Edwards v. South Carolina

Appellant
James Edwards, Jr.
Appellee
State of South Carolina
Appellant's Claim
That the South Carolina common law crime of breach of the peace, as applied to a peaceful march to protest racial discrimination, infringes on the First Amendment guarantee of free speech.
Chief Lawyer for Appellant
Jack Greenberg
Chief Lawyer for Appellee
Lionel R. McLeod
Justices for the Court
Hugo Lafayette Black, William J. Brennan, Jr., William O. Douglas, Arthur Goldberg, John Marshall Harlan II, Potter Stewart, Earl Warren, Byron R. White
Justices Dissenting
Tom C. Clark
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
25 February 1963
Decision
The Supreme Court struck down the convictions of the civil rights demonstrators for breach of peace.
Significance
Using the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court made it illegal for states to criminalize peaceful expressions of unpopular views.
On the morning of 2 March 1961, roughly 200 African American high school andcollege students assembled at the Zion Baptist Church in Columbia, South Carolina. They proceeded to walk, in groups of 15, to the nearby state house grounds, an area open to the public. Their purpose in doing so was to protest segregation, a message they conveyed by peacefully carrying placards as they walked through the grounds. A small, quiet crowd gathered to watch them, and thepolice then informed them that they had 15 minutes to leave the premises. When the students responded by singing "The Star Spangled Banner" and other patriotic and religious songs, they were arrested and charged with breaching thepeace, a crime under the common law of South Carolina.
Convicted and sentenced with small fines and jail sentences of up to 30 days,the students appealed their cases to the state supreme court, which upheld the convictions for an offense that even the appellate court admitted was onlyvaguely defined. The students then petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for review of this decision.
The Supreme Court declared that the students' convictions violated their rights of free speech, free assembly, and the freedom to petition government forredress of grievances. All of these rights, the Court said, were assured by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which makes fundamental guarantees of the Bill of Rights binding upon the states. The arbitrariness andegregiousness of South Carolina's violation of the petitioners' rights was manifest in the fact that they were not convicted of having violated any proper statute, only an ill-defined rule:

We do not review in this casecriminal convictions resulting from the evenhanded application of a preciseand narrowly drawn regulatory statute evincing a legislative judgment that certain specific conduct be limited or proscribed. If, for example, the petitioners had been convicted upon evidence that they had violated a law regulatingtraffic, or had disobeyed a law reasonably limiting the periods during whichthe State House grounds were open to the public, this would be a different case.

Uncodified Breach of Peace Crime Held Not a "Time, Place, and Manner" Restriction
Justice Stewart's opinion, expressing the views of the majority of the Court,was referring to the so-called "time, place, and manner" restrictions whichare often upheld in First Amendment cases. The assumption implicit in the "time, place, and manner" doctrine is that where it is possible to distinguish between the message certain speech is intended to convey and the manner in which it is communicated, the latter may be reasonably regulated even though theformer may not. Here, however, the evidence "showed no more than that the opinions which [the students] were peaceably expressing were sufficiently opposed to the views of the majority of the community to attract a crowd and necessitate police protection." Far from being precise and narrowly-drawn, the common law crime outlined by the South Carolina Supreme Court was so broad and ambiguous as to permit the state to impermissibly interfere with the message as well as the medium. In effect, with Edwards, the Supreme Court madeit impossible for a southern state beset by peaceful demonstrations to fightback with vague, overly broad laws. This case is yet another example of how the Court headed by Earl Warren helped to create a legal climate in which theCivil Rights movement could flourish.