Garner v. Louisiana

The Court did not say that sit-ins were protected. It said something narrower: Louisiana had convicted the students on no evidence at all. Chief Justice Warren wrote for a unanimous bench on December 11, 1961, that nothing in the record showed conduct likely to disturb the peace, so the convictions violated due process. Frankfurter, Douglas and Harlan each added separate opinions, and Harlan compared sitting in to speech. 64 Parishes says Thurgood Marshall, then with the NAACP, argued for the students. The ground was thin enough for nine justices to share.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old State Capitol — steps away
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
• Capitol Park Museum — 0.5 mi
  The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 0.7 mi
  A 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.
• LSU Rural Life Museum — 4.9 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.

More markers nearby

• Pioneers of the Bus Boycott — steps away
• Alvin Batiste — steps away
• The C.O.R.E. March — steps away
• Oliver Pollock — steps away