The Law: Call Her Miss

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The ponderous load of important cases facing the Supreme Court seemed to add weight to the argument advanced by the attorney general of Alabama. The nation's highest court, he said, should not bother itself with "frivolous" questions, "with an attempt to enforce social amenities and rules of etiquette."

Mary Hamilton, a Negro field secretary for the Congress of Racial Equality, felt otherwise. If there was any etiquette involved, she figured, it was Southern etiquette, the sort of "social amenity" that was really a form of discrimination. What bothered her was the traditional Southern practice of addressing all Negroes by their first names, never with the title of Mr., Mrs. or Miss. In a court of law, Mary Hamilton thought, justice should be blind to the color of her skin. And after she was arrested for taking part in an Alabama civil rights demonstration, she stuck to her belief.

"My name is Mary Hamilton," she said when she was in the witness chair and the County Solicitor addressed her as Mary. "Who were you arrested by, Mary?" repeated the solicitor. Despite the judge's admonition to answer, CORE's Mary Hamilton stubbornly refused to respond to her first name. She was fined $50 and also sentenced to five days in jail.

Mary Hamilton's case reached the Supreme Court, which wasted little time agreeing that the question she raised was far from frivolous. In an unusual shortening of standard procedure, the court not only consented to review the case of Mary Hamilton v. Alabama; it made its decision at the same time. Without even hearing oral argument, and without handing down a written opinion, the court summarily reversed the contempt conviction. With Miss Mary Hamilton concurring, the court ruled in effect that calling Negroes by their first names is a form of racial discrimination.