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A Victory for Democracy: NAACP v. Alabama and Freedom of Association

A Victory for Democracy: NAACP v. Alabama and Freedom of Association

Author: Charles W. Eagles
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780197795873

Published In: November 2025
Format: Hardback
Jurisdiction: U.S. ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only

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Description
Contents

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In 1956, six months after the start of the Montgomery bus boycott, Alabama Attorney General John Patterson obtained from state circuit court judge Walter B. Jones, an ardent defender of segregation, an order banning the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). On appeal, the case led to the U.S. Supreme Court's declaration of the new constitutional right to freedom of association, the right of individuals to form groups and promote ideas without government interference: Martin Luther King Jr. called it "a victory for democracy."

Charles W. Eagles examines the landmark decision in NAACP v. Alabama (1958) that the Court based on the First Amendment's freedoms of speech and assembly and the Fourteenth Amendment's right to due process. Drawing on NAACP papers, court records, the Justices' papers, newspapers, and other court decisions, Eagles follows the case from its origins in thirty years of courageous local NAACP activism and in Alabama white racist politics through the pathbreaking Supreme Court decision. Alabama political and judicial officials fought the 1958 decision with procedural traps in state courts, arbitrary court delays, and three more appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court until the court in 1964 finally ordered Alabama to allow the NAACP, after an eight-year absence, to register and operate in the state.

A Victory for Democracy lucidly explains the legal procedures and constitutional questions in the case, depicts the lawyers for the NAACP and for the state of Alabama, and analyzes the Supreme Court deliberations behind Justice John M. Harlan's decisions. This landmark case establishing freedom of association had major unexpected implications for subsequent cases involving birth control, women in the Jaycees, gay men in the Boy Scouts, and the privacy of political contributions.

Introduction

1. Starting a Long and Tortuous Battle for Justice: June 1956

2. Albert Patterson, Phenix City, and the Rise of John Patterson

3. Living in This Land of Bigotry: The NAACP in Alabama

4. To Strike a Mortal Blow: The Anti-NAACP Campaign

5. Entrapped in a Procedural Morass: Alabama v. NAACP

6. Bare-Knuckle Fight for Survival: NAACP v. Alabama

7. NAACP v. Alabama in the U.S. Supreme Court

8. Vindicating the NAACP: The Freedom of Association

9. Arbitrary and Vindictive Harassment of the NAACP

10. Alabama's Cynical Perversion of the Legal Process

11.