ACLU Founded – Fight For Civil Liberties Begins
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was founded on this day, the occasion marked by the first official meeting of the Executive Committee.
The ACLU grew out of the National Civil Liberties Bureau, originally a committee of the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM), in 1917. Roger Baldwin (born January 21, 1884) had been co-Director of the National Civil liberties Bureau with Crystal Eastman, and he served as Director of the ACLU until retiring in 1950. On the National Civil Liberties Bureau, see the events of July 4, 1917; November 1, 1917.
The founding of the ACLU marked the beginning of a long campaign to defend civil liberties that continues today. In its first years, the ACLU had about 1,000 members; today it has 1, 500,000, with affiliates in every state.
The most notable efforts of the ACLU in its first 100 years include, but are not limited to: (1) the defense of free speech and assembly in the face of massive repression during World War I; (2) the defense of the rights or workers and labor unions in the 1920s and 1930s; (3) the defense of civil rights for African-Americans from 1920 through to the present day; (4) opposition to the evacuation and internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II; (5) the defense of freedom of speech and association during the Cold War in the face of government and private group-led repression; (6) the defense of separation of church and state from the 1940s through to the present day; (7) defense of the rights of women and the right to an abortion from the 1960s to the present day; (8) vigorous opposition to violations of civil liberties in the War on Terrorism following the attacks on 9/11; (9) the defense of the rights of LGBT people from the early 1970s to the present; (10) vigorous opposition to the many abuses of President Donald J. Trump through protests, lobbying, and litigation.
Read the Minutes of the first meeting:
https://webspace.princeton.edu/users/mudd/Digitization/MC001.01/MC001.01%20volume%20120.pdfRead Sam Walker’s essay on Baldwin and the origins of the ACLU
Read: Samuel Walker, In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU (1990)
Read the ACLU FBI File (not the complete file): http://vault.fbi.gov/ACLU
Learn about the ACLU today: www.aclu.org
Read: Akhil Reed Amar, The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (2000)
And about the ACLU’s First Amendment battles in the 1920s and 1930s: Laura Weinrib, The Taming of Free Speech (2016)