Supreme Court Establishes Right of Freedom of Association
The Supreme Court on this day established a right of freedom of association under the First Amendment.
The case involved a 1956 Alabama law requiring private membership organizations to disclose their membership lists. The law was primarily directed at the NAACP and was a response to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, on May 17, 1954, declaring segregated schools unconstitutional.
Other states also passed anti-NAACP laws or laws that attempted to restrict civil rights activity following Brown — as part of a campaign of “massive resistance.” See, for example, the Virginia laws seeking to restrict activist litigation, enacted on September 29, 1956, which the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional in NAACP v. Button, on April 2, 1963. Disclosure of the NAACP membership list would have subjected members to harassment, job loss, and even possible death at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan.
Legal scholars have noted the enormous contribution of the civil rights movement to the development of First Amendment law (see Harry Kalven, below).
The Court: “. . . the free exercise by petitioner’s members of their constitutionally protected right of association.
“Effective advocacy of both public and private points of view, particularly controversial ones, is undeniably enhanced by group association, as this Court has more than once recognized by remarking upon the close nexus between the freedoms of speech and assembly. . . . It is beyond debate that freedom to engage in association for the advancement of beliefs and ideas is an inseparable aspect of the ‘liberty’ assured by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which embraces freedom of speech.”
Learn more: George Lewis, Massive Resistance: The White Response to the Civil Rights Movement (2006)
Learn about the contributions of the civil rights movement to civil liberties: Harry Kalven, The Negro and the First Amendment (1965)
Listen to the oral arguments before the Supreme Court: http://www.oyez.org/cases/1950-1959/1957/1957_91
Visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture here