1964 | A Libel Suit Yields a Vigorous Defense of Free Speech

It may surprise some readers that Sarah Palin’s defamation lawsuit against The New York Times involves an editorial, not a news article.

But libel cases can arise in surprising places. As a matter of fact, the most consequential libel case in contemporary American history, The New York Times Company v. L. B. Sullivan, was not fought over a news article or an editorial or anything else prepared by our staff.

No. The center of the storm was an advertisement — “Heed Their Rising Voices” — that was published on Page 25 of The Times on March 29, 1960. It was placed by the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Freedom in the South, whose leadership included Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph.

Thousands of black students demonstrating nonviolently in the South for their basic human rights were “being met by an unprecedented wave of terror,” the advertisement declared. It made serious charges against law-enforcement authorities generally and called out police actions in Montgomery, Ala., among other places. A number of what appeared to be factual assertions in the ad turned out to be false.

L. B. Sullivan, an elected commissioner in Montgomery who supervised the police department, sued The Times for defamation, even though he was not named in the advertisement. He sought $500,000 in damages, an amount equivalent to about $4 million today.

The lawsuit arose, his lawyers said, “because of a wilful, deliberate and reckless attempt to portray in a full-page newspaper advertisement, for which the Times charged and was paid almost $5,000, rampant, vicious, terroristic and criminal police action in Montgomery, Alabama, to a nationwide public of 650,000.”

Mr. Sullivan won his case in the Alabama courts but the matter wound up at the Supreme Court, where The Times — and the free press generally — won a stunning victory in 1964.

“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 liberal Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote for the majority, which included Chief Justice Earl Warren.

“The present advertisement, as an expression of grievance and protest on one of the major public issues of our time, would seem clearly to qualify for the constitutional protection,” he continued. “The question is whether it forfeits that protection by the falsity of some of its factual statements and by its alleged defamation of respondent.”

“Authoritative interpretations of the First Amendment guarantees have consistently refused to recognize an exception for any test of truth, whether administered by judges, juries or administrative officials — and especially not one that puts the burden of providing truth on the speaker.”

Justice Brennan noted that “there is evidence that The Times published the advertisement without checking its accuracy against the news stories in The Times’s own files.”

But he went on to say, “We think the evidence against The Times supports at most a finding of negligence in failing to discover the misstatements, and is constitutionally insufficient to show the recklessness that is required for a finding of actual malice.”

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the publisher of The Times, welcomed the decision. “The opinion of the Court makes freedom of the press more secure than ever before,” he said.

He might well have said so. “Heed Their Rising Voices” may have paid greater dividends than any advertisement The Times has ever run.