In Sullivan's Shadow: The Use and Abuse of Libel Law during the Long Civil Rights Struggle by Aimee Edmondson (review)

Segregationists sued frequently for libel. They sued black and white people, editors and reporters, ministers and activists, longtime state residents and socalled outside agitators. They sued for articles written, advertisements published, and words spoken. They demanded retractions and compensation for what they characterized as unwarranted damage to their reputations. But in actuality, white government officials wielded libel law to protect white supremacy and waste the time and funds of those individuals and organizations that worked to dismantle segregation and end police brutality. Segregationists pursued these ends when the law was adjudicated in their favor but continued even after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1964 in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan that public officials must show "actual malice" to prove libel (p. 4).

In In Sullivan's Shadow: The Use and Abuse of Libel Law During the Long Civil Rights Struggle, Aimee Edmondson recounts one lawsuit after another, mostly in the South but also in the North and the West, to illustrate how "these legal assaults constitute a clear historical pattern showing how white political leaders turned to libel law as a weapon for silencing all critics on the momentous issue of racial justice, not just news coverage by national and local media" (p. 2). Some cases are quite familiar to historians of journalism, First Amendment law, and the long civil rights movement. Others are less so. The strength of Edmondson's monograph, which artfully blends court documents, archival research, and secondary sources, rests in the sheer number of cases reviewed. Her numerous vignettes link local names and actions and consequences to "at least $300 million in libel actions" filed by government officials by 1964 (p. 101).

Before the Sullivan decision, white public officials sued often because they usually won. They expected to find sympathetic judges and juries in their state courts. In 1950, John Henry McCray, the editor of a black weekly in South Carolina, dared to raise doubts about the conviction of a black man sentenced to death for raping a white teenage girl. McCray interviewed the man, who said the sex was consensual. He never published the girl's name. Even so, McCray was fined $3,000 and sentenced to three years' probation. Notoriously, he was later accused of violating his probation and sentenced to five weeks on a chain gang. He had pleaded guilty because his lawyers assumed he would not receive a fair trial. In 1955, a Florida state legislator sued a state NAACP official who suggested the politician was advancing the cause of communism by proposing to abolish public schools rather than integrate them. That accusation appeared in a telegram and a letter. The activist was ordered to pay $15,000. In 1961, veteran journalist Howard K. Smith was suspended and then fired by CBS for an hour-long report that took a critical look at how officials in Birmingham, Alabama, responded to civil rights demonstrations. Officials complained the report lacked balance. CBS settled the resulting lawsuit out of court for an undisclosed amount and issued an on-air apology.

Even after Sullivan, government officials continued to file strategic lawsuits against public participation (known as SLAPPs). The trials, though, were now in federal court, where judges applied the new standard. Regardless, libel suits continued to cost defendants time and money. Edmondson examines three suits filed in 1964 and 1965 by police officers in New York and New Jersey involved in shootings. Demonstrators protested with placards that bore the officers' names and badge numbers. Not until 1969 was it "widely understood" that "criticism of a police officer in his official capacity was now protected speech" (p. 263).

Edmondson's research suggests that libel lawsuits were a more significant tactic in defending white supremacy, racial segregation, and police brutality than scholars...