Lessons From Black and Chinese Relations in the Deep South

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Lessons From Black and Chinese Relations in the Deep South
Baldwin Lee, ‘Mississippi Triangle,’ and the limits of upward mobility
3:25 PM · Jun 10, 2022

https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/unsettled-territory/62a33ef133833200211f154b/mississippi-triangle-documentary-racism-in-the-jim-crow-south/


Mississippi Triangle is a 1983 documentary about the Black, white, and Chinese communities in the Mississippi Delta region, which I rewatched the other day, prompted by a message from a friend. It is one of a plethora of works in film and art that show, contrary to popular perception, that the South has never had just two racial groups.

The documentary had three directors, one from each of the abovementioned groups: Christine Choy, Allan Siegel, and Worth Long, each with their own crew. Two members of Long’s team, Charles Burnett and Arthur Jafa, went on to have illustrious careers as filmmakers. But to the contemporary eye, Mississippi Triangle is a humble, if artful, production. The narrative arc is fuzzy, and so is the footage. But still it resonates. It begins with a Black man singing “Amazing Grace,” then pans through the Delta landscape, piney woods and shotgun houses. The story is told through voices heavy with the distinctive vowels of the Deep South. A clear assertion is made: Chattel slavery and cotton production are the foundation of this place. Chinese people came as workers—some on the railroad, others in the fields—yet ultimately became situated in local economies as grocers. One white woman comments that the Chinese always seemed to hold themselves apart from white people. Unita Blackwell, then the mayor of Mayersville, Mississippi—a Black woman who was once a sex worker and a plantation worker, and then an organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—says, in contrast, that the Chinese people were kinder than white folks. And there was no confusion about who they were: They spoke Chinese, and they were Mississippians.

The lesson of the documentary is crystallized in the story of Martha Lum, the child plaintiff in Gong Lum v. Rice, a case decided by the United States Supreme Court in 1927. The Lum children had been attending white schools in Mississippi, but in a wave of renewed anti-Chinese sentiment fueled by the 1924 Immigration Act (which banned all immigration from Asia), they were expelled and told they must attend the schools for African American children. They fought back, all the way to the Supreme Court. The Court sided with Mississippi, declaring that excluding Chinese children from white schools was not a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Lum family was told that their children could either attend Black schools or create their own Chinese school. Anywhere was fine, as long as it wasn’t white space.

I teach Gong Lum v. Rice in my class on race in American legal history. It was a “Jim Crow” case that affirmed the exclusion of all nonwhite people, and not just Black people, from white spaces. But its particulars are important, too. And this is what Mississippi Triangle shows. It was not the case that Chinese Mississippians occupied the same social location as Black people. But as nonwhite people they were subject to the whims of a white-supremacist order. Theirs was an intermediate status.

*snip*

[FM123]

1. Wow. I never knew about this case.

"But as nonwhite people they were subject to the whims of a white-supremacist order. Theirs was an intermediate status."

[Solly Mack]

2. The hierarchy of racism. I saw it growing up in Georgia.