Libel and Freedom of Speech: New York Times Co. V. Sullivan

In History on Trial, an account of how she fought and defeated David Irving’s libel suit, Deborah Lipstadt describes her surprise she discovered that British libel law “presumes defamatory words to be untrue until the author proves them true.  In order to avoid conviction for libel in a British courtroom, the author must prove that the statements s/he made were true in every respect.  Deborah’s surprise reflects how much we take our First Amendment right to make honest mistakes for granted.  And yet we have had this right for a mere forty-four years.

Until March 9, 1964 American libel laws were virtually indistinguishable for the British.  In 1964, “freedom of the press” in the United States meant what it still means in the UK “freedom from prior restraint”.  All that changed—or started to change—with the Supreme Court’s verdict in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan.

The Case

It is traditional to say that New York Times Co. v. Sullivan started with a political advertisement on Dr. King’s behalf.  But in my opinion, it started much earlier; I think it started with a deeply-felt resentment in much of the South about how people who didn’t understand the South and who were keeping “their” African-Americans in inner cities where White people simply didn’t go, came to the South to agitate and (worse) to judge.  The New York Times newspaper was seen as the epitome of that Northern hypocritical meddling.  All this, long before John Murray, on behalf of the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Freedom in the South, reserved space for a full-page ad to raise money to defend Dr. King against the charge that he had committed perjury when he signed his 1956 and 1958 tax returns.

Among other things, the ad (http://faculty-web.at.northwestern.edu/commstud/freespeech/cont/cases/nytsullivan1.html) claimed that:

• Dr. King had been arrested seven times (he had been arrested four times);
• “After students sang ‘My Country, ‘Tis of Thee’ on the State Capitol steps, their leaders were expelled from school”( The students had actually sang the Star Spangled Banner and were expelled not after that but after attempting to be served in the Montgomery Court House)
• “Truckloads of police armed with shotguns and tear-gas ringed the Alabama State College Campus” (The police never “ringed” the school; they were deployed around the school in very large numbers); and
• When the entire student body protested to the state authorities, their dining hall was padlocked” (This never happened at all)

Commissioner L.B. Sullivan sued the New York Times for libel because, as police commissioner, he said that by mentioning the police (of which he was in charge) and doing so erroneously, the New York Times libeled him.  It took the Alabama jury a little over two hours to return a guilty verdict against the New York Times and to award Sullivan $500,000.  Other libel suits swiftly followed.  By the time the case was heard in the Supreme Court, the New York Times was being sued for over five million dollars and CBS was being sued for over one million dollars.