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For the next two years, Louisville was mired in spells of protests,
arrests, and negotiations.
Black Louisvillians also pressed city officials to
adopt a public accommodations ordinance, but to no avail.
The response
was predictable. As one city official sighed, the city “has no control over
private property rights nor can it pass any laws in conflict with constitutional
guarantee [sic] of private property rights.”
During this time, the boycotters’ escalations and concerns, however,
made their way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court wrestled with the
tension between civil rights and property rights in a series of cases known as
“the sit-in cases.” The earliest cases involved trespassing
and disorderly
conduct.
Civil rights lawyers argued hundreds of these cases every year,
and some of the cases that reached the Supreme Court—namely the
consolidated cases of Hamm v. City of Rock Hill and Lupper v. Arkansas—
had far-reaching consequences.
Both rulings would impact the convictions
of large swaths of movement centers throughout the South.
The sit-in cases were, in the eyes of some, the most significant civil
rights cases in the post-Brown years,
and they came to shape the careers of
civil rights icons like Constance Baker Motley. In fact, most of Motley’s
arguments before the Court were sit-in cases, and she won nearly every case
she argued before the Court.
Of all of her arguments to the Court, regardless
of legal issue, Motley considered Lupper, which stemmed from trespass
convictions, “the most difficult case [she] argued” and perhaps her “most
stunning Supreme Court victory.”
Motley remembered that Lupper
Id. at 97–103 (chronicling the tensions in the city).
Id.
Id. at 83.
See Mitchell v. City of Charleston, 378 U.S. 551 (1964); Hamm v. City of Rock Hill, 379 U.S.
306 (1964); Barr v. City of Columbia, 378 U.S. 146 (1964); Bouie v. City of Columbia, 378 U.S. 347
(1964); Shuttlesworth v. City of Birmingham, 373 U.S. 262 (1963); Blow v. North Carolina, 379 U.S.
684 (1965); Abernathy v. Alabama, 375 U.S. 963 (1964); Thompson v. Virginia, 374 U.S. 99 (1963);
Bouie v. City of Columbia, 374 U.S. 805 (1963); Bell v. Maryland, 374 U.S. 805 (1963); Gober v. City
of Birmingham, 373 U.S. 374 (1963); Peterson v. City of Greenville, 370 U.S. 935 (1962).
Some states similarly used breach of peace statutes to prosecute activists. See Henry v. City of
Rock Hill, 376 U.S. 776 (1964); Fields v. South Carolina, 375 U.S. 44 (1963); Edwards v. South Carolina,
372 U.S. 229 (1963); Wright v. Georgia, 370 U.S. 935 (1962); Garner v. Louisiana, 368 U.S. 157 (1961).
Hamm, 379 U.S. at 307. The Court decided these sit-in cases after the passage of the Civil Rights
Act of 1964, and the case raised the issue of applying the Act retroactively. Id. at 312. The Court issued
a momentous ruling, vacating the convictions and dismissing the prosecutions in the sit-in cases, although
the conduct occurred before the Act’s enactment. Id. at 317.
Rights Cases in High Court, CHI. DAILY DEF., Nov. 1, 1962, at 6; Legal Defense Fund Keeps U.S.
Supreme Court Busy, CLEV. CALL & POST, June 30, 1962, at 4C.
Raymond J. Lohier, Jr., On Judge Motley and the Second Circuit, 117 COLUM. L. REV. 1803,
1804–05 (2017) (noting that Motley won nine out of the ten cases she argued before the Court).
CONSTANCE BAKER MOTLEY, EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY 199 (1998).