Tennessee: Naked Discrimination

In Tennessee, which has had little racial trouble, the most ambitious civil rights case in years got under way last week. The plaintiffs, for a change, were not Negroes. They were nudists.

At issue before a three-judge federal court in Knoxville was a suit by the Tennessee Outdoor Club, which last year received a state charter to found a nudist colony. In the charter’s words, the coeducational camp was for the sole purpose of “social, sun, air and water therapy . . . without the confinement of clothing.” But before the project could take off, local residents persuaded the Tennessee legislature to pass a law making nudism a misdemeanor.

Clothing themselves in the Constitution, Tennessee nudists — joined by the 15,000-member American Sunbathing Association — argued that the state stat ute violates the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of thought, belief and assembly, what the petitioners called the Ninth Amendment’s protection against invasion of privacy, and the Fifth and 14th Amendments’ bar against deprivation of property without due process of law. Declared the plaintiffs’ attorney, Bernard Bernstein:

“Their private practices as nudists do not constitute antisocial conduct which might authorize criminal sanctions.”

In defense of the anti-nudism statute, Tennessee Attorney General George McCanless argued: “The ultimate issue is whether the general assembly may require members of the opposite sex to wear clothing in the presence of each other except where the persons are joined in a family relationship.” If the court decides against them, the nudists have an obvious last resort — a strip-in.