Knowles-Gardner on The Selma 29: When Courage Risked Conviction (Or Much, Much Worse)

Helen J. Knowles-Gardner, Institute for Free Speech, has published The Selma 29: When Courage Risked Conviction (Or Much, Much Worse). Here is the abstract.

The day after twenty-nine Black residents of Selma put their signatures to a petition calling for the city’s schools to integrate in the fall of 1955, they found their names and addresses published in a front-page article in the Selma Times-Journal. The newspaper’s disclosure of this personal information was, in part, designed to generate a violent response, and the predictable reprisals came swiftly. This was classic political violence, 1950s white supremacist Alabama style. It made headlines across the country but, curiously, has received far less scholarly attention than one might expect. Although not the example of political racial violence for which Selma is most infamous, and by no means the only example of political racial violence directed at the city’s Black population, the story of the twenty-nine deserves to be told. This is because these individuals were not just targeted for supporting desegregation; they were targeted for supporting a primary legal goal of the NAACP. Most, if not all, of the twenty-nine were members of the NAACP, and several of them were prominent local leaders of Selma’s chapter. In Selma in 1955, mere membership in the NAACP could and did (up)end people’s lives and livelihoods. This paper tells the stories of the Selma 29. It situates those stories within a timeline that leads up to the June 1, 1956 issuance of a temporary restraining order that put the NAACP out of business in Alabama for over eight years, and generated a series of landmark rulings from the Supreme Court of the United States holding that the state’s efforts to demand disclosure of the names and addresses of the members of the NAACP in Alabama ran afoul of the First Amendment. This paper is part of Dismembering the NAACP, a book project under contract with LSU Press.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.