No issue or achievement is more central to the self-identity of today’s Democratic Party than civil rights. It was President Lyndon Johnson, a Southern Democrat, who pushed civil rights, voting rights, and fair housing laws through Congress in the 1960s.
It is all the more difficult to understand why Democrats, who now control both houses of Congress for the first time in six years, are adding what they call “democratic reform”, particularly HR 1, to their agenda-setting legislation for the new Congress. In one provision of the bill, Democrats are turning away from an important civil rights-era decision by the US Supreme Court: the right of nonprofit donors to avoid racial violence by not being forced to reveal their names.
This edition is from Alabama in the mid-1950s – a time when the Ku Klux Klan committed heinous acts against American civil rights activists as the movement grew in strength in the deep south. Rosa Parks had just drawn national attention for refusing to get on a public bus in Montgomery, where Martin Luther King Jr. would soon lead a 13-month signal bus boycott. The clan’s violence against blacks and their white supporters was very real: in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, four young black girls were killed and Viola Liuzzo, a white activist from Detroit, was murdered, because they supported the suffrage movement the famous march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.
The NAACP was organizing direct and legal action in the south at the time, which meant that its supporters were facing precisely this type of deadly retribution. This imminent threat is what made Alabama State’s efforts to force the NAACP to publicize its membership roster so crucial. The members should of course also be financial supporters.
After a judge ruled in the state’s favor, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund took the case to the US Supreme Court. In the majority opinion, Justice John Harlan said: “The immunity from government scrutiny of the petitioner’s lists of members is related to the right of the petitioner’s members to privately pursue their legitimate private interests, while freely associating with others under the protection the fourteenth amendment. In addition, the right to protect its membership roster was central to the NAACP’s right to ‘promote beliefs and ideas’. This was vital at a time when Klan-style violence could mean death.
Today, with HR 1, we see Democrats abandoning the precedent in Alabama by demanding that the names of political advocacy donors be published in the same way as direct campaign donors. The scope of the proposal seems narrow and focuses on political action committees and so-called “dark money”, but these donors need just as much protection as anyone else.
Interest groups inevitably use controversial elections to get their views across. For example, imagine if the NAACP in Alabama ran ads of clan violence in 1958, at a time when the successful gubernatorial candidate was actually publicly approved by the clan. Should the NAACP be forced to publish its list of donors? Under HR 1 they should.
HR 1 points out the possibility of threats against donors and says that donations could be private “if ingestion of the information exposes the person to serious threats, harassment or reprisals”. However, the Chicago law firm Wagenmaker and Oberly, which specializes in nonprofit law, stated, “HR 1 does not contain any guidance or any other language to determine how this exception should be interpreted or applied. Because of this, such an exception can be defined based on experience with actual threats and reprisals. In other words … too late. ”
There is no doubt that the potential for threats and harassment has grown dramatically – to the point that many citizens feel they need to censor themselves. This could be attributed to the chilling effect of “culture breakup” that now extends from universities and corporations to political campaigns. It is true that cultural conservatives – like those who backed the 2008 California referendum that rules out gay marriage and faces personal setback because political contributions are already public information – may be protected by donor privacy policies. But they wouldn’t be alone. Democrats would be amazed to ignore that donors of planned parenting or the American Civil Liberties Union could also face serious threats. Planned parenting offices have been targeted by murderous extremists in recent years.
In fact, supporters of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund seem to understand just that. The Fund recently announced a $ 40 million fellowship program for prospective civil rights attorneys in the South, supported by a single gift from an “anonymous” – also known as a “private” – donor. While donors do not fear retaliation, there are other traditional reasons for donating anonymously, such as religious reasons or simple humility. It was the 12th century Jewish scholar Maimonides who believed that anonymous giving was a good deed performed for its own sake.
Donors of all beliefs should be careful not to support violent marginalized groups. However, there is no need to remove the privacy that anonymity provides for charity. When nonprofit groups get out of hand – for example, with overt calls for violence – the IRS has the tools it needs to investigate the legitimacy of their tax-exempt status. They should be measured by their work and not by how motives are attributed to their supporters. Democrats who want to go further forget the lessons of their own proud past.
Howard Husock is an Executive Senior Fellow at the Philanthropy Roundtable and author of “Who Killed Civil Society?”
Comments are closed.