Statement at Lawyers Advisory Committee Meeting
Author: King, Martin Luther, Jr.
Date: May 8, 1961
Location: New York, N.Y.
Genre: Speech
Topic: Martin Luther King, Jr. - Political and Social Views
Details
On 29 March 1960, a full-page ad titled “Heed Their Rising Voices” ran in the New York Times, criticizing Alabama officials who opposed the protest movement. In response, Montgomery city commissioner L. B. Sullivan, Montgomery mayor Earl James, former commissioner Clyde Sellers, and Alabama governor John Malcolm Patterson each filed libel suits against the New York Times and SCLC executive board members Ralph Abernathy, Joseph Lowery, S. S. Seay, and Fred L. Shuttlesworth.1 In the following address, King urges the Lawyers Advisory Committee (LAC), headed by New York lawyer Theodore Kheel, to give financial and legal support to the four SCLC ministers.2 Emphasizing the economic impact of the charges on the defendants, King argues that an “economic lynching has terrors not fundamentally less destructive than physical lynching.” King later acknowledged that the LAC’s formation “was a significant contribution” to the movement.3
It is not always that a case can properly be described as historic, but we are on safe ground when we declare that the implication of these cases profoundly affects the political and social interests of our nation. If these judgments are not reversed, no newspaper can publish truthful accounts of injustice without risk of bankruptcy and without hazard to its reporters of criminal indictment. If these judgments are not reversed, victims of injustice dare not express opposition to their oppressors. If these judgments are not reversed, the supporters of those seeking social advancement dare not act, nor reveal their sympathy, lest they be sued in tribunals where due process is elusive but power is almost unlimited. These cases are a classic example of tyranny over the minds and tongues of men making a nullity of the First Amendment to the Constitution.
It may be asked why authorities in the State of Alabama have acted with such unrestrained recklessness. In general this conduct is a part of their determined refusal to permit those social changes which emancipation of the Negro requires. More particularly, it reflects the counter-offensive of Alabama political rulers to reverse some of the progress attained in integration. Following the successful integration of buses in Montgomery, a new spirit of dignity and independence was felt in the heart of every Negro.4 This small beginning was too much for the recalcitrant segregationist to accept. When, therefore, the students sought to integrate lunch counters, there was unleashed against them and the Negro community as a whole a reign of terror backed by a military display of force which would have been appropriate to combat an armed invasion by a foreign enemy. We were not secure even in our churches. Armed police were posted outside, and in one case a platoon invaded a church to disrupt a meeting in progress there.5 In this context it can be understood how furious rage would result when an advertisement describing these conditions, and in strong terms denouncing them, was published in THE NEW YORK TIMES. That Negroes and their supporters should dare to speak out boldly and clearly profoundly shocked the segregationists. They were long accustomed to our submissive silence in the face of oppression. The Declaration of Independence could not have outraged the imperial sensibilities of King George more than this.6 Such privileges of free expression are reserved for free men, and the Negro of the south was forgetting that he was not free. But physical intimidation can be sustained only for a limited period. Other complementary methods are required for long term effect.
Brutality and intimidation can wear many disguises. They need not openly be flaunted, as in Mississippi, by setting police dogs trained in viciousness on human beings, nor need they be expressed only by the howling lynch mob.7 These have the disadvantages that the sense of decency and justice of the American people can in revulsion turn upon the perpetrators. So a more subtle form of attack needed to be designed. In this sense the misuse of legal process is a new and potent weapon in the arsenal of the segregationists. It is a sword with two cutting edges. It not only deprives the victim of his economic security, but it undermines his confidence in law as he finds himself led through all the processes of a juridical system traditionally designed to insure justice, but which for him is perverted to accomplish oppression and injustice. That ours is a government of laws not men becomes a bitter mockery when it is not only men who can misrule but the law itself.
The effect of accumulating millions of dollars in judgments against leaders in an integration struggle goes far beyond those directly involved. Every Negro senses the threat to his own security and his own dignity, when he witnesses his leaders stripped of their means of transportation, small parcels of land, and the garnishment of their salaries.8 When the line between poverty and subsistence is paper thin, an economic lynching has terrors not fundamentally less destructive than physical lynching.
