Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1970

Adickes v. S. H. Kress & Co.

398 U.S. 144 | 90 S. Ct. 1598 | 26 L. Ed. 2d 142 | 1970 U.S. LEXIS 31

Full access

Unlock the video and quiz

The written brief is free to read below. Subscribe to watch the video explainer and take the quiz.

Create an account Log in

Takeaway

In short, this case holds that a private business may face § 1983 liability when it conspires with police or acts pursuant to a state-enforced custom of racial segregation, and that a defendant seeking summary judgment must first eliminate genuine factual disputes.

Background

Sandra Adickes, a white teacher at a Mississippi Freedom School, entered a Hattiesburg Kress store with six Black students in August 1964. A waitress took the students’ orders but refused to serve Adickes because she was white and accompanied by Black people. After the group left the store, police arrested Adickes on a vagrancy charge; the students were not arrested.

Adickes sued Kress under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. She alleged both that Kress acted under a state-enforced custom of restaurant segregation and that Kress employees conspired with Hattiesburg police to deny her service and cause her arrest. The District Court granted Kress summary judgment on the conspiracy claim and later directed a verdict for Kress on the custom claim. The Second Circuit affirmed. The Supreme Court reversed and remanded for further proceedings.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether a private business may be liable under § 1983 for jointly participating with police in racial discrimination or a false arrest.

Holding

Yes. A private party acts under color of state law when it is a willful participant in joint activity with state officials.

Reasoning

Section 1983 requires a deprivation of a federal right and action under color of state law. The Equal Protection Clause forbids a State from discriminating based on a person’s race or the race of her companions, and it also forbids state action that compels or encourages segregation.

If a Kress employee and a Hattiesburg police officer reached an understanding to deny Adickes service or to have her arrested because she was a white person with Black companions, the officer’s involvement would supply the required state action. The private employee and Kress could then be liable because private persons who willfully join state officials in prohibited conduct act under color of law.

Issue #2

Whether Kress was entitled to summary judgment on Adickes’s claim of a conspiracy with Hattiesburg police.

Holding

No. Kress failed to carry its initial burden of showing that no genuine dispute of material fact existed.

Reasoning

On summary judgment, the movant must demonstrate the absence of a genuine factual dispute, and the court must draw reasonable inferences in favor of the nonmoving party. Kress relied on statements from its manager and police officers denying an arrangement to arrest Adickes, but those materials did not eliminate the possibility that an officer was in the store before service was refused.

The record permitted an inference that an officer entered the store, observed Adickes with Black students, and then arrested her shortly after the group departed. Kress did not submit affidavits from the counter supervisor or waitress that would rule out communication with an officer, and the arresting officers’ affidavits likewise did not deny being in the store or influencing the decision to refuse service.

If an officer was present in the store, a jury could infer from the ensuing sequence of events that the officer and a Kress employee had reached a meeting of the minds. Kress therefore had not foreclosed a material factual issue concerning a conspiracy.

Rule 56(e) did not require Adickes to submit counteraffidavits merely because Kress had filed affidavits. The opposing party must produce specific evidence only after the moving party has first made a sufficient showing that no genuine factual issue exists.

Issue #3

Whether a “custom or usage” under § 1983 includes an unofficial community practice unsupported by state action.

Holding

No. A custom or usage under § 1983 must have the force of law through persistent practices of state officials.

Reasoning

The Court read § 1983 against its statutory history and longstanding precedent requiring action under color of law. The statute addresses a custom or usage “of any State,” not merely a social practice shared by people who live there.

Congress included customs and usages in § 1983 to reach entrenched official practices that might not appear in written statutes but could still deny equal protection through systematic maladministration, nonenforcement, sanctions, or the withholding of benefits. Such settled governmental practices can function as state law.

A custom therefore need not be written into a statute, but it must be state-enforced or otherwise have legal force because of official conduct. A private business that knowingly follows such a state-enforced custom may be treated as a participant in joint activity with the State.

Issue #4

Whether a restaurant’s racially discriminatory refusal of service violates the Fourteenth Amendment when it is compelled by a state-enforced custom of segregation.

Holding

Yes. Adickes states a § 1983 claim if Kress refused her service because of a state-enforced custom requiring racial segregation in Hattiesburg restaurants.

Reasoning

Private discrimination alone ordinarily is not state action under the Fourteenth Amendment. But when state law commands a private actor to discriminate, the State has effectively determined the result and has become significantly involved in the discrimination.

