My book explains the strong, but not absolute, protections that U.S. courts provide to anonymous speech. Those safeguards originated from a dispute over civil rights activist Manuel Talley's March 22, 1958, distribution of handbills outside the A&D Market in Los Angeles. The handbills called for a boycott of the store, alleging that the retailer sold products from manufacturers that did not employ racial minorities.
The handbills were signed only with the name of Talley's group, National Consumers Mobilization, in violation of a Los Angeles ordinance that required handbills to include the author's real name. Talley was arrested and charged. At trial, Talley argued that the market also distributed leaflets that did not include the author's name. This argument did not persuade the judge, who convicted Talley of a misdemeanor and fined him. The California Court of Appeal affirmed the conviction, but two judges struggled to reconcile the fine with a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that blocked Alabama state officials' efforts to force the NAACP to disclose its membership lists.
