## Facts

- 187 African American high school and college students gathered in Columbia, South Carolina, and marched in small groups to the South Carolina State House grounds, a public area.
- Their purpose was to protest racial discrimination and to petition state officials to remove laws enforcing racial inequality.
- On the State House grounds, they peacefully assembled, delivered speeches, and sang patriotic and religious songs.
- The record showed no violence or threats of violence by demonstrators or onlookers.
- Police ordered the demonstrators to disperse within fifteen minutes or be arrested; the demonstrators did not disperse and continued singing.
- The demonstrators were arrested and convicted of the common-law offense of breach of the peace, described by the state court as not susceptible of exact definition.
- The South Carolina Supreme Court affirmed the convictions.

## Issues

1. Whether convicting peaceful demonstrators for breach of the peace, based on their protest and refusal to disperse from public statehouse grounds, violated the First Amendment rights of speech, assembly, and petition as applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment.
2. Whether the record contained evidence of actual or threatened disorder sufficient to justify the arrests and convictions under a public order offense.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court reversed the state court and set aside the convictions.
- The Court held that, on this record, South Carolina infringed the demonstrators’ rights of free speech, free assembly, and petition protected by the First Amendment and applied to the states by the Fourteenth Amendment.
- The Court emphasized the protest’s peaceful nature and the absence of violence or any threat of violence.
- The Court rejected treating the convictions as justified crowd-control where the record did not show imminent disorder, distinguishing cases where police intervened to prevent an impending riot.
- Justice Clark dissented, reasoning that officials could act to prevent potential disorder and that the situation warranted deference to state public-order judgments.

## Legal Principles

- The First Amendment protects peaceful expression, assembly, and petition in public places, and these protections constrain state action through the Fourteenth Amendment.
- A state may not criminally punish peaceful protest merely because the views are unpopular or because officials issue a dispersal order unsupported by evidence of actual or imminent violence or disorder.
- Public-order offenses that are broadly defined cannot be used to penalize protected expression absent proof of a concrete threat to public safety.

## Conclusion

Because the demonstrators’ conduct was peaceful and the record showed no actual or imminent breach of the peace, South Carolina’s use of a breach-of-the-peace conviction to punish the protest violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments.


Edwards v. South Carolina, 372 U.S. 229 (1963)