Nation: Obliterating the Effect

After deciding that the public-accommodations section was constitutional, the Supreme Court turned to a less significant but more nettlesome legal problem: Could the thousands of sit-in demonstrators who had invaded the South’s segregated lunch counters and been convicted under valid state antitrespass laws still be punished for acts that are now undeniably legal? The question split the court’s earlier unanimity.

A five-man majority of the Justices declared that the sit-in convictions “and the command of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 are clearly in direct conflict.” Referring to a 1934 ruling by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, the majority found precedent to assume that Congress intends “to avoid inflicting punishment at a time when it can no longer further any legislative purpose and would be unnecessarily vindictive.” The fact that the sit-in convictions were under state rather than federal law, ruled last week’s majority, is “a distinction without a difference.” Explained the opinion, also written by Justice Tom Clark: “Since the provisions of the Act would abate all federal prosecutions it follows that the same rule must prevail under the Supremacy Clause which requires that a contrary state practice or state statute must give way.”

“No Precedent.” Declaring that “the great purpose of the civil rights legislation was to obliterate the effect of a distressing chapter of our history,” the opinion concluded that the specific convictions under consideration (cases from Arkansas and South Carolina) “must be vacated and the prosecutions dismissed.” The ruling meant that some 3,000 other cases now pending or under appeal in which sit-in demonstrators had acted “peacefully” eventually would be dropped.

In biting dissent, Justice John M. Harlan called the majority’s reasoning “revolutionary” in its voiding of state convictions. Justice Hugo Black was even more scathing. “It certainly relieves us of work to abate these so-called sit-in cases,” he commented in court. But, he contended in his written dissent: “I do not find one paragraph, one sentence, one clause, or one word in the 1964 Act on which the most strained efforts of the most fertile imagination could support such a conclusion. The idea that Congress has power to accomplish such a result has no precedent, so far as I know, in the nearly 200 years that Congress has been in existence.”

“Incomprehensible.” In Black’s view, such demonstrators still have no right “to take the law into their own hands by sitting down and occupying the premises for as long as they choose to stay,” particularly since the very aim of the new law is to “take such disputes out of the streets and restaurants and into the courts.”

The decision does not automatically end local prosecution of sit-in cases; civil rights lawyers may have to seek dismissal in specific cases. Yet it does mean that a great variety of civil rights advocates—ranging from Mrs. Malcolm Peabody, 73-year-old mother of Massachusetts’ lame-duck Governor, to Mardon Walker, a 19-year-old daughter of a white Navy captain, no longer need fear confinement. Said a relieved Miss Walker in New London, Conn., where she is a student at Connecticut College: “I somehow felt that I would never have to serve 18 months in jail for trying to be served in a restaurant. It just seemed incomprehensible.”

The decision also frees some $2,000,000 in bond money posted by individuals and civil rights groups, dating back to the winter of 1960 when a band of determined Negro students first sat down at a variety-store lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., and refused to move. That money is not likely to remain idle for long. Civil rights leaders plan to use it to push voting-registration drives and—despite general compliance with the new civil rights laws in metropolitan areas—to push into rural Southern hamlets where the law has never even been tested and WHITE ONLY signs still proclaim defiance.