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Prowling by Auto
"I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking."
Henry D. Thoreau |
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Papachristou
v.
City of Jacksonville
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Prowling by Auto
Justice Douglas Opinion
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February 24, 1972
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Excerpt:
This case involves eight defendants who were convicted in a Florida
municipal court of violating a Jacksonville, Florida, vagrancy
ordinance.
...Papachristou and Calloway are white
females. Melton and Johnson are black males. Papachristou was
enrolled in a job-training program sponsored by the state employment
service at Florida Junior College in Jacksonville. She was the owner
of the automobile in which the four defendants were arrested. Melton
was a Vietnam War veteran who had been released from the Navy after
nine months in a veterans' hospital. On the date of his arrest he was
a part-time computer helper while attending college as a full-time
student in Jacksonville. Johnson was a tow-motor operator in a grocery
chain warehouse and was a lifelong resident of Jacksonville.
At the time of their arrest the four of them were riding in
Calloway's car on the main thoroughfare in Jacksonville. They had left
a restaurant owned by Johnson's uncle where they had eaten and were on
their way to a nightclub. The arresting officers denied that the
racial mixture in the car played any part in the decision to make the
arrest. The arrest, they said, was made because the defendants had
stopped near a used-car lot which had been broken into several times.
there was, however, no evidence of any breaking and entering on the
night in question.
...Walkers and strollers and wanderers may be going to or coming from a
burglary. Loafers or loiterers may be "casing" a place for a holdup.
Letting one's wife support him is an intra-family matter, and normally
of no concern to the police. Yet it may, of course, be the setting for
numerous crimes.
The difficulty is that these activities are historically part of the amenities of life as we have known them. They are not mentioned in the Constitution or in the Bill of Rights. These unwritten amenities have been in part responsible for giving our people the feeling of independence and self-confidence, the feeling of creativity. These amenities have dignified the right of dissent and have honored the right to be nonconformists and the right to defy submissiveness. They have encouraged lives of high spirits rather than hushed, suffocating silence.
They are embedded in Walt Whitman's writings, especially in his "Song of the Open Road." They are reflected, too, in the spirit of Vachel Lindsay's "I Want to Go Wandering" and by Henry D. Thoreau.
Text Excerpt:
"Walking," Henry David Thoreau
I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks -- who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la 'Sainte Terre'," to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from 'sans terre' without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering.
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