Forsyth County, Georgia v. the Nationalist Movement (505 U.S. 123)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided June 19, 1992 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 505 U.S. 123 · 112 S. Ct. 2395
- Decided
- June 19, 1992
- Term
- October Term 1991
- Vote
- 5–4
- Majority author
- Justice Blackmun
- Issue area
- First Amendment
- Disposition
- Affirmed
- Outcome
- Petitioning party lost
- Ideological direction
- Liberal
- Constitutional ruling
- Local ordinance held unconstitutional
Opinion excerpt
Justice Blackmun delivered the opinion of the Court. In this case, with its emotional overtones, we must decide whether the free speech guarantees of the First and Fourteenth Amendments are violated by an assembly and parade ordinance that permits a government administrator to vary the fee for assembling or parading to reflect the estimated cost of maintaining public order. H-C Petitioner Forsyth County is a primarily rural Georgia county approximately 30 miles northeast of Atlanta. It has had a troubled racial history. In 1912, in one month, its entire African-American population, over 1,000 citizens, was driven systematically from the county in the wake of the rape and murder of a white woman and the lynching of her accused assailant. Seventy-five years later, in 1987, the county population remained 99% white. Spurred by this history, Hosea Williams, an Atlanta city councilman and civil rights personality, proposed a Forsyth County “March Against Fear and Intimidation” for January 17, 1987. Approximately 90 civil rights demonstrators attempted to parade in Cumming, the county seat. The marchers were met by members of the Forsyth County Defense League (an independent affiliate of respondent, The Nationalist Movement), of the Ku Klux Klan, and other Cumming residents. In all, some 400 counterdemonstrators lined the parade route, shouting racial slurs. Eventually, the…
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