Edwards Vs South Carolina Case Study

Ashley Bejarano
Mr. Asper
American Government Honors
21 October 2011
Edward V. South Carolina: Facts of Cause
1.Facts of case
Edwards v. South Carolina (1963) was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution forbade state government officials to force a crowd to disperse when they are otherwise legally marching in front of a state house. The 187 petitioners consisted of African-American high school and college students who peacefully assembled at the Zion Baptist Church in Columbia South Carolina on March 2, 1961. The students marched in separate groups of roughly 15 to South Carolina State House grounds to peacefully express their grievances regarding civil
The crowd of petitioners did not engage in any violent conduct and did not threaten violence in any manner, nor did crowds gathering to witness the demonstration engage in any such behavior. Petitioners were told by police officials that they must disperse within 15 minutes or face arrest. The petitioners failed to disperse, opting to sing religious and patriotic songs instead. Petitioners were convicted of the common law crime of breach of the peace. Their purpose was "to submit a protest to the citizens of South Carolina, along with the Legislative Bodies of South Carolina, our feelings and our dissatisfaction with the present condition of discriminatory actions against Negroes, in general, and to let them know that we were dissatisfied and that we would like for the laws which prohibited Negro privileges in this State to be removed."
2.Issues
As stated before, approximately two hundred African‐American high school and college students walked in groups of fifteen from a church in Columbia, South Carolina, to the grounds of the state capitol, an area normally open to the public. Their purpose in visiting this traditional public forum was to protest discrimination against blacks and to seek
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 and egregiousness 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 case criminal convictions resulting from the evenhanded application of a precise and 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 regulating traffic, or had disobeyed a law reasonably limiting the periods during which the State House grounds were open to the public, this would be a different