1951 October 8

Emergency Civil Liberties Committee Formed

 

Corliss Lamont, a long-time civil libertarian and ACLU Board member, founded the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee on this day. (It was usually referred to as the ECLC.)

Lamont felt that the ACLU was not taking a strong enough position challenging anti-Communist measures in the Cold War. During its existence, the ECLC remained a small organization, without a strong national presence, taking a number of important and often highly publicized cases. Lamont, the son of a wealthy New York banker, remained the controlling force in ECLC throughout its history.

Lamont was denied a passport by the State Department on October 15, 1951, although he later received on after challenging the denial. And on May 24, 1965, he won an important First Amendment case against the Post Office which had been conducting surveillance of mail he received from overseas.

Two of the more famous ECLC cases involved Kent v. Dulles (June 16, 1958), in which it represented the noted artist Rockwell Kent and won a Supreme Court decision affirming the right to travel, and winning a $25,000 damage award against the FBI for Jim Peck (December 9, 1983), who was brutally beaten by racists on May 14, 1961 in Anniston, Alabama, as a member of the 1961 Freedom Ride. The FBI took no action even though it had advance knowledge of the planned attacks. The famous Freedom Ride began on May 4, 1961.

After Lamont’s death in 1995, ECLC in January 1998 merged with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR).

Learn more about Corliss Lamont: http://www.corliss-lamont.org/

On the ACLU in the Cold War, read: Samuel Walker, In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU (1990)

Read about the life and work of Corliss Lamont here

Learn more about the Center for Constitutional Rights: http://ccrjustice.org/

Read: Corliss Lamont, Freedom is as Freedom Does (1956)

Find a Day

Go
Abortion Rights ACLU african-americans Alice Paul anti-communism Anti-Communist Hysteria Birth Control Brown v. Board of Education Censorship CIA Civil Rights Civil Rights Act of 1964 Cold War Espionage Act FBI First Amendment Fourteenth Amendment freedom of speech Free Speech Gay Rights Hate Speech homosexuality Hoover, J. Edgar HUAC Japanese American Internment King, Dr. Martin Luther Ku Klux Klan Labor Unions Lesbian and Gay Rights Loyalty Oaths McCarthy, Sen. Joe New York Times Obscenity Police Misconduct Same-Sex Marriage Separation of Church and State Sex Discrimination Smith Act Spying Spying on Americans Vietnam War Voting Rights Voting Rights Act of 1965 War on Terror Watergate White House Women's Rights Women's Suffrage World War I World War II Relocation Camps

Topics

Tell Us What You Think

We want to hear your comments, criticisms and suggestions!