“Inviolability of privacy in group association may in many circumstances be indispensable to preservation of freedom of association, particularly where a group espouses dissident beliefs.” – Justice John M. Harlan, NAACP v. Alabama (1958)
Powerful forces, especially those in government, despise contrarians — those who want to change the course of politics and policy, correct some kind of historic injustice, or disrupt the cozy relationship between those who make the political decisions and their cronies who financially benefit from them. They guard their power jealously and use whatever means available to them to intimidate their opponents into silence — especially governmental power.
In the 1950s, we saw this play out throughout the American South as people of color worked passionately to fundamentally change the political landscape and gain the full-measure of political rights that were supposed to be guaranteed to them by the Constitution, but that evildoers had, over decades, denied. In places like Alabama, groups like the NAACP were using their powers of organizing, their political and legal expertise, and their sheer determination to bring people together to remake that landscape… and the powerful in Alabama, to put it mildly, did not like this.
These power-mongers in Alabama had many tools at their disposal, but they knew that if they could isolate the NAACP, cut off their support, and make it dangerous for the NAACP’s supporters to publicly voice that support, the NAACP and its allied organizations could potentially be silenced. And they set out on a legal campaign to do just that — and it centered on forcing the NAACP to name its supporters — its donors — to government officials in Alabama.
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