Peterson v. City of Greenville

Peterson v. City of Greenville
Litigants	Peterson v. City of Greenville
ArgueDate	April 24, 1963
DecideDate	May 20, 1963
FullName	Peterson et al. v. City of Greenville, South Carolina
Citations	373 U.S. 244 (1963)
Prior	Defendants convicted, Greenville County Court; affirmed, South Carolina Supreme Court, 239 S.C. 298, 122 S.E.2d 826 (1961); cert. granted, 371 U.S. 810 (1962).
Subsequent	Reversed and remanded.
Holding	State enforcement of a city ordinance requiring racial segregation in restaurants constitutes state action in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
SCOTUS	1962–1965
Majority	Warren
JoinMajority	unanimous
LawsApplied	U.S. Const. amend. XIV; Greenville, S.C., Code § 10-7 (1960)

Contents

Background and Context
The Incident and Arrest
Legal Proceedings and Arguments
Supreme Court Decision
Impact and Legacy

Peterson v. City of Greenville was a landmark 1963 decision by the Supreme Court of the United States that struck down a Greenville, South Carolina, ordinance requiring racial segregation in restaurants. The unanimous ruling was a significant victory for the Civil Rights Movement, establishing that a city could not use its police power to enforce private discrimination, as such enforcement constituted prohibited state action under the Fourteenth Amendment. The case was part of a crucial legal strategy to dismantle Jim Crow laws in the Southern United States.

Background and Context

In the early 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement was intensifying its campaign against racial segregation in public accommodations across the American South. SNCC and other activist groups targeted sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, a tactic that had gained national attention after the Greensboro sit-ins in 1960. These protests often led to mass arrests, creating test cases to challenge the constitutionality of Jim Crow laws. The legal landscape was evolving; the Supreme Court had recently decided Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which barred segregation in interstate bus terminal facilities, but the status of local laws mandating segregation in places like restaurants was still contested. The city of Greenville, South Carolina, like many municipalities, had an ordinance explicitly making it unlawful for restaurants to serve white and Black patrons in the same room. This legal framework provided the backdrop for a planned protest by ten African-American high school students.

The Incident and Arrest

On August 9, 1960, ten Black teenagers, including the lead petitioner Jesse Peterson, entered the S. H. Kress five-and-dime store lunch counter in downtown Greenville. They took seats at the "whites-only" counter and requested service. The store manager, acting in compliance with the city's segregation ordinance, immediately asked them to leave. When they refused, he called the police. Officers arrived and arrested all ten students for trespassing. The students were charged under a state trespass statute, but the arrest and prosecution were directly precipitated by their violation of the city's segregation law. The police acted explicitly to enforce that ordinance, a fact clearly established in the trial record. This direct link between city law enforcement and the maintenance of segregated facilities became the central factual pillar of the subsequent legal challenge.

Legal Proceedings and Arguments

The students were convicted in the Greenville County Court. Their convictions were affirmed by the South Carolina Supreme Court, which held that the private restaurant owner had the right to choose his customers and that the city ordinance did not force him to discriminate. The state court treated the case as one involving only private action, which would not be subject to the Fourteenth Amendment. The petitioners, represented by NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorneys including Constance Baker Motley, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. They argued that the city ordinance was unconstitutional on its face and that the arrests constituted state action to enforce racial segregation, violating the Equal Protection Clause. The city of Greenville contended that the manager would have evicted the students regardless of the ordinance to avoid a breach of the peace, and thus no state action was involved. The Solicitor General filed an amicus curiae brief supporting the petitioners, emphasizing the pervasive role of state-enforced segregation.

Supreme Court Decision

On May 20, 1963, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision, authored by Chief Justice Earl Warren, reversing the convictions. The Court held that the existence of the city ordinance requiring segregation was itself unconstitutional state action. The justices found it unnecessary to determine whether the store manager would have acted without the law because the ordinance "remove[d] the decision as to who shall be served from the realm of private choice." The Court ruled that when a state law commands segregation, the state "patently encourages" discrimination, and any arrest to enforce that policy makes the state a joint participant in the discriminatory act. This reasoning rendered the convictions a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision explicitly connected the police action to the city's statutory mandate, closing a loophole that lower courts had used to uphold convictions in sit-in cases. The ruling was announced on the same day as the related cases of Lombard v. Louisiana and Goober v. City of Birmingham.

Impact and Legacy