Privacy Rights Are Civil Rights: The Legacy of NAACP v. Alabama
By Mariah Wildgen
The right to privacy is deeply intertwined with the civil rights movement, both past and present. This weekend marks a moment in civil rights history that highlights the need to continue the fight for a robust federal comprehensive data privacy law today.
In NAACP v. Alabama, decided on June 30, 1958, a unanimous Supreme Court secured the right for civil rights advocates to associate freely and privately. This case arose from efforts by the state of Alabama to stamp out the civil rights group’s advocacy in the wake of the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, among other activities. Citing noncompliance with Alabama’s corporate filing laws, the state issued a subpoena for the membership rolls of the NAACP. If those lists were made public, NAACP members faced grave threats at the hands of racist organizations and individuals who sought to stop the civil rights movement in its tracks through fear, intimidation, and violence. Those in power in the Alabama state government understood those risks. That was the very point of their frivolous lawsuits — to intimidate the NAACP and civil rights activists into submission and maintain Jim Crow-era segregation and white supremacy.
Thankfully, the Supreme Court made the right decision in this case and tied together the civil rights movement with the right to privacy. The Court ruled that the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment granted the petitioners a right to privacy, stating: “This Court has recognized the vital relationship between freedom to associate and privacy in one’s associations.”
Today, we continue to fight the same battles to protect our civil rights and privacy rights, but we find ourselves in new arenas. Emerging technologies, like artificial intelligence (AI), make our lives easier in many ways, crunching a high volume of data and generating content and decisions based on that data. On the flipside, new technologies also pose both known and unknown risks, especially when it comes to the privacy and protection of our personal data and our civil rights.
To address these challenges, our work today includes advocating for comprehensive federal data privacy law with strong and explicit civil rights protections — legislation that is not yet on the books. That means ensuring that any law that touches data privacy includes language that explicitly prohibits using personal data to discriminate on the basis of protected characteristics.
Just this week, after lawmakers removed civil rights provisions from a data privacy bill pending before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the civil rights community successfully delayed committee consideration of the bill and is demanding that the legislation be revised. We know that an equitable data future is possible, and this legislative fight is far from over.
In the historic NAACP v. Alabama decision, the Supreme Court noted that the NAACP “made an uncontroverted showing that, on past occasions, revelation of the identity of its rank-and-file members has exposed these members to economic reprisal, loss of employment, threat of physical coercion, and other manifestations of public hostility.” Loss of job opportunities, economic reprisal, and public hostility — these threats still echo today alongside new ones that our forebears could not have possibly imagined.
Right now, black box algorithms and AI systems are making decisions every day that impact our lives based on data that may be biased. People are being denied loans for their businesses, refused essential health care, and excluded from education and job opportunities by systems that cannot explain how they came to those decisions. People continue to be wrongfully arrested and jailed because of inaccurate identifications made by facial recognition technology despite widespread knowledge that the technology can be wrong. People of color, women, low-income people, and people from other marginalized communities are more often the ones to be denied or harmed based on data they may not have even knowingly consented to being collected by Big Tech. These risks are unacceptable.
Everyone deserves to reap the reward of new technologies — without fear of their personal data being weaponized against them. We believe that everyone can prosper in an equitable tech future. But that future can only be realized with a comprehensive federal data privacy law that explicitly protects our civil rights.
Mariah Wildgen is the senior manager of strategic communications for the Center for Civil Rights and Technology at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.