Sit‐in Demonstrations

Sit‐in Demonstrations, which occurred throughout the South in the early 1960s, were at the core of efforts to overthrow racial discrimination in public accommodations. Acting under its authority to enforce the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, Congress had banned such discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1875. But the law was overturned by the Supreme Court in the Civil Rights Cases (1883). The Court held that the Thirteenth Amendment's ban against slavery or involuntary servitude did not extend to discrimination in public accommodations; and it decided that the Fourteenth Amendment did not empower Congress to prohibit directly private discrimination but only discriminatory “state action.” Following this decision and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which constitutionalized the doctrine of “separate but equal” as an acceptable interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause, the southern states rewrote their constitutions to require separate facilities and accommodations. The “equal” component of the formula was, for the most part, ignored.

Opposition to discrimination in public accommodations began to grow after World War II. In 1947, President Harry S. Truman's Committee on Civil Rights recommended the “enactment by the states of laws guaranteeing equal access to places of public accommodation, broadly defined, for persons of all races, colors, creeds, and national origins” (p. 170). By 1962 there were twenty‐eight states with such laws, but none in the South. There was also discrimination in the North, but it was only the southern and some border states that required segregated facilities.

The first sit‐in demonstration was in Greensboro, North Carolina, on 1 February 1960. Four Negro college students protested the refusal of service at a campus luncheonette by “sitting‐in” for several days. They were joined by other students and heckled by white protesters. This particular demonstration ended in negotiations, and no arrests were made. But it lit a spark that burned throughout the nation. About seventy thousand black and white students, many from the North, participated in the spiraling demonstrations; an estimated thirty‐six hundred were arrested and convicted on a variety of charges such as breach of the peace, trespass, loitering, vagrancy, and failing to obey a police officer's order to disperse. Violence, brutality, and economic sanctions were also directed against the demonstrators and their families.

Sit‐in cases soon began coming to the Supreme Court in large numbers—most seeking reversal of convictions in state courts. The Court granted certiorari to an exceptionally large number of these cases and sided with the demonstrators in all but a few. The basic issue was whether there had been sufficient “state action” to convert private discriminatory decisions, which do not violate the Constitution, to state‐aided discrimination that is prohibited by the Fourteenth Amendment. In Peterson v. Greenville (1963), where a group of demonstrators at a lunch counter were asked to leave (and then arrested) “because it was contrary to local customs” and because a city ordinance prohibited integrated lunch counters, the Court held that the ordinance involved the state to a significant extent in the discrimination and reversed the conviction. But it often had to strain to find such a linkage. In Lombard v. Louisiana (1963), for example, New Orleans had no such ordinance. But city officials had publicly condemned sit‐in demonstrations and privately pressured lunch counter owners not to give in to the demonstrator's demands. The Court reversed these convictions too, holding that the statements of city officials were state action no less than a city ordinance.

In Bell v. Maryland (1964), a badly divided Court refused to hold that, where there was no other state involvement, the mere “neutral” arrest of demonstrators on trespass charges was sufficient to overthrow their convictions. A majority of the justices was reluctant to convert the Fourteenth Amendment into a public accommodations statute, especially since Congress was on the verge of passing a national public accommodations law, albeit one grounded in the Commerce Clause rather than the Fourteenth Amendment (see Commerce Power). That law, Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was unanimously sustained in Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States (1964).

The law did more than prohibit discrimination in public accommodations. It also prohibited the punishment of any person attempting to exercise rights secured by the act, for example, demanding nondiscriminatory service in a place of public accommodations. In Hamm v. Rock Hill (1964), the Court not only upheld this ban on state prosecutions but also applied it retroactively to wipe out all nonfinal convictions pending appeal. Thus, Congress had vindicated both the aims and tactics of the sit‐in demonstrators.

See also Civil Rights Movement; Race and Racism; Segregation, De Jure.

Bibliography

President's Committee on Civil Rights, To Secure These Rights (1947).

Joel B. Grossman