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    Carter knew exactly what Patterson was looking to do. The boycott had already led to the violent targeting of its public leaders. King’s home was firebombed; so was the home of his friend and fellow minister Ralph Abernathy. Four black Baptist churches were attacked and set on fire. Whites physically assaulted boycotters.
    The Supreme Court victory would cause even more violence: King’s home came under shotgun fire; white men attacked a black teenager as she left a bus; snipers fired on buses, and in one incident shot a pregnant woman in both legs. Less than a month after the boycott ended, whites bombed five black churches. A few weeks after that, Klansmen lynched a black man, Willie Edwards. Rosa Parks would ultimately leave Montgomery, unable to find a job, the subject of death threats.
    Carter knew an NAACP member and donor list would be, in the hands of segregationists, at best a blacklist, at worst a kill list. His organization could not and would not ever comply.
    When the NAACP failed to provide the documents, Judge Jones held it in contempt and slapped it with a $10,000 fine. He warned that it would increase to $100,000 after five more days. The civil rights organization decided to legally fight the order, though in a show of goodwill it did provide a list of the names and addresses of the NAACP’s officers in Alabama. That wasn’t enough for Patterson, and the fine grew. The case worked up to the Alabama Supreme Court, which refused to modify or halt the fine or disclosure order. It landed with the Supremes.
    And so Carter, almost sixty years to the day before Karen Kenney would receive her first IRS inquisition form, walked into the Court determined to broaden some basic rights.
    The First Amendment doesn’t contain a direct reference to “freedom of association.” It does, however, guarantee the right to assembly and to petition government. And starting in about the 1930s, the Supreme Court began interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause to more widely guarantee the right of Americans to gather together in private or in public, and to collectively exercise free speech.
    In 1945, for instance, the Court backed up Roland Jay Thomas, then the president of the United Automobile, Aircraft and Agricultural Implement Workers. Thomas flew into Houston in September 1943 to aid in organizing workers at the nearby Humble Oil and Refining Company. A few hours before he was due to speak at a public event, he was issued a restraining order by an antiunion state attorney general, told he’d be violating a law requiring union bosses to first obtain a special license to organize new members. Thomas spoke anyway, and was arrested. He pointed out to the Supreme Court that he did not personally sign up members, did not ask for or receive funds, and did not disturb or breach the peace. All he had done was speak—and Texas had no right to stop him. The Court agreed, tying together free speech and free association: The “exercise of the rights of free speech and free assembly” are “immune” to registration.
    Shoring up freedom of assembly had meanwhile forced the Court to confront another question: anonymity in political speech. The twentieth century witnessed a startling and rapid rise in the size and power of both federal and state government. What good was freedom of speech, or freedom of assembly, if citizens were too frightened by a powerful state to exercise those rights?
    In 1941, a political gadfly and publisher named Edward Rumely helped establish the Committee for Constitutional Government, an organization opposed to Franklin Roosevelt’s government expansion and court-packing. Rumely distributed books and literature about the Constitution to a mass mailing list. House Democrats called him in front of Congress, demanding the names of those who had bought his books in bulk for further distribution. He refused to provide them and was convicted of obstructing a congressional inquiry.