No Key for Anarchy

"We will not be fully free until we smash the state completely and totally," cried William Epton in a street-corner harangue on the first night of the 1964 Harlem riots. Later that evening he added: "In that process, we're going to have to kill a lot of these cops, a lot of these judges, and we'll have to go up against their army." A onetime Communist who thought that the Party was too restrained and resigned to help organize the Peking-oriented Progressive Labor Movement, Epton was arrested and eventually convicted in a New York court of conspiring to riot and of advocating and conspiring to advocate criminal anarchy.

He drew concurrent one-year sentences on each of the three counts, and he appealed to the Supreme Court.

Many lawyers saw the case as a chance for the court to tell more about how far agitators can go in potential riot situations before the First Amendment free-speech guarantee fades into the shouting-fire-in-a-crowded-theater category. But the court ducked the chance, choosing instead to dismiss Epton's appeal in an unsigned order. The order might be interpreted as meaning that such haranguing can very easily become criminal and that the Rap Browns can be prosecuted without constitutional objection. But it might not. For in cases involving concurrent sentences, the court has traditionally allowed all the convictions to stand if just one is deemed correct. In Epton's case, the court may simply have been satisfied with the conviction for conspiring to riot. If that is so, the justices may never have actually reached the issue of anarchy.

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