When Americans consider the relationship between privacy and free speech, the discussion often turns to NAACP v. Alabama. That unanimous 1958 Supreme Court ruling articulated a First Amendment right to privately support nonprofit advocacy groups like the NAACP. The political climate of the case – a civil rights organization fighting against Jim Crow laws in the deep South – makes for a compelling reminder that, in some circumstances, the right to keep our beliefs and memberships private is a matter of personal safety.

This year, NAACP v. Alabama turns 66, but the case is anything but old news. Recent research by Helen Knowles-Gardner of the Institute for Free Speech sheds new light on this landmark Supreme Court decision. Her findings reveal that forcing the NAACP to disclose its donors was a deliberate strategy hatched by Alabama officials to stop the group in its tracks. Analyzing materials from numerous archival sources, Knowles-Gardner concludes that “the litigation was designed and intended to put the NAACP out of business.”

Moreover, that strategy was successful for no less than 8 years. Starting in 1956, the NAACP faced an injunction preventing the group from doing business in Alabama. Despite winning at the Supreme Court in 1958 on the disclosure question, the state stubbornly refused to admit defeat for six more years. The injunction would not ultimately die until the matter returned to the Supreme Court in 1964’s NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Flowers.

For many years, some scholars and commentators have categorized the donor disclosure demands in NAACP v. Alabama as an “indirect” means of stifling a nonprofit organization’s activities. Knowles-Gardner’s article rebuts this classification. The state’s dogged fight to turn its corporate registration laws into a weapon against civil rights activism should instead be understood as a direct attack on the NAACP’s right to exist and operate.

“Yes, the state of Alabama (primarily Attorney General John M. Patterson and Judge Walter B. Jones, but also, to a lesser extent Assistant Attorney General Edmon L. Rinehart) sought to achieve this goal by using an indirect legislative measure – in other words, a measure that was not principally designed to put a nonprofit organization out of business for failing to disclose its members. However, as this Article’s historical research demonstrates, our analytical focus should be on the end, not the means. When one considers the nature of the Patterson litigation – not only the statute involved, but also Alabama’s litigation tactics and procedural maneuvering, it becomes clear that this was the very model of a major, general, and decidedly direct attempt to control the NAACP. And, as subsequent installments of this research will demonstrate, what the state tried to do, how the nonprofit organization responded, and how the courts ruled is as relevant today as it was back in the 1950s and early 1960s,” writes Knowles-Gardner.

You can access the full scholarly article draft here.