I.

Introduction

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), organization devoted to defending the individual rights and freedoms of all people in the United States. The ACLU works to protect the civil liberties granted by the Constitution of the United States and Bill of Rights through litigation, legislation, and public education. The nonpartisan organization provides lawyers and legal advice for individuals and groups involved in local, state, and federal court cases. It also spearheads numerous campaigns to extend more rights to people who have traditionally been denied them, including the rights of children, prisoners, homosexuals, and people with mental illness. The ACLU has been involved in some of the most celebrated U.S. legal cases and lobbying campaigns of the 20th century.

The ACLU is the nation’s largest nonprofit law organization. Its full-time and volunteer attorneys work on several thousand cases each year. The ACLU has about 500,000 members and more than 300 chapters and affiliated offices throughout the United States. The organization is based in New York City.

Since its founding in 1920, the ACLU has initiated a variety of court challenges to clarify whether particular laws are constitutional. These cases are often referred to as test cases. It has also participated in numerous court cases pertaining to individual rights by filing amicus curiae briefs (Latin for “friend of the court”). In such a brief, the ACLU advises the court on issues concerning civil liberties but does not provide legal counsel for either the defendant or plaintiff. ACLU briefs have influenced the outcome of many trials.

II.

Early Years

The ACLU was founded by American civil liberties advocate Roger Baldwin and other social reformers as an outgrowth of the American Union Against Militarism. That organization had been formed during World War I (1914-1918) to seek amnesty for conscientious objectors—citizens who refused to participate in military combat for moral reasons. The ACLU was created to preserve the civil liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, which include First Amendment rights (including freedom of speech, press, religion, and separation of church and state); equal protection of the law for all citizens; due process of law (the right to be treated fairly when facing criminal charges or other serious accusations); and the individual’s right to privacy. Baldwin led the ACLU for its first 30 years.

One of the organization’s most famous test cases took place in 1925 when ACLU attorney Clarence Darrow defended evolution teacher John Scopes in Tennessee v. John Scopes, often known as the Monkey Trial. Scopes violated a state law that prohibited teaching the theory of evolution in public schools because it contradicted the Bible’s account of creation. The ACLU fought to keep church and state issues separate and allow freedom of speech. Scopes was convicted of violating the law, but it was overturned a year later on a technicality. Although the ACLU did not succeed in changing the state law that year, the trial brought the organization national attention.

III.

The 1930s and 1940s

The ACLU went on to join a wide variety of rights-related causes that challenged traditional political and social mores. In 1932 the ACLU organized the National Committee on Freedom from Censorship “to fight censorship in the literary arts, the press, motion and talking pictures, the radio, and the scientific discussion of sex.” The following year the ACLU won a landmark ruling on book censorship. The novel Ulysses (1922), by Irish author James Joyce, had been banned in the United States since excerpts of the manuscript were published from 1918 to 1920 in the American magazine The Little Review. It was considered “obscene” for containing sexual content. But in 1933 a federal court ruling prohibited the U.S. Customs Service from confiscating the book at all U.S. borders. The decision changed the legal definition of “obscenity.” Previously, a book was ruled obscene if it contained one or more passages of offensive language that could possibly have an adverse effect on members of society “whose minds are open to such immoral influences.” For the first time in court, the artistic value of an entire book outweighed its passages of controversial language and content.

During World War II (1939-1945) the ACLU won a ruling on religious freedom before the Supreme Court of the United States. In the late 1930s public schools required all students to salute the United States flag as a show of patriotism. However, members of the religious group Jehovah’s Witnesses did not want their children to salute the flag because it went against their beliefs to show allegiance to any government. The ACLU argued that the public school policy infringed on freedom of religion. In the case West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), the Supreme Court ruled Jehovah’s Witnesses could refuse to salute the flag without being penalized by school officials.

The ACLU was also the only national organization to challenge Japanese American internment camps during World War II. Fearing that some Japanese Americans worked as government spies, the federal government moved about 110,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps. In Korematsu v. United States (1944) the ACLU fought to overturn the five-year prison sentence of a Japanese American man who had refused to live in an internment camp. The ACLU argued that fundamental individual rights should not be sacrificed during wartime. Although the ACLU lost the Supreme Court case in 1944, the organization continued to fight for legislation that would grant reparations to internees. More than 40 years later, the Congress of the United States in 1988 approved legislation calling the internment a “grave injustice,” and the federal government paid $20,000 to each surviving internee.

IV.

The 1950s and 1960s

In 1954 the ACLU joined the legal battle to prohibit racial segregation in public schools in the case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The ACLU filed a friend-of-the-court-brief in support of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which argued for the desegregation of schools. In its decision on Brown the Supreme Court struck down segregation laws, declaring that separate educational facilities were “inherently unequal” by definition.

Also during the 1950s, the organization challenged laws enacted during the Cold War period to prevent the spread of communism. The organization spearheaded a campaign to end loyalty-oath laws that required some groups of people, including public schoolteachers, to swear they were not communists in order to keep their jobs. The ACLU claimed these laws violated an individual’s right to privacy. Many people criticized the organization’s actions as being “anti-American.” The American Legion, an association of military veterans, called for a congressional investigation of the ACLU, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) started tracking the activities of the ACLU and its leaders.

The ACLU expanded its mission during the mid-1960s to help groups of people who have traditionally been denied certain rights. These groups included prisoners, people with mental illness, soldiers, racial minorities, children, the poor, women, people with disabilities, and gays and lesbians. The organization began a number of projects that resulted in new legislation. For example, the ACLU National Prison Project was created to help pass new state laws to give prisoners more legal rights. The ACLU successfully lobbied for better medical care for all prisoners and improved facilities for people with disabilities in prisons. The group also won rulings to restrict prison guards from both mentally and physically abusing prison inmates.

V.

The 1970s to 1990s

In the late 1970s thousands of ACLU members resigned in protest when the organization defended the right of the American Nazi Party to march through Skokie, Illinois, a predominately Jewish suburb of Chicago. Skokie had enacted laws to prevent the group from gathering in a public area. The ACLU fought for the group’s First Amendment rights—freedom of assembly and freedom of speech. The organization has always argued that all groups, no matter how unpopular, have a right to express their ideas in a peaceful manner. In Smith v. Collin (1978), a federal court ruling prohibited any official attempts to restrict the Nazis’ right to free speech.

Criticism of the ACLU also came from the highest levels of government in the 1980s. In 1981 U.S. Attorney General Ed Meese, who served under President Ronald Reagan, called the ACLU “a criminals’ lobby.” Meese claimed the organization was too liberal. However, the ACLU often criticized Meese for not supporting various civil liberties. In 1988 Reagan’s eventual successor, George Bush, made a high-profile campaign issue out of the fact that his election opponent, Democratic Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, was a “card-carrying member of the ACLU.” However, Bush’s campaign did not hurt the ACLU. More than 50,000 people joined the organization in 1988 and 1989.

By the 1990s, the ACLU had argued more cases before the U.S. Supreme Court than any other entity except the U.S. Department of Justice. During the 1990s the organization became increasingly involved in labor-management issues that violated an individual’s right to privacy. The ACLU fought to prohibit company policies requiring workers to take drug tests and campaigned for legislation to regulate electronic surveillance in the workplace. The ACLU also worked to protect the rights of people with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS); litigated against censorship in literature, music, and art exhibits; and lobbied to abolish the death penalty. Other issues that the ACLU focused its efforts on in the 1990s included children’s rights, education reform, lesbian and gay rights, immigrants’ rights, national security, privacy and technology, prisoners’ rights, reproductive freedom, voting rights, and women’s rights.

VI.

The 21st Century

Following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, the ACLU became especially active in ensuring that the U.S. government’s “war on terrorism” did not infringe on civil liberties. Soon after the attacks, Congress passed the Patriot Act to help law enforcement agencies investigate terrorist networks within the United States. However, the ACLU criticized a number of its provisions, including one that allowed the government to inspect a person’s library, bank, and medical records without a judicial determination that the person was likely committing a crime.

The ACLU also played a prominent role in challenging the government’s detention of American citizens and others without charging them with a crime or providing them access to a lawyer. Hundreds of these detainees were held at the U.S. naval station at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. An ACLU suit forced the government to release thousands of internal records documenting the abusive treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay.