Four of the eight defendants—Margaret Papachristou, Betty Calloway, Eugene Eddie Melton, and Leonard Johnson—were charged with "prowling by auto" under the Jacksonville vagrancy ordinance. Papachristou and Calloway were white women; Melton and Johnson, black men. At the time of their arrest, which was early on a Sunday morning, they were driving in Calloway's car in Jacksonville. The arresting officers denied that the racial makeup of the car's passengers was a factor in the arrest; rather, the officers claimed that they arrested the defendants because they had stopped near a used-car lot that had been broken into several times. The morning they were arrested, however, there had been no evidence of breaking and entering. Shortly after the defendants' arrest, someone from the police department had called Papachristou's parents and told them she had "been out with a negro."