Water Tossing Boulders

Water Tossing Boulders
Author :
Publisher : Beacon Press
Total Pages : 210
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780807083161
ISBN-13 : 080708316X
Rating : 4/5 (61 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Water Tossing Boulders by : Adrienne Berard

Download or read book Water Tossing Boulders written by Adrienne Berard and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2017-09-12 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A generation before Brown v. Board of Education struck down America’s “separate but equal” doctrine, one Chinese family and an eccentric Mississippi lawyer fought for desegregation in one of the greatest legal battles never told On September 15, 1924, Martha Lum and her older sister Berda were barred from attending middle school in Rosedale, Mississippi. The girls were Chinese American and considered by the school to be “colored”; the school was for whites. This event would lead to the first US Supreme Court case to challenge the constitutionality of racial segregation in Southern public schools, an astonishing thirty years before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. Unearthing one of the greatest stories never told, journalist Adrienne Berard recounts how three unlikely heroes sought to shape a new South. A poor immigrant from southern China, Jeu Gong Lum came to America with the hope of a better future for his family. Unassuming yet boldly determined, his daughter Martha would inhabit that future and become the face of the fight to integrate schools. Earl Brewer, their lawyer and staunch ally, was once a millionaire and governor of Mississippi. When he took the family’s case, Brewer was both bankrupt and a political pariah—a man with nothing left to lose. By confronting the “separate but equal” doctrine, the Lum family fought for the right to educate Chinese Americans in the white schools of the Jim Crow South. Using their groundbreaking lawsuit as a compass, Berard depicts the complicated condition of racial otherness in rural Southern society. In a sweeping narrative that is both epic and intimate, Water Tossing Boulders evokes a time and place previously defined by black and white, a time and place that, until now, has never been viewed through the eyes of a forgotten third race. In vivid prose, the Mississippi Delta, an empire of cotton and a bastion of slavery, is reimagined to reveal the experiences of a lost immigrant community. Through extensive research in historical documents and family correspondence, Berard illuminates a vital, forgotten chapter of America’s past and uncovers the powerful journey of an oppressed people in their struggle for equality.


Water Tossing Boulders Related Books

Water Tossing Boulders
Language: en
Pages: 210
Authors: Adrienne Berard
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2017-09-12 - Publisher: Beacon Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A generation before Brown v. Board of Education struck down America’s “separate but equal” doctrine, one Chinese family and an eccentric Mississippi lawye
Chinese in the Post-Civil War South
Language: en
Pages: 236
Authors: Lucy M. Cohen
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 1999-03-01 - Publisher: LSU Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In much of the United States, immigrants from China banded together in self-enclosed communities, “Chinatowns,” in which they retained their language, cultu
Transforming the Elite
Language: en
Pages: 259
Authors: Michelle A. Purdy
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2018-08-17 - Publisher: UNC Press Books

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

When traditionally white public schools in the South became sites of massive resistance in the wake of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision,
The Mississippi Chinese
Language: en
Pages: 288
Authors: James W. Loewen
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 1988-01-01 - Publisher: Waveland Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This scholarly, carefully researched book studies one of the most overlooked minority groups in Americathe Chinese of the Mississippi Delta. During Reconstructi
The Yosemite
Language: en
Pages: 336
Authors: John Muir
Categories: Biography & Autobiography
Type: BOOK - Published: 1912 - Publisher: Binker North

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the classic nature work, The Yosemite, the great American naturalist, John Muir, describes the Yosemite valley's geography and the myriad types of trees, flo