More than 60 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state of Alabama could not require the NAACP to disclose its membership list.
In NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson, the court unanimously held that the civil rights organization had shown that disclosure of its members in the state would expose them to retaliation in the Jim Crow South.
“This court has recognized the vital relationship between freedom to associate and privacy in one’s associations,” Justice John Marshall Harlan II wrote for the court. “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.”
