• Brown triggered a huge volume of integration litigation which lasted for decades.  Those battles were fought mainly in federal courts; southern state courts remained mainly on the sidelines.  The only Deep South state court that had occasion to address Brown was Florida’s supreme court, which treated it with studied skepticism. 

• In Manatee County, integration opponents argued that integrated schools were not a public purpose and could not be funded because the state constitution prohibited state funding of non-public activities.  A majority of justices rejected this argument but openly questioned whether Brown would promote or hold back integration in the South.   

• Change through non-violent action, a concept promoted heavily by Dr. King, was a core guiding principle for most civil rights activists.  They practiced this principle in a number of ways, beginning with Rosa Parks’s decision to sit at the front of a Montgomery, Alabama bus in 1955. 

• In the late 1950s activists adopted the “sit-in,” which became a major tool of change.  Typically, a group of protesters would sit at a whites-only lunch counter at a restaurant or department store, would request service (and be denied), and would either:  (i) leave when asked, (ii) refuse to leave until they were served, or (iii) would be arrested without any request to leave.  Protesters were usually prosecuted under trespassing or breach-of-the-peace laws that did not mention race.  The sit-ins attracted national attention and raised the profile of the movement substantially.

• Southern state courts did not know quite what to do with the protesters.  They disliked them and did not want to be seen as condoning their actions, but many judges were uneasy about the heavy fines and jail sentences lower courts often imposed even upon peaceful protesters.  As with the jury cases of the 1930s and 1940s, the U.S. Supreme Court kept a close watch on sit-in cases that were appealed, but Southern courts were less receptive to the high Court’s  sit-in directives than they had been in jury cases.

• For example, in Goldfinch,  Peterson and Barr, the Louisiana and South Carolina supreme courts upheld trespassing convictions because the demonstrators had not left after the store manager asked them to.  The courts reasoned that the Constitution was violated because no segregation laws were involved:  trespass and breach-of-the-peace statutes did not refer to race.  The U.S. Supreme Court responded that local officials had put pressure on the store to segregate and enforced the laws at issue as part of that effort, and that was enough to violate the U.S. Constitution.  In Birmingham, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a close associate of Dr. King, was arrested for abetting a crime after he organized a sit-in; Alabama’s supreme court upheld his conviction but the U.S.  Supreme Court again reversed, because there was no violence and thus no crime to abet. 

“The fact that the State provides a system of courts so that S.H. Kress and Company can enforce its legal rights against trespassers upon its private property in violation of [trespass statutes] … cannot fairly be said to be State action enforcing racial segregation … To rule as contended by defendants would mean that S.H. Kress and Company could enforce its rights against white trespassers alone, but not against Negro trespassers and white and Negro trespassers in company. … it would be a denial to the White race of the equal protection of the law.” – Justice Joseph R. Moss, in Barr

“When a state agency passes a law compelling persons to discriminate … and the State’s criminal processes are employed in a way which enforces the discrimination mandated by that law, such a palpable violation of the 14^th Amdt cannot be saved by attempting to separate the mental urges of the discriminators.”  - U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, in Peterson