340 U.S. 315 (1951)
On the evening of March 8, 1949, Irving Feiner stood on a wooden box at the corner of South McBride and Harrison Streets in Syracuse, New York, addressing a crowd of approximately seventy-five to eighty people through a loudspeaker attached to an automobile.1
His speech urged listeners to attend a meeting later that night at the Syracuse Hotel and included derogatory remarks about President Truman, the American Legion, the Mayor of Syracuse, and other local officials.2 As the speech progressed, Feiner called for Negro people to rise up in arms and fight for equal rights, which stirred excitement in the mixed audience of white and Negro listeners.3
Police officers arrived after receiving a telephone complaint about the meeting.4 They observed the crowd filling the sidewalk and spilling into the street, forcing some pedestrians to walk in the roadway amid passing traffic.5 The officers noted the crowd's restlessness, including pushing, shoving, and milling about, along with remarks from onlookers questioning the police's ability to handle the situation and at least one threat of violence if the officers did not intervene.6
One officer approached Feiner and requested three times over four or five minutes that he stop speaking and get down from the box.7 Feiner refused each request and continued addressing the crowd, which pressed closer around him and the officer.8 After the third demand, the officer placed Feiner under arrest for disorderly conduct, at which point Feiner had been speaking for over half an hour.9
Feiner was tried without a jury in the Court of Special Sessions of the City of Syracuse, where the judge credited the prosecution witnesses and found him guilty, imposing a sentence of thirty days in the county penitentiary.10 The conviction was affirmed by the Onondaga County Court and the New York Court of Appeals.11 The United States Supreme Court granted certiorari to review the case.12
Whether the petitioner's conviction for disorderly conduct violated his right of free speech under the Fourteenth Amendment?13
When clear and present danger of riot, disorder, interference with traffic upon the public streets, or other immediate threat to public safety, peace, or order, appears, the power of the State to prevent or punish is obvious.14 The offense known as breach of the peace embraces a great variety of conduct destroying or menacing public order and tranquility.15 It includes not only violent acts but acts and words likely to produce violence in others.16
No. Applying the rule to the established facts, Feiner addressed a mixed crowd of seventy-five to eighty people that filled the sidewalk and spilled into the street, forcing pedestrians into the path of passing traffic while the crowd grew restless with pushing, shoving, and milling about.17
Onlookers questioned the officers' ability to handle the situation and at least one threatened violence if the police failed to act.18 Feiner refused three separate requests over four or five minutes to stop speaking and descend from the box, continuing instead as the crowd pressed closer around him and the officer.19 The trial judge credited the prosecution witnesses and concluded that the officers acted to prevent a breach of the peace after Feiner had spoken for over half an hour.20
These facts establish that the officers confronted an imminent threat to public order that justified the arrest and subsequent conviction.21
Related opinions on this issue
Even accepting the facts credited below, the conviction mocks the free speech guarantees of the First and Fourteenth Amendments by approving a ready technique for police supervision and censorship of street speeches.24 The police had an obligation to protect the speaker's right to talk, including by arresting the one man who threatened assault, yet they made no effort to quiet the crowd or clear a path and instead suppressed the speech after a single threat from a man accompanied by his wife and children.25 Petitioner's refusal to obey unexplained commands did not constitute deliberate defiance of official duty, as a speaker engaged in a lawful address is entitled to know why he must cease.26
Joined by Justice Minton
The record reveals no extremes of incitement to riot or fighting words that would justify penalizing the speaker.27 There was pushing and shoving along with angry muttering, but no fights and no disorder even by police standards, only the threat of one man to remove the speaker himself.28 Police have a high function to protect lawful public gatherings so that constitutional rights may be exercised.
When they instead throw their weight against the speaker and arrest him, they become censors whose actions cannot be squared with prior decisions striking down suppression of speech.29