Which Supreme Court case decided that citizens are constitutionally protected when engaging in peaceful protest?

The evening before Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, he delivered what many believe to be one of his most powerful speeches.

“We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop,” Dr. King declared to an overflowing audience at the Church of God in Christ on April 3, 1968. “And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”

Although the speech is well known today for King’s soaring rhetoric and Biblical allusions — as well as King’s ominous foreboding that he would not live a long life — much of the speech concerned the Memphis Sanitation Workers, who were on strike for better working conditions and higher wages. In response to the group’s plan to hold a peaceful protest on April 4, the city of Memphis asked the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee to issue an injunction to prevent the march, citing violence that erupted at a previous protest on March 18.

“Now about injunctions,” King said to the crowd. “We have an injunction and we’re going into court tomorrow morning to fight this illegal, unconstitutional injunction.” He continued:

All we say to America is, “Be true to what you said on paper.” If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions. Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn’t committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right.

King’s determination, not only to hold the march, but to fight in the court of law for the right to protest, underscores a lesser-known aspect of the Civil Rights Movement: that peaceful protests not only appealed to the moral conscience of the average citizen but were also vehicles for advancing civil rights — especially First Amendment rights — in courts of law so as to establish lasting legal precedents that would protect the constitutional rights of future generations.

“Nearly all the cases involving the civil rights movement were decided on First Amendment grounds,” according to University of Columbia law professor Jack Greenberg, who served as the director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund from 1961 until 1984. These include seminal Supreme Court cases such as Garner v. Louisiana (1961) and ​​Edwards v. South Carolina (1963), which civil liberties groups — including FIRE — rely on today.

In Garner, the Supreme Court overturned the convictions of five African American students from Southern University who were arrested and charged for disturbing the peace after engaging in a sit-in at a segregated, all-white lunch counter at a drugstore in Baton Rouge. In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court ruled the students’ actions were protected by the First Amendment.

“We would surely have to be blind not to recognize that petitioners were sitting at these counters, where they knew they would not be served, in order to demonstrate that their race was being segregated in dining facilities in this part of the country,” Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote in his concurring opinion. “Such a demonstration, in the circumstances of these two cases, is as much a part of the ‘free trade in ideas’ . . . as is verbal expression, more commonly thought of as ‘speech.’”

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Similar reasoning was applied in Edwards, where the Supreme Court overturned the convictions of 187 African American students who were arrested following a demonstration, held outside of the South Carolina State House, to end segregation. The authorities, who claimed that the protesters were “boisterous,” “loud,” and “flamboyant,” asserted that the protest disturbed the “public tranquility.” Once again, what started as a peaceful protest ultimately became a legal means to challenge what King referred to as “unjust laws” in his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” In this case, the Supreme Court found that the protesters’ First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, association, and petition had been violated by the state of South Carolina:

It has long been established that these First Amendment freedoms are protected by the Fourteenth Amendment from invasion by the States . . . The circumstances in this case reflect an exercise of these basic constitutional rights in their most pristine and classic form. The petitioners felt aggrieved by laws of South Carolina which allegedly “prohibited Negro privileges in this State.” They peaceably assembled at the site of the State Government and there peaceably expressed their grievances.

Although King was not directly involved in either of these landmark cases, he was involved in many others, and fighting the injunction sought by the city of Memphis would turn out to be King’s final legal victory. Shortly before delivering his “Mountaintop” speech, King met with lawyers in his room at the Lorraine Motel to review their legal strategy, as he had surely done countless times before, charting a path forward for lasting change.

That night, King said to the crowd, “And so just as I say, we aren’t going to let dogs or water hoses turn us around. We aren’t going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.”

How has the Freedom of Speech been interpreted by the Supreme Court? Explore these landmark cases to better understand this important constitutional right.

Schenck v. United States (1919)

Freedom of speech can be limited during wartime. The government can restrict expressions that would create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. Read More.

Abrams v. United States (1919)

The First Amendment did not protect printing leaflets urging to resist the war effort, calling for a general strike, and advocating violent revolution. Read More.

Debs v. United States (1919)

The First Amendment did not protect an anti-war speech designed to obstruct recruiting. Read More.

Gitlow v. New York (1925)

The Supreme Court applied protection of free speech to the states through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Read More.

Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942)

The First Amendment did not protect fighting words which, by being said, cause injury or cause an immediate breach of the peace. Read More. 

West Virginia v. Barnette (1943)

The West Virginia Board’s policy requiring students and teachers to recite the Pledge of Allegiance was unconstitutional. Reversing Minersville v. Gobitas (1940), the Court held government cannot force citizens to confess by word or act their faith in matters of opinion. Read More.

United States v. O’Brien (1968)

The First Amendment did not protect burning draft cards in protest of the Vietnam War as a form of symbolic speech. Read More.

Tinker v. Des Moines (1969)

The Court ruled that students wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam War was “pure speech,” or symbolic speech protected by the First Amendment. Read More.

Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969)

The Supreme Court held that the First and Fourteenth Amendments protected speech advocating violence at a Ku Klux Klan rally because the speech did not call for “imminent lawless action.” Read More.

Cohen v. California (1971)

A California statute prohibiting the display of offensive messages violated freedom of expression. Read More.

Miller v. California (1973)

This case set forth rules for obscenity prosecutions, but it also gave states and localities flexibility in determining what is obscene. Read More.

Island Trees School District v. Pico (1982)

The Supreme Court ruled that officials could not remove books from school libraries because they disagreed with the content of the books’ messages. Read More.

Bethel School District v. Fraser (1986)

A school could suspend a pupil for giving a student government nomination speech full of “elaborate, graphic, and explicit sexual metaphor.” Read More.

Texas v. Johnson (1989)

Flag burning as political protest is a form of symbolic speech protected by the First Amendment. Read More.

R.A.V. v. St. Paul (1992)

A criminal ordinance prohibiting the display of symbols that “arouse anger, alarm or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender” was unconstitutional. The law violated the First Amendment because it punished speech based on the ideas expressed. Read More.

Reno v. ACLU (1997)

The 1996 Communications Decency Act was ruled unconstitutional since it was overly broad and vague in its regulation of speech on the Internet, and since it attempted to regulate indecent speech, which the First Amendment protects. Read More.

Watchtower Bible and Tract Society v. Stratton (2002)

City laws requiring permits for political advocates going door to door were unconstitutional because such a mandate would have a “chilling effect” on political communication. Read More.

United States v. American Library Association (2003)

The federal government could require public libraries to use Internet-filtering software to prevent viewing of pornography by minors. The burden placed on adult patrons who had to request the filters be disabled was minimal. Read More.

Virginia v. Hicks (2003)

Richmond could ban non-residents from public housing complexes if the non-residents did not have “a legitimate business or social purpose” for being there. The trespass policy was not overbroad and did not infringe upon First Amendment rights. Read More.

Virginia v. Black (2003)

A blanket ban on cross-burning was an unconstitutional content-based restriction on free speech. States could ban cross burning with intent to intimidate, but the cross burning act alone was not enough evidence to infer intent. Read More.

Ashcroft v. ACLU (2004)

The Child On-Line Protection Act violated the First Amendment because it was overbroad, it resulted in content-based restrictions on speech, and there were less-restrictive options available to protect children from harmful materials. Read More.

Morse v. Frederick (2007)

The First Amendment did not protect a public school student’s right to display a banner reading “Bong Hits 4 Jesus”. While students have the right to engage in political speech, the right was outweighed by the school’s mission to discourage drug use. Read More.