Boynton v. Virginia

Boynton v. Virginia
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued October 12, 1960 Decided December 5, 1960
Full case name	Boynton v. Virginia
Citations	364 U.S. 454 (more) 81 S. Ct. 182; 5 L. Ed. 2d 206; 1960 U.S. LEXIS 1889
Case history
Prior	Cert. granted, 361 U.S. 958 (1960).
Holding
Racial segregation in public transportation is illegal under the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887.
Court membership
Chief Justice Earl Warren Associate Justices Hugo Black · Felix Frankfurter William O. Douglas · Tom C. Clark John M. Harlan II · William J. Brennan Jr. Charles E. Whittaker · Potter Stewart
Case opinions
Majority	Black, joined by Warren, Frankfurter, Douglas, Harlan, Brennan, Stewart
Dissent	Whittaker, joined by Clark
Laws applied
Interstate Commerce Act of 1887

Boynton v. Virginia, 364 U.S. 454 (1960), was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court.^[1] The case overturned a judgment convicting an African American law student for trespassing by being in a restaurant in a bus terminal which was "whites only". It held that racial segregation in public transportation was illegal because such segregation violated the Interstate Commerce Act, which broadly forbade discrimination in interstate passenger transportation. It moreover held that bus transportation was sufficiently related to interstate commerce to allow the United States federal government to regulate it to forbid racial discrimination in the industry.

Thurgood Marshall argued the case for Boynton. The majority opinion was written by Justice Hugo Black.

The significance of Boynton was not located in its holding since it managed to avoid deciding any Constitutional questions in its decision, and its expansive reading of Federal powers regarding interstate commerce was also well established by the time of the decision. Its significance is that its outlawing of racial segregation in public transportation led directly to a movement called the Freedom Rides, in which African Americans and whites together rode various forms of public transportation in the South to challenge local laws or customs that enforced segregation. The Freedom Rides, and the violent reactions they provoked, prompted Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to confront the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) with its failure to enforce a bus desegregation ruling it had handed down in 1955, Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company, 64 MCC 769 (1955) as well as the companion train desegregation case, NAACP v. St. Louis-Santa Fe Railway Company, 297 ICC 335 (1955). By presenting the commission with its own rulings in a May 29, 1961, petition, Kennedy was able to prompt it to do what it had promised in 1955, five years before the Boynton ruling was handed down, and six years before the Freedom Riders set out to test Boynton across the Deep South. On September 22, 1961, the ICC issued regulations which implemented its 1955 Keys and NAACP rulings, as well as the Supreme Court's ruling in Boynton, and on November 1 those regulations went into effect, effectively ending Jim Crow in public transportation.