The same principle applies when the State’s command arises from an entrenched custom with the force of law rather than from a written statute. A state-enforced custom that requires restaurant segregation makes a private proprietor’s compliance attributable to the State.

The Court did not decide whether lesser forms of state encouragement or involvement would suffice. It held only that state compulsion, whether statutory or customary, is enough to transform the private refusal into unconstitutional state action.

Issue #5

Whether Adickes had to prove a statewide practice of refusing service specifically to white persons accompanied by Black persons, enforced exclusively through Mississippi’s trespass statute.

Holding

No. The lower courts defined the relevant custom and the permissible proof too narrowly.

Reasoning

Adickes could prove state enforcement in ways other than through a trespass prosecution. For example, she might show that police used a baseless vagrancy arrest to punish her for seeking to eat with Black people, or that police intentionally tolerated threats or violence against those who violated restaurant segregation.

The relevant custom was not the unusually narrow practice of refusing service only to white patrons accompanied by Black patrons. The proper question was whether a longstanding, prevailing, state-enforced custom of racial segregation in Hattiesburg public eating places existed. That broader custom could encompass the particular refusal alleged here.

Nor did Adickes have to prove that the custom operated throughout Mississippi. A custom with the force of law in Hattiesburg, a political subdivision of the State, can violate the Fourteenth Amendment just as a discriminatory municipal ordinance can.

Concurrences

Justice Black

Reasoning

Justice Black agreed that both claims should go to a jury, but he did not join the Court’s extended analysis of the meaning of “custom or usage.” He assumed, for purposes of his opinion, that the trial court’s construction of that term was correct and concluded that Adickes was still entitled to a trial.

In his view, conspiracy is ordinarily a factual question. Summary judgment improperly substituted affidavits for live testimony, cross-examination, impeachment, and jury evaluation of credibility. Those trial protections were especially important because Adickes might need the jury to disbelieve the accounts offered by Kress and police witnesses.

Justice Black also concluded that Adickes presented enough evidence of discriminatory custom to reach the jury even under the trial court’s narrow definition. Her testimony about integrated groups being turned away and a white rabbi being beaten while with Black people provided evidence from which a jury could find such a custom.

Justice Douglas

Reasoning

Justice Douglas agreed with reversal but rejected the majority’s conclusion that a § 1983 custom must be enforced by state officials. In his view, the statute deliberately distinguishes “custom” from formal law and reaches a dominant, longstanding community practice that prescribes conduct and is backed by communal sanctions.

He maintained that Mississippi’s pervasive legal and social commitment to segregation demonstrated a custom at least as powerful as a written rule requiring restaurant segregation. The State’s many segregation laws formed the background against which the restaurant’s discrimination occurred, even though no statute expressly required segregated restaurant service.

Justice Douglas also stressed that § 1983 protects rights secured not only by the Fourteenth Amendment but by federal law and the Thirteenth Amendment, whose protection against the badges and incidents of slavery is not confined to state action. He would therefore construe the civil-rights statute broadly rather than impose a state-official-enforcement requirement that its text does not contain.

Justice Brennan

Reasoning

Justice Brennan joined the Court’s ruling that summary judgment on the conspiracy claim was improper, but he disagreed with the majority’s treatment of the custom and state-action questions. He emphasized that § 1983 has two separate requirements: a deprivation of a federally secured right and action under color of a state statute, custom, or usage. Whether state action is needed depends on the particular right asserted.

For Equal Protection purposes, he reasoned that Mississippi’s statutory policy could itself make restaurant segregation state action. Mississippi’s law authorizing proprietors to choose whom to serve, considered alongside the State’s wider segregation program, authorized and encouraged racial discrimination and offered state enforcement through trespass law. Under the Court’s sit-in precedents, a State’s policy of authorizing or encouraging segregation can taint private discrimination even without proof that the proprietor was actually motivated by the policy.

Justice Brennan would interpret action “under color of” a statute more narrowly than constitutional state action: a private proprietor must consciously act pursuant to a statute that gives support, incentive, or legitimacy to the discrimination. He would also define a § 1983 custom more broadly than the majority did, to include a widespread and enduring community practice treated as a norm and backed by official or unofficial sanctions.

Finally, Justice Brennan argued that § 1983 remedies should be developed as federal law responsive to the statute’s purposes. A plaintiff subjected to a voluntary racial denial of equal protection should recover actual damages without proving an evil motive, while punitive damages should require actual knowledge or reckless disregard of federally protected rights.