This is a guest opinion column

Sixty years ago, on June 1, 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark First Amendment decision in NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Flowers. The justices unanimously decided that Alabama could not compel the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to disclose the identity of its members. This was a victory for freedom of speech and assembly.

At a time when these constitutional freedoms are under attack by individuals and entities across the ideological spectrum, the anniversary of Flowers should be remembered and celebrated.

The decision in the Flowers case came exactly eight years after Alabama Attorney General (and later Governor) John M. Patterson obtained a court order prohibiting the NAACP from doing business in the state unless it turned over copies of its membership lists. It was a direct effort to suppress the civil rights work of the organization and came at a time when disclosure of NAACP membership threatened the lives and livelihoods of Blacks across the South.

The association was legitimately concerned that there would be “use of actual force” against its Alabama members (numbering almost 15,000) if their identities were disclosed to the government (and then to others such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Citizens’ Councils). There was already plentiful evidence that members had lost their jobs after expressing support for desegregation.

During the litigation’s initial oral argument before the Court, Justice Felix Frankfurter perfectly captured what Alabama was trying to achieve. He said the state sought to impose “a death sentence” on the civil rights organization.

It took four U.S. Supreme Court rulings (all in favor of the NAACP) before Alabama finally accepted the decision that its membership disclosure demand violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of assembly.

In the first ruling, on June 30, 1958, in NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson, the Court emphasized that the ability of individuals to freely express their political views “is undeniably enhanced by group association,” and that “it is beyond debate that freedom to engage in association for the advancement of beliefs” is protected by the First Amendment. Considering the “vital relationship between freedom to associate and privacy in one’s associations,” and the real threat of physical and economic harm, compelled disclosure of the identity of the NAACP’s members in Alabama was unequivocally unconstitutional.

In Flowers, six years later, the Court reiterated the importance of these constitutional principles. The justices expressed their frustration at Alabama’s refusal to comply with decisions made by the nation’s highest court. Thankfully, Alabama would abide by this fourth ruling, finally ending the years-long legal battle and signaling a new era of more robust protection for associational freedom.

The official process of reorganizing, restoring, and rebuilding the NAACP in Alabama began later that year.

The philosopher George Santayana famously observed: “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” The decision in Flowers is not as well-known as other landmark civil rights rulings, such as the school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). But it is just as important.

For it is Flowers that guarantees that “We, the People” can exercise our freedom to assemble and express our political views with an important degree of anonymity. Absent that protection, what is to stop political leaders from silencing us by threatening to tell the world who we are?

Helen J. Knowles-Gardner is the research director at the Institute for Free Speech and is currently researching the history of the NAACP v. Alabama litigation. She has written extensively about expressive freedom, and her third co-authored/co-edited book about the First Amendment will be published later this year.