It’s LGBTQ Pride parade season all over America, but not for communists in Oklahoma City. This year, the Communist Party of Oklahoma was denied a booth at the Oklahoma City Pride festival because of a 1955 McCarthyite law declaring Communist Party membership illegal in the state.
The incident was troubling for obvious reasons: Pride celebrations put inclusivity of marginalized people at their heart. Even more alarming, with anti-communism on the rise, and with Donald Trump and other far-right politicians constantly calling for repression and violence against socialists and communists, many other states also have such laws on the books. The Right is ready and willing to use them. This coercive legal infrastructure stems from the McCarthy era as well as earlier Red Scares, but today’s political climate makes it newly relevant.
Oklahoma’s law makes membership in the Communist Party illegal, as well as membership in any group that might “advocate, abet, advise, or teach . . . any activities intended to overthrow, destroy or alter . . . the government of the United States, or of the state of Oklahoma . . . by force or violence.” It declares that members of such groups don’t have any rights.
Indeed, under the 1955 law, any individual who “contributes to the support of” the Communist Party could be fined $20,000 and sentenced to twenty years in prison. Note the broad wording of “contributes to the support of”: What does that include? Party membership? Financial support of a Communist Party campaign? Retweeting the Communist Party’s Martin Luther King Day or Fourth of July greetings? Signing a petition for a racial justice campaign that the party’s members are organizing? The law’s language could justify undemocratic crackdowns on a wide range of action or expression.
Historically, laws like this were often connected to efforts to repress the civil rights movement as well as communism, since the links between the two (both real and, in the fevered imagination of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and white supremacist Southern politicians, imagined) were so intertwined. Breathlessly proclaiming that civil rights agitation was being carried out by Moscow puppets, some states tried to ban the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Alabama did so successfully in 1956. Arkansas’s governor denied state employment to NAACP members through 1959. In 1958, the US Supreme Court ruled that the NAACP had a right to exist and that such laws violated Americans’ rights to freedom of association.