This past week an Ohio jury delivered an enormous verdict of $44.4 million against Oberlin College for the massive abuses that it and its students inflicted on Gibson’s Bakery, a small, family-owned business that has long operated in Oberlin, Ohio. The jury verdict required Oberlin to pay over $11 million in actual damages to Gibson’s and its owners. On top of that, the jury awarded punitive damages of $33 million, which, under Ohio law, will most likely be reduced to roughly $22 million, or double the actual damages awarded. And finally, the judge instructed the jury to award Gibson’s between $5 and $10 million in attorney’s fees. These numbers are no surprise in light of the seriousness of the charges of defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, trade libel, and more made by the College against the bakery.

The jury verdict in this case is instructive because it illustrates the massive transformation—all for the worse—in the civil rights movement over the past sixty years. When I was a college student, the Supreme Court waded into the law of defamation in a suit brought by L.B. Sullivan, an elected Commissioner of Montgomery County, Alabama, against the New York Times. The Times had published an advertisement—Heed their Rising Voices—which documented violent attacks on student groups in Orangeburg, South Carolina, Montgomery, Alabama, and elsewhere. The letter was signed by sixty-four leading civil rights leaders, all intent on exposing the systematic evils of segregation. They urged contributions to support the work of Dr. Martin Luther King. The statements about Montgomery talked about “truckloads of police armed with shot guns and tear-gas ringed the Alabama State College Campus.” No mention was made of Sullivan by name or by his office. Nonetheless, he claimed that the advertisement defamed him personally, given that there were some factual inaccuracies in the account.