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The Civil Rights Movement : The New York Times Newspaper Company

Decent Essays

In 1960 the Civil Rights Movement was beginning to gain a lot strength. Many civil rights leaders put a full-page ad in the New York Times newspaper company. The ad was to raise money to help civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr. There were sixty popular
Americans who signed it. The ad put in the paper was describing how “ an unprecedented wave of terror” was rising with police actions against peaceful demonstrators in Montgomery,
Alabama. The ad was mostly accurate, but a few of the charges in it were not true. An example is that the ad said police “ringed” a college campus where many protesters were, but this charge was completely exaggerated. The ad also read the false statement: “When the entire student body
protested …show more content…

The background to New York Times v. Sullivan is pretty complex and has a lot to it. The city of Montgomery, Alabama, was already considered to be in civic stress when The New York
Times published an ad by the name of “Heed Their Rising Voices” on March 29, 1960. February
25, about 35 students from the Alabama State College, which was an all-black school, were buying food in a snack bar in the basement of the Montgomery County Courthouse. They were taken into custody and arrested. The day after the arrest Governor John Patterson, who was once the officio chairman for the state board of education, demanded for the expulsion of the African
American students from the public college. Two days after the expulsion almost all of the 800 students that attended Alabama State marched to the state capitol to protest against Patterson’s actions with the students. While state and Montgomery police stood by, members of the Ku Klux
Klan wielding baseball bats assaulted the students of the college. The attack was unpunished even though the Montgomery Advertiser produced and printed pictures of the incident, with several clearly identified members. (Urofsky pg. 2)
Bayard Rustin, A. Phillip Randolph, and Harry Emerson Fosdick were

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