ABSTRACT
In Edwards v. South Carolina, 372 US 229 (1963), the US Supreme Court dealt with the liberty of Americans to assemble peacefully on public property to protest government policies and to have that right protected by the national government against state and local government actions. During the civil rights movement of the 1950s, black Americans relied on acts of nonviolent public protest to demand changes to a segregated South. Most white public authorities, however, were neither sympathetic nor ready to change the Jim Crow system of racial separation. As more public protests, such as sit-ins and marches, spread across the American South, officials used both legal and nonlegal means to quell the demonstrations. In 1961 more than 180 African American high school and college students marched from a Baptist church in Columbia, South Carolina, to the state capitol building.
