“Heed Their Rising Voices”: Annotated

On February 1, 1960, four young men, students at the historically Black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College (NCA&T), went to Woolworth’s in Greensboro and sat down at the lunch counter to order. They waited until closing, never receiving the doughnuts and coffee they came for. The next day, they returned with more students. Again, they waited until closing, without being served. The third day, there were sixty students, the fourth day, 300. Telephone networks spread the word to other cities, mobilizing students across the South in a mass movement to put their bodies on the line to desegregate public accommodations. [...] Twelve days later, the state of Alabama indicted Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. on charges of perjury (felony) and tax evasion, stemming from his roles in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Montgomery Improvement Association.

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In response to these events, a group of people met at the home of Harry Belafonte to organize what became The Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Freedom in the South, which placed a full-page advertisement in the New York Times, entitled “Heed Their Rising Voices.” The copy was written by Bayard Rustin and playwright John Murray and sought to raise money for Dr. King’s defense and bail funds for the lunch counter activists.

The ad contained some inaccuracies regarding the Montgomery city government’s response to student demonstrations, which L. B. Sullivan and other officials, although not named, seized on to bring a libel suit against The New York Times, not only to “correct the record” but also to possibly discourage the press from covering the civil rights movement for fear of being sued as well.

The jury found the newspaper guilty and fined them $500,000 (in 1963 dollars, approximately $5,000,000 today.) The Times appealed to the Supreme Court of Alabama, which upheld the decision, and then to the US Supreme Court. SCOTUS’s decision in the case, The New York Times v. Sullivan, found for the newspaper and became a landmark decision for freedom of speech regarding public officials, setting a standard requiring “actual malice” for statements to be libelous.