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The Sit-Ins And The Failed State Action Revolution, Christopher W. Schmidt

Studio for Law and Culture

This article revises the traditional account of why the Supreme Court, when faced in the early 1960s with a series of cases arising out of the lunch counter sit-in movement, refused to hold racial discrimination in public accommodations unconstitutional. These cases are the great aberration of the Warren Court. At a time when the justices confidently reworked one constitutional doctrine after another, often in response to the moral challenges of the civil rights movement and often in the face of considerable public resistance, they broke pattern in the sit-in cases. And they did so despite a transformation in popular opinion …