Significance: This ruling established that the First Amendment protects freedom of association. It also established that no court can order an organization to reveal membership information that might limit that freedom for the group as a whole or its individual members.
Background: The state of Alabama had long been concerned about the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)’s attempts to set up bus boycotts and help achieve desegregation in the state university. Claiming that these and other activities caused harm to the citizens as a whole, the state filed suit in state court against the NAACP for not following Alabama’s corporate filing laws. The organization turned over all records that the state requested except for a membership list, saying that publication of the list would lead to harrassment, violence, and other burdens on the members’ right to associate freely. The judge in the case held the NAACP in contempt, fining it $100,000. The NAACP appealed the case to the Supreme Court.
Decision: This case was argued on January 15­16, 1958, and decided on June 30, 1958, by a vote of 9 to 0. Justice John Harlan spoke for the unanimous Court, which overturned the state court’s decision by indicating that the First Amendment upheld the freedom of association, even though that freedom was not directly stated in the amendment. Thus, the NAACP could refuse to hand over its membership list to protect the its members’ constitutional right to free assembly.
Excerpt from the Opinion of the Court: “We hold that the immunity [freedom] from state scrutiny of membership lists which the Association claims on behalf of its members is here so related to the right of the members to pursue their lawful private interests privately and to associate freely with others in so doing as to come within the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment. And we conclude that Alabama has fallen short of showing a controlling justification [reason] for the deterrent [preventative] effect on the free enjoyment of the right to associate which disclosure of membership lists is likely to have.“
