The Times was a national newspaper, with a circulation of about 650,000, but its readership in the South was minuscule. On the day the ad ran in 1960, a grand total of 394 copies went to subscribers, libraries and newsstands in Alabama. Yet local journalists there spotted the ad, and a couple of the state’s newspapers published articles about it, bringing it to the attention of a wider audience — including L.B. Sullivan, a city commissioner in Montgomery. His responsibilities included overseeing Montgomery’s police force, whose behavior the “Heed Their Rising Voices” ad had condemned. On April 8, he sent an angry letter to The Times stating that the ad, which had not named him, nonetheless amounted to a personal accusation of “grave misconduct.” He demanded a retraction.
Less than two weeks later, when no retraction was forthcoming, Sullivan filed a lawsuit in a local court accusing The Times and some of the ad’s signatories of libel. He sought damages of $500,000. At the time, it was relatively easy for plaintiffs, regardless of their public stature, to prevail in such cases. Unlike in a criminal trial, in which the defendant is presumed innocent, the starting point in libel cases, based on centuries of “common law” originating in England, tended to be that what the defendant wrote was false. It was up to him to prove otherwise. A result was that “publishing criticism — even truthful criticism — of public officials was a dangerous undertaking for a newspaper,” as Barbas put it.
In the weeks after Sullivan filed his lawsuit, other Alabama officials — none of them named in the ad — followed his lead, seeking a total of roughly $3 million in damages from The Times. Such penalties posed an existential threat to the barely profitable newspaper. Sullivan and his colleagues were not trying to hold The Times accountable for minor inaccuracies. They were seeking to send a message to it and other influential news organizations: If they aggressively covered the civil rights struggle, documenting the illegal and at times violent ways that white Southerners were fighting to maintain power, they would incur catastrophic costs.
Why did Sullivan and his colleagues care what papers like The Times, with its paltry Southern readership, wrote about them? Because civil rights leaders had been relying on the national media to provoke outrage among the broader public about Southern racism, and this unwanted attention was causing trouble. More protesters were arriving from Northern cities. And through legislation and law enforcement, the federal government was taking a more muscular approach to protecting civil rights. More news coverage meant more meddling.
Sullivan was an unapologetic bigot. He campaigned for his commissionership on a hard-line anti-integration platform, and he railed against the influence of outside “agitators,” whether they were student protesters or carpetbagging Northern reporters. On more than one occasion, when mobs of Klansmen and other angry whites attacked demonstrators, Sullivan instructed the police not to intervene until the victims were sufficiently bloodied. “Providing police protection for agitators is not our policy,” he explained.