Civil Rights Movement

Civil Rights Movement The American struggle for racial equality can hardly be placed within clear temporal boundaries. It obviously includes the brilliant writings of Frederick Douglass, the courage of Harriet Tubman, the stirring speeches of Sojourner Truth, the hesitant proclamations of Abraham Lincoln, the advocacy of W. E. B. Du Bois, the calm spirit of Jackie Robinson, and the post‐World War II litigation efforts of Thurgood Marshall. And since, in the language of Martin Luther King Jr., the Declaration of Independence has always represented a “declaration of intent rather than of reality,” the unfulfilled quest for equality will test the nation's best efforts for generations to come.

Still, it is not inappropriate to characterize the period from the mid‐1950s until about 1970 as a unique watershed in the civil rights struggle in the United States. When the seamstress Rosa Parks refused to step to the back of an Alabama bus on 1 December 1955—thus inspiring the successful Montgomery bus boycott—a decade and a half of civil rights protests were sparked that forever changed the American social fabric. Parks explained that her refusal was “a matter of dignity; I could not have faced myself and my people if I had moved.” King, the young preacher whom the boycott brought to prominence, believed that the civil rights movement was an attack on “man's hostility to man.” Encouraging widespread boycotts, freedom rides, and sit‐ins to protest segregation, King stressed that one who breaks an unjust law openly and with a willingness to accept the penalty expresses “the very highest respect for the law.”

It is clear that the protest movement, which began in the Deep South and spread to the nation at large, had a dramatic impact upon American institutions—particularly American legal institutions. The role of the Supreme Court—as advocate, prophet, protector, and product of the civil rights struggle—constitutes one of the most fascinating chapters of the Court's history.

It makes sense to begin with Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The ruling, handed down at the beginning of Chief Justice Earl Warren's tenure, determined that in the field of “public education, the doctrine of separate‐but‐equal has no place” (p. 495). Warren's painstaking and successful effort to forge a united front to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson was surely the greatest of his many judicial accomplishments. The opinion, which drew on Warren's own sense of fair play and opportunity, emphasized that separating children “of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone” (p. 494). Brown was thus a bold move—even if it was a belated one, designed to rid the legal system of a court‐created impediment to equality.

The Brown decision gave impetus to the demonstrations that began across the South in 1955. Robert L. Carter, former general counsel of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, has written that the desegregation ruling altered the status of blacks, who were no longer supplicants “seeking, pleading, begging to be treated as full‐fledged members of the human race.” Rather they were entitled to equal treatment under the law; the constitution promised no less. Therefore, Brown's indirect consequences were dramatic. But most of the work—for both the Court and the civil rights activists—lay ahead.

Brown's demand for a unitary public school system presented massive implementation problems. The Court's remedial decision, Brown II (1955), called for the dismantling of segregated schools under a cautious charge of “all deliberate speed.” If recalcitrant local school officials sought to move slowly, though, civil rights protestors did not. For the entire decade of the 1960s the Supreme Court faced a series of trespass, contempt, and breach of the peace convictions arising from protests for racial equality. The Court regularly demonstrated a strong solicitude for these cases that, on one level, could have been seen as mere matters of local law enforcement practice, unfit for Supreme Court attention. Actually, though, the justices repeatedly bent traditional principles of review to offer protection to a protest movement of tremendous historical moment.

In Boynton v. Virginia (1960), for example, the Supreme Court reversed a black law student's trespass conviction for refusing to leave the white section of a restaurant operated by a private company in the Richmond Trailways Bus Terminal. Boynton had been arrested under Virginia's trespass statute rather than any overt segregation provision. His lawyers at trial had failed to challenge the conviction under the Interstate Commerce Act, which made discrimination in certain aspects of interstate transportation illegal. Despite these difficulties, the Court ruled that under the Commerce Act the terminal and the restaurant stood in the place of the bus company in the performance of its transportation obligations (see Commerce Power). Although the courts below made no findings of fact, the Supreme Court ruled that “the evidence in this case shows such a relationship and situation here” (p. 461). Under normal concepts of appellate review, the Court would have demanded that the Interstate Commerce Act defense have been preserved at trial.

