Reversal in Alabama

After a professional visit to Alabama in April 1960, veteran New York Times Reporter Harrison Salisbury reported that the city of Birmingham was a smoldering volcano of racial tension, "a community of fear." These and other Salisbury conclusions, published in a two-part series, outraged six Birmingham and neighboring Bessemer city commissioners (plus one police detective), who separately brought libel suits against Salisbury and the Times and asked a total of $3,100,000 in damages. Last week in New Orleans, by holding that a newspaper published in New York City could not be sued for libel in Alabama, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in effect threw all seven suits out of court.

The case never got far enough along the legal trail for the courts to consider the merits or demerits of the libel action. But in the preliminary skirmishing last summer, Kentucky-born U.S. District Court Judge Harlan Hobart Grooms ruled that the New York Times could be sued in Alabama. It was this decision that was overturned last week by the New Orleans court, which cited a 1921 Alabama Supreme Court decision stating that in newspaper libel cases in Alabama, suit can be filed only where the newspaper is published.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.