Dawson v. Mayor and City Council of Baltimore City

• Decision Date: 14 March 1955
• Docket Number: 6904.,No. 6903,6903
• Citation: Dawson v. Mayor and City Council of Baltimore City, 220 F.2d 386 (4th Cir. 1955)
• Parties: Robert M. DAWSON, Jr., et al., Appellants, v. MAYOR AND CITY COUNCIL OF BALTIMORE CITY, James C. Anderson, President, et al., Appellees. Milton LONESOME et al., Appellants, v. R. Brooke MAXWELL, Chairman, Bernard I. Gonder, H. Lee Hoffman, Sr., J. Miles Lankford, J. Wilson Lord, constituting the Commissioners of Forests and Parks of Maryland, et al., Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fourth Circuit

220 F.2d 386 (1955)

Robert M. DAWSON, Jr., et al., Appellants, v. MAYOR AND CITY COUNCIL OF BALTIMORE CITY, James C. Anderson, President, et al., Appellees.

Milton LONESOME et al., Appellants, v. R. Brooke MAXWELL, Chairman, Bernard I. Gonder, H. Lee Hoffman, Sr., J. Miles Lankford, J. Wilson Lord, constituting the Commissioners of Forests and Parks of Maryland, et al., Appellees.

Nos. 6903, 6904.

United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit.

Argued January 11, 1955.

Decided March 14, 1955.

Robert L. Carter, New York City (Linwood Koger, Jr., Tucker R. Dearing, Baltimore, Md., Jack Greenberg and Thurgood Marshall, New York City, on the brief), for appellants.

Francis X. Gallagher, Asst. City Sol., Baltimore, Md., and W. Giles Parker, Asst. Atty. Gen., of Maryland (Thomas N. Biddison, City Sol., Edwin Harlan, Deputy City Sol., Hugo Ricciuti, Asst. City Sol., Baltimore, Md., and C. Ferdinand Sybert, Atty. Gen., of Maryland, on the brief), for appellees.

Before PARKER, Chief Judge, and SOPER and DOBIE, Circuit Judges.

PER CURIAM.

These appeals were taken from orders of the District Court dismissing actions brought by Negro citizens to obtain declaratory judgments and injunctive relief against the enforcement of racial segregation in the enjoyment of public beaches and bathhouses maintained by the public authorities of the State of Maryland and the City of Baltimore at or near that city. Notwithstanding prior decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States striking down the practice of segregation of the races in certain fields, the District Judge, as shown by his opinion, 123 F.Supp. 193, did not feel free to disregard the decision of the Court of Appeals of Maryland in Durkee v. Murphy, 181 Md. 259, 29 A.2d 253, and the decision of this court in Boyer v. Garrett, 4 Cir., 183 F.2d 582. Both of these cases are directly in point since they related to the field of public recreation and held, on the authority of Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 16 S.Ct. 1138, 41 L.Ed. 256, that segregation of the races in athletic activities in public parks or playgrounds did not violate the 14th Amendment if substantially equal facilities and services were furnished both races.

Our view is that the authority of these cases was swept away by the subsequent decisions of the Supreme Court. In McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, 339 U.S. 637, 70 S.Ct. 851, 94 L.Ed. 1149, the Supreme Court had held that it was a denial of the equal protection guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment for a state to segregate on the ground of race a student who had been admitted to an institution of higher learning. In Henderson v. United States, 339 U.S. 816, 70 S.Ct. 843, 94 L.Ed. 1302, segregation on the ground of race in railway dining cars had been held to be an unreasonable regulation violative of the provisions of the Interstate Commerce Act, 49 U.S.C.A. § 1 et seq. Subsequently, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S.Ct. 686, 98 L.Ed. 873, segregation of white and colored children in the public schools of the state was held to be a denial of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment; and in Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497, 74 S.Ct. 693, 98 L.Ed. 884, segregation in the public schools of the District of Columbia was held to be violative of the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment. In these cases, the "separate but equal" doctrine adopted in Plessy v. Ferguson 163 U.S. 537, 16 S.Ct. 1144 was held to have no place in modern public education.

The combined effect of these decisions of the Supreme Court is to destroy the basis of the decision of the Court of Appeals of Maryland in Durkee v. Murphy, and the decision of this court in Boyer v. Garrett. The Court of Appeals of Maryland based its decision in Durkee v. Murphy on the theory that the segregation of the races in the public parks of Baltimore was within the power of the Board of Park Commissioners of the City to make rules for the preservation of order within the parks; and it was said that the separation of the races was...