The Law: Word to the Wise

For five years the Supreme Court has thrown out Southern convictions for nearly every kind of civil rights demonstration. So last week the court’s reversal seemed inevitable in the case of Henry Brown and other CORE demonstrators, whose “standup” in a Clinton, La., public library resulted in their conviction for disturbing the peace.

Win the demonstrators did—but in a remarkably close 5 to 4 decision that apparently signaled the Supreme Court’s growing disenchantment with ever bolder civil rights demonstrations. Though the Negroes were protesting an unconstitutionally segregated library system, the angriest of four dissenters in Brown v. Louisiana was none other than the court’s most steadfast liberal, Justice Black, who declared, “It has become automatic for people to be turned loose as long as whatever they do has something to do with race. That is not the way I read the Constitution.

“The crowd moved by noble ideals today can become the mob ruled by hate and passion and greed and violence tomorrow,” said Black. “If we ever doubted that, we know it now. The peaceful songs of love can become as stirring and provocative as the Marseillaise did in the days when a noble revolution gave way to rule by successive mobs until chaos set in . . . I am deeply troubled with the fear that powerful private groups throughout the nation will read the court’s action as I do—that is, as granting them a license to invade the tranquillity and beauty of our libraries whenever they have quarrel with some state policy that may or may not exist. It is an unhappy circumstance, in my judgment, that the group which more than any other has needed a government of equal laws and equal justice, is now encouraged to believe that the best way for it to advance its cause, which is a worthy one, is by taking the law into its own hands.” Warned Black: “It should be remembered that if one group can take over libraries for one cause, other groups will assert the right to do it for causes which, while wholly legal, may not be so appealing to this court.”