THE SUPREME COURT: Limited Victory

All he wanted was a sandwich and a cup of tea while his bus made a brief stop in Richmond, Va. But Bruce Boynton, a law student at Washington’s Negro Howard University, wanted to eat his snack in the white section of the bus terminal’s segregated lunchroom. A restaurant official ordered Boynton to leave, and when Boynton declined, called the cops. Boynton was fined $10 in police court, and his conviction was upheld by Virginia’s Supreme Court.

Boynton kept right on fighting the case. He appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court—where lawyers supplied by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People attempted to turn the Boynton case into a legal landmark in the struggle against Jim Crow. Arguing on broad constitutional grounds, Boynton’s lawyers claimed that he had been deprived of his rights under the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection, due process and commerce clauses.

For various reasons the Boynton case was a less-than-ideal test of such a far reaching issue. Any decision would almost certainly have been taken to apply to the touchy sit-in demonstrations that have flared up in eating places all over the South. But the U.S. Justice Department, entering the case as a friend of the court, filed a brief which contended that Boynton’s conviction also violated the statu tory (as opposed to constitutional) provisions of the Interstate Commerce Act, which forbids interstate busline operators from exercising any kind of “unjust discrimination” or “unreasonable prejudice”, against any individual.

With an almost audible sigh of relief, the Court ignored the constitutional issues, confined itself to the Justice Department’s argument, and last week decided by a vote of 7 to 2 that the terminal restaurant, even though privately owned, was an integral part of the busline’s services. “Interstate passengers have to eat,” observed the Supreme Court, and they have a right to expect service “without discrimination prohibited by the Interstate Commerce Act.”

So anxious was the Supreme Court to make sure that its decision would not reach too far, it took the trouble to specify about limitations. “We are not holding,” wrote Justice Hugo Black for the majority, “that every time a bus stops at a wholly independent roadside restaurant the act applies.” But even this limited legal victory was gratifying to the N.A.A.C.P. Said a spokesman for the organization: “I assume it will mean an end to one more sector of embarrassment and second-class treatment for Negro travelers.”