This piece was originally published on AL.com on May 16, 2026.

June 1 marks the 70th anniversary of Attorney General John M. Patterson’s effort to oust the NAACP from Alabama.

It was on that day in 1956 that Patterson obtained a court order preventing the group from operating in the state. It was the beginning of an eight-year legal battle as the state sought to silence an organization whose work was crucial to the advancement of civil rights. The NAACP did not return to Alabama until October 1964.

The NAACP could have resumed operations in the state as early as July 1956, but only if it was willing to endanger the livelihoods—and lives—of all its members in Alabama. This is because one of the court orders that Patterson obtained tried to compel the organization to hand over a list of the names and addresses of every Alabamian who was a member of the NAACP. It was a calculated campaign of intimidation deliberately designed to delay (and maybe even defeat) implementation of the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). And everyone knew what would happen if the disclosure demand succeeded.

Initially, not every member of the NAACP leadership believed that they should fight the lawsuit. Some were concerned that resisting the court order would undermine the organization’s main litigation strategy. The NAACP primarily worked to advance its civil rights agenda by obtaining favorable court rulings—rulings, such as Brown, that they then worked hard to enforce against often-defiant governments. Wouldn’t resisting Patterson’s order threaten that work, some asked? Thankfully, that argument did not prevail, and the NAACP did fight that order—all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The result was a series of four unanimous landmark decisions from that Court, all in favor of the NAACP, beginning with NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson (1958). The Court ruled that Alabama’s demand that the organization hand over personal information about its members violated the First Amendment. As Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote in Patterson: “Effective advocacy of both public and private points of view, particularly controversial ones, is undeniably enhanced by group association.” He went on to explain that “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.”

In the 1950s, in Alabama, the NAACP was widely viewed as the dictionary definition of a “group espous[ing] dissident beliefs.” But the organization recognized that Patterson’s actions didn’t just represent an attack on the NAACP. Instead, as it explained in a 1956 statement, the motivation behind the court order threatened “any group in disagreement with those who control the state.”

“If the NAACP can be banned because it seeks to uphold the federal Constitution, so can any other organization or institution – the church, a trade union, a civic association, a political party, a fraternal order, a professional society, or a business association,” the NAACP’s statement noted.

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch recently echoed that sentiment when he reinforced the importance of the Patterson decision in First Choice Women’s Centers v. Davenport. In that case, decided on April 29, the Court ruled that state disclosure demands—like Alabama’s attempt to expose the NAACP’s membership in the 1950s—constitute a fundamental threat to First Amendment freedoms. Therefore, when confronted with such a demand, an organization can take its case to federal court.

In his opinion for the unanimous Court in First Choice, Gorsuch explained that “associational rights carry special significance for political, social, religious, and other minorities.” And when “confronted” with attacks to freedom of association, that tribunal had, “over and again…held those demands burden the exercise of First Amendment rights.”

In 2026, at a time when opposition to “dissident beliefs” far too often takes the form of political violence, every American should be grateful that the NAACP chose to fight the June 1, 1956, court order. Our First Amendment rights are that much stronger because the NAACP took a stand and spoke up for those that the state sought to silence.