Knoxville, Tennessee- Forty-six years ago, a local bookstore was raided by law enforcement officers confiscating what they designated as pornography.

The resulting legal action became a landmark civil rights case.

It was 1962, and Bernard Bernstein had been practicing law only a couple years when he got a frantic call from client Robert Warner. Warner said his Gateway Bookstore in downtown Knoxville was being raided.

Bernstein rushed to the store and found several TBI agents going through the store, shelf by shelf, seizing copies of Playboy and magazines and books that would be considered tame by today’s standards.

“I heard them say one to the other, that if it has ‘sex’ in the title and it has a scantily clad female on the cover, seize it,” Bernstein said.

Warner was arrested and charged with violating the state’s pornography law.

“In the meantime, I discovered a statute which is now in vogue but wasn’t back then, called the Civil Rights Statute that was enacted at the end of the Civil War,” Bernstein said.

So he filed a suit in the United States District Court against the District Attorney General and the TBI seeking damages under Civil Rights Act. There were now two cases pending in two different courts. As expected, Warner was found guilty of pornography in the criminal court case.

“It was very difficult for a jury to withstand the argument that, ‘Don’t you want to keep your community clean and wholesome?’ like there’s something wrong with every book that has a scantily clad female on the cover or ‘sex’ in the title,” Bernstein said.

They appealed to the state Supreme Court, where Warner was acquitted, and the court found the state pornography statue unconstitutional.

In the meantime, the civil case was still pending.

“They were depriving people of their constitutional rights of freedom of expression and ability to read whatever they wished,” Bernstein said. “And so the case was set for trial before Judge Robert Taylor in District Court, and the State of Tennessee came to us, and said ‘Okay, you’ve won. We would like very much to settle this case.'”

“And a payment was made, which I’m not free to tell you about, and that was the end of the case,” Bernstein said. “I think we preserved freedom of the press and freedom of expression in the defense of Mr. Werner and the Gateway Book Store at that time.”