Owen J. Roberts

“ Under the tortured meaning now attributed to the words 'labor dispute,' no employer-merchant, manufacturer, builder, cobbler, housekeeper or whatnot-who prefers helpers of one color or class can find adequate safeguard against intolerable violations of his freedom if members of some other class, religion, race, or color demand that he give them precedence. ”

“ Petitioner, the New Negro Alliance, is a corporation composed of colored persons, organized for the mutual improvement of its members and the promotion of civic, educational, benevolent, and charitable enterprises. The individual petitioners are officers of the corporation. ”

“ The relation of employer and employees does not exist between the respondent and the petitioners or any of them. The petitioners are not engaged in any business competitive with that of the respondent, and the officers, members, or representatives of the Alliance are not engaged in the same business or occupation as the respondent or its employees. ”

“ It seems unbelievable that, in all such circumstances, Congress intended to inhibit courts from extending protection long guaranteed by law and thus, in effect, encourage mobbish interference with the individual's liberty of action. ”

“ The former deprives those courts of jurisdiction to issue an injunction against, inter alia, giving publicity to the existence of, or the facts involved in, any labor dispute, whether by advertising, speaking, patrolling, or by any other method not involving fraud or violence; against assembling peaceably to act or to organize to act in promotion of their interests in a labor dispute; against advising or notifying any person of an intention to do any of the acts specified; against agreeing with other persons to do any of the acts specified. ”

“ Design thus to promote strife, encourage trespass, and stimulate intimidation, ought not to be admitted where, as here, not plainly avowed. The ultimate result of the view now approved to the very people whom present petitioners claim to represent, it may be, is prefigured by the grievous plight of minorities in lands where the law has become a mere political instrument. ”

“ Buy Where You Can Work! No Negroes Employed Here!' for the purpose of intimidating and coercing prospective customers from entering the respondent's store until the respondent accedes to the petitioners' demands. 'Said defendants, their pickets or patrols or some of them have jostled and collided with persons in front of the said store and have physically hindered, obstructed, interfered with, delayed, molested, and harassed persons desiring to enter the place of business of the Plaintiff Corporation ”

“ One of them shows a man carrying a sandwich placard on the sidewalk and no one else within the range of the camera. In another two children are seen beside the picket; in another two adults; in the fourth, one adult entering respondent's store at a distance from the picket and without apparent interference. The answer denies all these allegations save that it admits the petitioners did, during April 4, 1936, and at no other time, cause the store at 1936 Eleventh Street N.W. to be continuously picketed by a single person carrying a placard exhibiting the words quoted by the bill ”