The following year, in Garner v. Louisiana (1961), a unanimous Court reversed the disturbing‐the‐peace convictions of sixteen blacks who refused to leave a “whites‐only” lunch counter. After searching the record, the justices concluded that there was no evidence to support the breach of peace claims—reaching what could be seen as a local law conclusion that mere presence could not constitute a valid disturbance. In Peterson v. City of Greenville (1963) the justices reversed another group of sit‐in cases under the theory that the trespass convictions were not the result of mere private discrimination. Stretching the “state action” doctrine significantly, the Court concluded that well‐publicized statements of local public officials indicating that sit‐ins would not be permitted brought the case under the purview of the Fourteenth Amendment (see Sit‐In Demonstrations).

The willingness, evidenced in Peterson, to apply constitutional mandate to what had traditionally been regarded as mere private conduct was continued throughout the 1960s. In Burton v. Wilmington Parking Authority (1961) the Court extended the state action concept to embrace a private restaurant's refusal to serve a black customer. The establishment in question was located in a parking garage owned by a local government entity under a complex leasing arrangement that allowed the parking authority to benefit from the restaurant's practices. In Griffin v. Maryland (1964), a trespass conviction in a private amusement park was reversed because the park employee making the arrest was also a deputy sheriff. This dual status gave the seizure a sufficiently public character to be deemed action of the state, and thus subject to constitutional stricture. The justices in Robinson v. Florida (1964) found enough public coercion in a set of state health regulations requiring segregated toilets to overturn a restaurant owner's private segregation policy.

The First Amendment principles of vagueness and overbreadth were given new vigor during this period as well. A multitude of convictions arising from marches against segregation were reversed in Edwards v. South Carolina (1963). In this case, college students were arrested after a peaceful assembly on the grounds of a state capitol. The Court ruled that the breach of the peace statute, as construed, was so vague that it permitted the abrogation of First Amendment protected expression. In Cox v. Louisiana (1965) the justices held a Louisiana obstructing‐public‐passages statute as unnecessarily broad and overturned a sentence of twenty‐one months in jail for engaging in a peaceful demonstration.

Expanding First Amendment protections in another direction, the Supreme Court also reached out in the mid‐1960s to protect directly the primary litigation arm of the civil rights movement, the NAACP. In NAACP v. Button (1963), the justices invalidated an effort by the Virginia legislature to outlaw as solicitation of legal business the litigation strategy of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. And six months later, in Gibson v. Florida Legislative Investigation Committee (1963), the Court shielded the organization itself from being forced to disclose its membership to a state legislative committee.

There were exceptions to the Court's generous treatment of civil rights activists. The convictions of thirty‐two Florida A&M University students, arrested for protesting on the grounds of a jailhouse, were upheld in Adderley v. Florida (1966). And in Walker v. City of Birmingham (1967), the justices sustained contempt convictions of King and others for marching in violation of a seemingly unconstitutional court order. It may be that the Court was, by the late 1960s, becoming impatient with the growing militancy of civil rights demonstrators. But it is also true that in the early part of the decade the Court seemed to be passing on more than the merits of isolated trespass convictions. Indeed, the protestors won almost all of their cases in the highest court. The justices' near constant involvement in cases reflected a concern that the civil rights movement should not be worn down by local prosecutions.

It is indisputable, then, that the Supreme Court contributed significantly to the success of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. King, for example, acknowledged that the Court's determination that local laws requiring segregation on Montgomery's buses were unconstitutional greatly rejuvenated his watershed communitywide boycott. Nonetheless, it is not too difficult to carry a reciprocal claim that the civil rights movement—over the longer course—contributed even more substantially to the development of the Supreme Court.

