Civil rights attorney Solomon Seay dies at age 81
https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/news/2015/09/11/civil-rights-attorney-solomon-seay-dies-age/72101862/
In 1957, when he opened his law office, Seay filed a class-action suit against the city of Montgomery after a young man was beaten and arrested for walking through the segregated Oak Park. Instead of desegregating city parks, the city closed them.
Seay Jr. and Gray represented four African-American ministers including his father, the Rev. Solomon Seay Sr., Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth and Joseph Lowery in the precedent-setting freedom-of-the-press case The New York Times v. Sullivan.
He was also an attorney in the precedent-setting 1963 case Lee vs. Macon County Board of Education, which initially sought to integrate the all-white Tuskegee High School. Ultimately the case was expanded to include virtually all Alabama’s public schools and universities, and was later used as the precedent for school desegregation plans throughout the country.
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/seay-solomon-snowden-sr
In his memoir, Stride Toward Freedom, Martin Luther King described Solomon Seay as one of the few African American clergymen who, in the years before the Montgomery bus boycott, denounced injustice and encouraged blacks to have greater confidence in themselves. Seay observed King’s unique contribution to the movement, stating: “He’s a Ph.D. with common sense and humility, and not many people have both” (Ferron, 1 March 1956).
Seay was born 25 January 1899, in Macon County, Alabama, to Hagger Warren Seay and Isaac Seay, a railroad tie cutter. He studied at Alabama State College and Talladega College, and began his ministry in 1916. Seay preached at several AME Zion churches in the South before becoming pastor at Mount Zion AME Zion Church in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1947.
As one of the central pastors working to sustain the Montgomery bus boycott, Seay served on the executive board and the negotiating committee of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). He believed in social change through nonviolence grounded in Christian principles, proclaiming at one mass meeting that “with love in our hearts and God on our side, there are no forces in hell or on earth that can mow us down” (Ferron, 1 March 1956). He called the MIA his “dream organization—one that would really champion the cause of the forgotten masses of our group,” and wrote in a letter to MIA board members, “We have, voluntarily or involuntarily, been catapulted into a position of responsibility in the world’s struggle for human rights and justice” (Seay, 2 April 1958; Seay, 1957).
Seay continued his involvement in civil rights issues after the boycott came to an end. In 1961 Seay’s house served as a safe haven for freedom riders beaten by violent mobs in Montgomery. Seay was also one of four pastors sued for libel in the New York Times Co. v. Sullivan case. The subsequent trial continued for years before the U.S. Supreme Court finally ruled in the pastors’ favor in 1964.
Whenever you hear Trump saying something about wanting to "reform libel laws", that case is the one he is talking about, incidentally. It is also the case that was the principle hurdle that the plaintiff would have needed to get over in the Dominion lawsuit. It remains the gold standard for requiring proof of "actual malice" in libel suits involving public figures.
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