lum case. Despite the state permitting Chinese access to poorly funded “colored” public schools, the book offers little insight on the “colored” community, which remains distant to the entire narrative until the end, where it celebrates the passage of Brown v. Board. The narrative also remains disconnected from the broader Asian American history of education. How does Gong Lum compare with Tape v. Hurley (1885), in which the California Supreme Court ruled it unlawful to ban Chinese Americans from public education? This resulted in San Francisco creating a segregated public school system to avoid integration and to accommodate Chinese Americans and, shortly thereafter, most Asian American students. Asian Americans in other parts of the country faced uneven prejudice and access to equally funded education based on local practices and populations, but Gong Lum’s impact on these histories remains unclear.

Berard's Water Tossing Boulders provides interesting historical vignettes of the Lum family, Brewer, and the judges involved in the legal process of Gong Lum, but the prose is repetitive in many parts. Berard's stylistic adoption of “the language of their time” by using terms like “Negro” and “colored” in first-person narrative “to transport the reader into the reality of the era” is unsettling and often discounts her historical commentary (p. xiii). Yet, with little published material beyond academia about Gong Lum, mainstream readers may benefit from the book's simple narrative form.