Some of the constitutional initiatives of the civil rights era have faded. The great stretches of the state action doctrine between 1960 and 1972, for example, were dramatically pared back. Ambitious civil and voting rights statutes passed in 1964, 1965, and 1968 diminished the need for constitutional intervention in nonpublic discrimination (see Civil Rights Act of 1964; Voting Rights Act of 1965). Intrusive jurisdictional principles, designed to allow significant federal intervention into unconstitutional state court processes, have also been overruled as a sense of emergency has waned. Still, large areas of modern constitutional jurisprudence are deeply rooted in the civil rights/protest era. If the Supreme Court was forced to discard traditional principles of deference toward other government decision makers in order to assist a fragile civil liberties movement, the effect has been long term and beneficial.

Brown and its progeny, both within the federal courtrooms and outside them, have helped to transform the Supreme Court into a meaningful institution for the protection of civil and political rights. For example, litigation involving flag burning drew strength from the earlier civil rights movement. In 1969, a conviction arising from the burning of a flag by an African‐American man protesting the shooting of James Meredith was reversed in Street v. New York. Voting rights decisions like Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections (1966), striking down the use of the poll tax, and Gomillion v. Lightfoot (1960), requiring the racially equitable composition of political districts, have spawned a vital jurisprudence of political equality.

These changes, however, pale in comparison to the effect that New York Times v. Sullivan (1964) has had on freedom of expression in the United States. In the Sullivan case, the Supreme Court reversed a $500,000 libel judgment awarded to the police commissioner of Montgomery, Alabama. State courts had found that a group of civil rights activists and the New York Times had damaged the commissioner's reputation and brought him into public contempt. Prior to the Sullivan decision in 1964, statements found to be libelous by state courts were, without more, deemed outside the protection of the First Amendment. Realizing the significant threat to democratic processes resulting from such a strong chill on a citizen's ability to criticize government officials, the Court ruled in Sullivan that the free speech guarantee requires significant federal judicial oversight of state libel decisions. Sullivan held that public officials are prevented from recovering damages for a defamatory falsehood relating to official conduct unless “actual malice”— that is, wreckless disregard for the truth—is shown.

The ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan is the centerpiece of the American law of freedom of expression. The decision is not infrequently characterized as the most important free speech ruling in Supreme Court history. Not only has the Sullivan principle given far wider berth to the discussion of public affairs, but it began the erosion of a categorical First Amendment jurisprudence that had the result of leaving many key forms of expression outside the First Amendment's purview. Not only libel, but commercial speech, offensive speech, profane speech, provocative utterances, and sexually explicit expression have received more protection in the past two decades as the result of the process that New York Times v. Sullivan initiated (see Obscenity and Pornography).

And what of Brown v. Board of Education itself? The desegregation ruling unleashed, over the course of the next two decades, a cascade of previously unembraced civil liberties protections. They were unimaginable without Brown's earlier path‐clearing. An institution previously rendered silent by its battles with the New Deal and the revelations of legal realism was effectively resurrected. During the Warren era, the judiciary's reemergence was accomplished primarily on behalf of egalitarianism. Substantially broadening the participatory base of our democracy, the Warren Court shook the dust from old tools of judicial activism in an effort to realize more fully the goal of equal dignity for all. The result, in no small degree, was the development of an institution that views its primary responsibility as the protection of individual liberties against majority intrusion.

See also History of the Court: Rights Consciousness in Contemporary Society; Race and Racism.

Bibliography

Catherine A. Barnes , Journey from Jim Crow (1983).
Derrick A. Bell , Race, Racism and American Law (1980).
Robert L. Carter , The Warren Court and Desegregation, Michigan Law Review 67 (1968): 237–248.
Jack Greenberg , The Supreme Court, Civil Rights, and Civil Dissonance, Yale Law Journal 77 (1968): 1520–1544.
Martin Luther King, Jr. , Stride Toward Freedom (1958).

Gene R. Nichol