Hamilton v. Alabama

March 30, 1964

Supreme Court of the United States · decided 1964-03-30

Hamilton v. Alabama, 376 U.S. 650 (1964), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the court held that an African American woman, Mary Hamilton, was entitled to the same courteous forms of address customarily reserved solely for whites in the Southern United States, and that calling a black person by their first name in a formal context was "a form of racial discrimination".

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Relies on In the Matters of Lee Roy Murchison and John Whites · In re Oliver · Offutt v. United States

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Reversed · 6–3 · Decided 1964-03-30

How this case has been cited

Cited by 80 later decisions (6 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2011 · most notably Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co. (1968), Bell v. State of Maryland (1964)

31 federal appellate · 27 state decisions

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

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Jack Greenberg, James M. Nabrit III and Oscar W. Adams, Jr., for petitioner.

Richmond M. Flowers, Atty. Gen. of Alabama, and Bernard F. Sykes and Owen Bridges, Asst. Attys. Gen., for respondent.

¶1

PER CRIAM.

¶2

On Petition for Writ of Certiorari to the Supreme Court of Alabama.

¶3

The petition for writ of certiorari is granted. The judgment is reversed. Johnson v. Virginia, 373 U.S. 61, 83 S.Ct. 1053, 10 L.Ed.2d 195.

¶4

Mr. Justice BLACK concurs in rever al of the judgment of contempt for reasons discussed in In re Murchison, 349 U.S. 133, 75 S.Ct. 623, 99 L.Ed. 942; In re Oliver, 333 U.S. 257, 68 S.Ct. 499, 92 L.Ed. 682, and Thompson v. City of Louisville, 362 U.S. 199, 80 S.Ct. 624, 4 L.Ed.2d 654. Cf. Offutt v. United States, 348 U.S. 11, 75 S.Ct. 11, 99 L.Ed. 11.

¶5

Mr. Justice CLARK, Mr. Justice HARLAN and Mr. Justice WHITE are of the opinion that certiorari should be denied.