After the rally, with 60 police held close on standby, party members announced they would return for another rally the next night. According to the Supreme Court, the group held “an aggressively and militantly racist” rally in a small Maryland town with a crowd of 150 people, some of whom were Black. Our client, members of the National States’ Rights Party (NSRP), called themselves a white supremacist organization. Along with the cooperating attorney, William Zimmerman, I presented the constitutional arguments in both courts. Town of Princess Anne, a monumental First Amendment decision that appeared in both the 4th U.S. It was my good fortune to work for the national ACLU, fresh out of law school, where I helped bring a case that became one of the Warren court’s landmark civil liberties decisions. We had no power except for the power guaranteed us by the right to speak and to protest. The revolution in basic rights that the civil rights movement achieved depended on First Amendment protected speech and action by people of every race and background who pushed the amendment to its limits.
(Perhaps needless to say, I could not have imagined that I would one day be appointed by President Carter to head the EEOC.) In turn, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which barred discrimination in public and private accommodations it also provided a remedy for discrimination in employment and mandated an agency to enforce the new rights, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Eventually, though, billy clubs and arrests met their match as public opinion grew to favor the civil rights activists, who used the First Amendment.
Yet police had no training for handling such tactics. Although nonviolent, many of our actions were illegal. Police were more used to unruly crowds than demonstrators conducting sit-ins or peacefully picketing and occupying white-only spaces. Deprived of the basics of democracy, compelled to abide by racial segregation, and denied representation in Congress, my hometown prepared me to look to the First Amendment for change. was directly controlled by the federal government until the 1973 Home Rule Act and had no mayor or city council, and no Member of Congress. Growing up in the District of Columbia was ample preparation for the civil rights movement, not only because of racial segregation in the nation’s capital, but also considering that D.C. That activism, which sent me to Mississippi with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1963, was made possible by the First Amendment. It did not take much for a girl growing up in the nation’s segregated capital to become an activist.
ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON FULL
In our country, where the right to speak means the most to people like me, an African American woman, who are not automatically part of the larger majority, the First Amendment serves an outsized purpose.īefore I joined the ACLU to defend the First Amendment rights of others, I was a citizen who made full use of my free speech rights.
In this case, I was defending the First Amendment as much as the individual parties I represented. As a young lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, I had the opportunity to show the impartiality of the First Amendment by representing plaintiffs whose outspoken views on racism made them my polar opposites.
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