Freedom of association was defined negatively as the right to exclude, not positively

Evidence

As such sentiments made clear, “freedom of association” stood as a deep-seated and far-reaching concept in segregationist ideology. The idea found its full expression during the debate over school desegregation, but it had stood as an implicit rationale for white resistance and white flight during earlier stages of segregationist defiance, as in the struggle over transitional neighborhoods. Notably, the whites who invoked “freedom of association” did not define the concept positively, in terms of what outside groups they could join, but negatively, in terms of what groups of outsiders they could shun. Blacks were entitled to their rights, these parents reasoned, but not at the expense of whites’ rights to choose their own associates. “I want the negro to enjoy his freedom but I dont want any part of them,” said another. “I dont want any one to tell me Ive got to sit with them have my children go to school with them invite them into my home. … which shall it be? give us liberty or give us death?” In their struggle to preserve segregated education, these white parents insisted they had a right to choose what kind of schools their children attended and, more important, what kind of children attended school alongside their own. Although this seemed a narrow concern, “freedom of association” would serve as a unifying principle for the different strands of segregationist resistance, linking the homeowners’ organizations of the past, who insisted they had a right to choose their neighbors, with the future campaigns of businessmen, who insisted they had a right to select their customers. Taken together, these movements in defense of whites’ “freedom of association” accelerated the earlier movement away from community and consideration of common interests and instead toward individuality, privatization, and the concern for self-interest above all else. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 373

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the segregationist concept of ‘freedom of association’ as a purely negative right to shun outsiders rather than a positive right to join.
• XREF: Directly evidences the reader’s stated purpose: how segregationist ideology was reinvented as privacy/self-interest rhetoric, anticipating modern color-blind conservatism. — connects to: Segregationists understood resistance as defending their own rights and freedoms — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 31; Respectable segregationists framed exclusion of blacks as a symmetry of individual choice — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 372; Whites’ freedom to flee schools was denied because it exposed segregationist logic as self-defeating — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 369 (+9 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion of a civil-liberties phrase into an exclusion claim — and its capacity to unify homeowners, school parents, and businessmen — is a dense, paradigm-shifting observation about ideological repurposing.

Broader Connections

• Negative liberty means being free from interference in one’s choices. #expands (0.85) — Frank Lovett, Republicanism, 7
• Antiracist movements admitted the excluded without ceding defining power over criteria #complicates (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 114
• America’s founding freedoms were written to exclude Black, female, and lower-class subjects. #exemplifies (0.80) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 275
• Racial exclusion becomes legally unactionable once reframed as private moral preference #exemplifies (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1875
• Identity is defined oppositionally, against those one is not. #qualifies (0.75)
• Decent societies regulate inclusion through values that contradict their declarations #responds-to (0.75)