This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, July 25, 2018, Man Caleb Brown.

It's been 60 years since the Supreme Court decided N-A-C-P-V Alabama, a landmark First Amendment case that fleshed

out the freedom of association and helped establish the importance of

associational privacy. It's relevant today because of broad efforts to compel disclosure of so many of your ideological

associations.

Brad Smith of the Institute for Free Speech comments.

The issue that was before the court was fairly simple which was could the state of

Alabama insist on getting a list of donors and members of the N-W-A-C-P as part of a judicial proceeding.

And it's worth looking a little bit at how that came about. In the fall of 1956 politicians in Alabama had a big problem and

that problem was the NAACP. The NAACP had lit of course, Brown versus Board of Education, the famous

integration, school integration case.

Alabama's leading politicians were almost uniformly dedicated publicly to resisting that decision and attempting to

foil its implementation. Additionally, the N-W-A-C-P was bringing lawsuits pertaining to

voting rights, accommodations in public places and so on for desegregation.

The NAACP and its activists had also been behind the efforts to integrate the University of Alabama.

Rosa Parks was an NAACP volunteer and activist when she refused to famously give a

proceed on the bus in Montgomery and that eventually triggered the

Montgomery bus boycott which was costing the city enormously in terms of its

economy in part because blacks lived out in segregated neighborhoods and they rode the buses downtown to shop.

And so they weren't shopping as well as not riding the buses, as a practical matter.

And so for all these reasons the establishment really wanted to

shut down the NAACP and they found what's kind of a legal technicality in which they

...