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the media reporting the sometimes stirring and often ugly
scenes of the civil rights movement, would it have progressed
as it did? Some think not. But Southern officials’ attempts
to suppress those images and send the national press packing
failed, because of a landmark libel case that arose from the
civil rights movement.
Journalists and lawyers study the case, but
most people know little about New York Times v. Sullivan .
But it is as important a case for basic civil freedoms as
any other and we celebrate its 40th anniversary in 2004.
“New York Times v. Sullivan was not
just a victory for the First Amendment; it was a victory for
all civil rights. That’s what it’s all about.
Free speech, free press are fundamental to all freedom,”
legal scholar Ellen K. Solender has written. “If the
national press could not safely report the activities of officials
who were engaged in practices which denied blacks their basic
civil rights, these wrongs might not have been corrected.”
What did a Southern official’s libel
case against a New York newspaper have to do with the future
of news coverage of the struggle for civil rights? American
law, following centuries of British common law, recognizes
that an individual’s reputation is precious. If a person
has been wrongfully defamed, the person seeks redress from
the courts, who may demand that the libeler pay money to the
libeled so that the victim may “be made whole again.”
But L.B. Sullivan and others who resisted the efforts to desegregate
the South were using the law of libel as a political weapon.
“If one could not stop the marches, one might at least
keep the marches off television and out of the newspapers,”
legal scholar Rodney Smolla wrote in Suing the Press.
They tried—and nearly succeeded—in
getting the national media to pack up their notebooks and
cameras and head home.
“No strategy for squelching the media’s portrayal
of conditions in the South, however, carried more potential
for success than the creative use of the law of libel,”
wrote Smolla. “Certainly, jury after jury could be counted
upon to deliver gigantic verdicts against the likes of the
New York Times. No national media outlet could endure a succession
of such verdicts, mounting up to millions of dollars of liability.”
The case began in 1960 when the Times published
a full-page advertisement purchased by The Committee To Defend
Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Freedom in the South.
“Heed Their Rising Voices,” the ad’s bold
headline declared. “As the whole world knows by now,
thousands of Southern Negro students are engaged in widespread
non-violent demonstrations in positive affirmation of the
right to live in human dignity as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution
and the Bill of Rights. In their efforts to uphold these guarantees,
they are being met by an unprecedented wave of terror by those
who would deny and negate that document…. Again and
again the Southern violators have answered Dr. King’s
peaceful protests with intimidation and violence.”
The ad contained several minor errors. For
example, the students at one demonstration had sung “The
Star Spangled Banner,” not “My Country, ‘Tis
of Thee.” Their dining hall had not been padlocked to
“starve them into submission.” Dr. King had been
arrested four times, not seven. And he could get seven years
for perjury, not 10. Sullivan sued the newspaper for libel,
even though he was not named in the ad.
The Times didn’t have a chance in the
Montgomery court room. The jury of 12 white men decided that
the ad had damaged Sullivan’s reputation to the tune
of $500,000. The newspaper appealed to the Alabama Supreme
Court, which affirmed the decision. Had the Times given up
then, or had the U.S. Supreme Court not accepted the case,
history may have turned out differently. The Times, itself,
may not have survived, because other plaintiffs were waiting
in the wings to collect millions of dollars for the same advertisement.
They weren’t identified in the ad, but neither was Sullivan.
And this was the tip of the iceberg, because the television
media were also being sued by Southern officials for their
stories about the civil rights movement. What would have happened
without the media or if the media had become suddenly shy
about including in their news casts and on their front pages
the harsh and heart-breaking scenes their reporters witnessed?
“The movement needed the New
York Times, “ wrote Smolla. “It needed the infant
news broadcasts of CBS, NBC, and ABC, it needed the constant,
virile, unsuppressed attention of a national press, in order
to appeal to a national conscience.”
Justice William Brennan, writing for the U.S. Supreme Court,
set the tone for the case at its onset when he stated: “Thus
we consider this case against the background of a profound
national commitment to the principle that debate on public
issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that
it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly
sharp attacks on government and public officials.” The
civil rights advertisement before the court, the justice continued,
was “an expression of grievance and protest on one of
the major public issues of our time” and “would
seem clearly to qualify for the constitutional protection,”
meaning the First Amendment guarantees of free speech and
press. But the question was whether the ad forfeits that constitutional
protection because some of the statements in it were false
and because it may have damaged a man’s reputation.
The Supreme Court, in reversing the Alabama courts, did not
think Sullivan was even identified by the ad, but, more importantly,
decided that public officials such as Sullivan should not
so easily be able to win libel cases against citizens who
criticize them in their official capacities. To ensure that
a “wide-open, robust debate” may not be dampened,
public officials must prove “actual malice,” the
Court ruled. This means Sullivan would have to prove the Times
knowingly or recklessly published lies about Sullivan in its
pages. This is difficult hurdle for public officials to leap.
As a result of this case, public officials lost a major tool
for press censorship. In subsequent cases, the Supreme Court
has extended the “Sullivan Rule” to public figures—powerful
individuals who have great influence over the outcome of public
affairs. This provides for a free flow of information and
ideas to help citizens in a democracy reach informed decisions.
In the realm of debate about religion or
politics, “sharp differences arise,” Brennan wrote
in the Sullivan opinion. To persuade others to their point
of view, people sometimes resort to exaggeration, vilification
and even to false statements. These errors are “inevitable
in free debate” and “must be protected if the
freedoms of expression are to have the ‘breathing space’
they need to survive.”
Anthony Lewis, wrote in Make No Law, his
well-regarded book about the impact of Sullivan case, “No
one could have guessed then that ‘Heed Their Rising
Voices’ would set off a profound struggle on an issue
other than that of racial justice. No one could have guessed
that the advertisement would test the right of Americans to
speak and write freely about the state of their society. No
one could have guessed that it would become a landmark of
freedom. But that is what happened.”
Sources:
New York Times v. Sullivan (376 U.S. 254)
Anthony Lewis, Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First
Amendment (Random House, 1991).
Rodney A. Smolla, Suing the Press: Libel, the Media and Power
(Oxford University Press, 1986).
Ellen K. Sollender, “What If” in Communications
Lawyer (Summer, 1984).
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