When I speak of the thin line separating so many of us from poverty, I do not exclude most of the defendants in these cases. They are ordained ministers; all but one are college trained. Yet none has a salary of as much as $100 a week. Reverend Seay is paid $50 a week; Rev. Abernathy $75 a week; and Rev. Shuttlesworth $70 a week. These are the men against whom 2–1/2 millions of dollars in judgments are sought.9 But even beyond this, contemplate this fact: the Negro parishioners in most of our churches who are expected to carry financial burden of lawsuits, suffrage campaigns and organizations to achieve school and public facility desegregation, earn between $12 and $15 per week. When so little separates a family from literal hunger, a massive economic threat can have a paralyzing effect.
If we, in struggling for our most elementary rights, find ourselves also defending the integrity of the Constitution for all Americans, we are, I feel, justified in asking for support not only because it is a common fight but because we have so little in financial resources for so great a struggle.
May I point out with pride that at no point in the conflicts of recent years, despite the most brutal periods of terror and intimidation, were we lacking in people to take any action required. There were always Negroes of courage to squarely face the mobs seeking to keep our children out of schools. There were always Negro students to sit at lunch counters. There were always Negroes to march to the State Capitols for redress of grievances. And always the Negroes adhered with iron discipline to non-violence. We will not sully our struggle by answering violence with violence nor hatred with hatred. But we cannot be complacent and rely upon inexhaustible courage. History teaches us that a people can at least temporarily be beaten into passivity and retreat.
Because we know we are in times that try men’s souls, because we are living hundreds of Valley Forges across the south, we need your help to move out of the midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, into that society of Brotherhood which the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution designed but which is still on the road ahead, for us.10
1. The Alabama officials each sued the ministers and the Times for $500,000. The suits were eventually resolved in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964). For more on the libel case, see Introduction and facsimile of the ad in Papers 5:25–26, 382, respectively.
2. Theodore Woodrow Kheel (1914–2010), a former president of the National Urban League and an arbitrator in New York labor disputes, organized the eighteen-member LAC in May 1961 to fight this “flagrant abuse of legal and judicial process for purposes other than those for which a legitimate civil action in libel was designed” (Kheel to William Hammatt Davis, 27 April 1961). Other members of the committee included Judge Hubert T. Delany and lawyer Lloyd K. Garrison (LAC, Press release, “Lawyers committee formed to assist defense in Alabama libel actions,” 8 May 1961).
3. King to Kheel, 11 December 1961.
4. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Gayle v. Browder, 352 U.S. 903 (1956) that Alabama’s laws requiring segregated public transportation were unconstitutional.
5. In March 1960, King wrote a telegram to President Dwight D. Eisenhower protesting a Montgomery police assault on the Alabama State College campus that halted demonstrations and interfered with religious services (King to Eisenhower, 9 March 1960, in Papers 5:385–387).
6. The Declaration of Independence blamed King George III for tensions between America and Great Britain. On 23 August 1775 the King had declared the colonies in rebellion and refused to accept the Second Continental Congress’s “Olive Branch Petition” for peace, which would have granted the colonists’ rights while promising loyalty to the King.
7. King refers to a 29 March 1961 demonstration outside the courthouse in Jackson, Mississippi, where students were chased by dogs and club-wielding police officers as they protested the trials of demonstrators arrested for a previous sit-in (“Dogs, Clubs Used on Negroes; Ask Whites to Leave,” Atlanta Daily World, 30 March 1961).
8. Seay, one of four ministers being sued for libel, wrote an urgent plea for financial aid to Stanley D. Levison, noting that his property was set to be sold a few weeks later (Seay to Levison, 9 April 1961). The four ministers attempted to obtain a federal injunction to stop the state from repossessing their property, but district court judge Frank M. Johnson dismissed the complaint because the issue was pending in the state court (“Federal Court Rejects Petition in Libel Case,” Birmingham News, 17 March 1961).
9. On 27 March 1961 Clyde Sellers filed his own $500,000 claim after Sullivan and James had already won favorable verdicts (“Another Libel Action Filed against Times,” Birmingham News, 28 March 1961).
10. King refers to the statement in “The American Crisis,” Thomas Paine’s 1776 Revolutionary War pamphlet: “These are the times that try men’s souls.”
Source: WHDP-WHi, William Hammatt Davis Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis.