Garland Fund Established to Support Civil Liberties in 1920s
Officially called the American Fund for Public Service, the Garland Fund which supported civil liberties, labor and leftist causes in the 1920s, was founded on this day.
Through the decade of the Twenties, the Fund gave away about $2 million to liberal and left-wing causes. Some of the organizations by the Fund included the ACLU, Brookwood Labor College, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (A. Philip Randolph’s labor union), The New Masses (a radical political magazine), the Rand School of Social Science (a leftist educational institution), the Urban League, Vanguard Press (which published leftist books), and the Women’s Trade Union League.
Particularly important, it made a special grant to the NAACP to support “a large-scale, wide-spread, dramatic campaign to give the Southern Negro his constitutional rights, his political and civil equality, and therewith a self-consciousness and self-respect which would inevitably tend to effect a revolution in the economic life of the country.” The money supported the Margold Report which, although originally put aside as too radical, eventually led to the series of cases that culminated i Brown v. Board of Education on May 17, 1954.
The Fund was named for Charles Garland, who did not wish to accept his inheritance for philosophical reasons and donated it to the fund which was established to accept it. Roger Baldwin, Director of the ACLU, advised Garland and essentially controlled the Fund.
The Fund, however, was devastated by the stock market crash and Great Depression and disbanded in 1941.
Read about the Garland Fund: Gloria Garrett Samson, The American Fund for Public Service: Charles Garland and Radical Philanthropy, 1922-1941 (1996)
Read more about the Fund and Roger Baldwin: Samuel Walker, In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU (1990)
Watch Traveling Hopefully, a documentary about Roger Baldwin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND_uY_KXGgY