Description
Description
These records document the administration and work of the ACLU's national office,
regional offices, and legal projects, with particular emphasis on the areas of civil
rights, children and women's rights, freedom of speech (and all First Amendment
questions), and due process, among many others. The records include case files,
correspondence, meeting minutes, research files, and files of staff members. A large
portion of the records are related to the numerous cases that the ACLU was involved
in on a wide range of civil liberties issues. Records are included from the national
office, ACLU projects, notably the Arts Censorship Project, Capital Punishment
Project, Children's Rights Project, Reproductive Freedom Project, and Women's Rights
Project, and the Mountain States Regional Office, Southern Regional Office, and
Washington Regional Office.
Collection Creator
History
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is the pre-eminent civil liberties
organization in the United States, utilizing litigation, lobbying, and public education
to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed by the U.S.
Constitution. Since its inception in 1920, the ACLU has played a part in nearly every
significant American social or political issue in the 20th and 21st centuries. Its
primary aims have been the defense of the freedoms of speech and press, the separation
of church and state, the free exercise of religion, due process of law, equal protection
of the law, and privacy rights of all citizens.
The ACLU was established in 1920 to protect the constitutional freedoms granted in the
Bill of Rights. It grew out of the Civil Liberties Bureau of the American Union Against
Militarism (AUAM), which defended the rights of conscientious objectors and the free
speech rights of war protesters. In October 1917, this group became an independent
organization, the National Civil Liberties Bureau (NCLB), led by Roger Baldwin and
Crystal Eastman. They formed the ACLU on January 19, 1920 to address postwar civil
liberties violations and to secure amnesty for wartime dissidents, with Baldwin serving
as executive director.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, labor and political speech issues predominated, along
with resisting all forms of censorship and working for amnesty and the repeal of
criminal syndicalism laws. Its highest-profile case during this time was to challenge
the Tennessee law forbidding the teaching of evolution by defending John T. Scopes in
the famous Dayton, Tennessee “Monkey Trial.” Following the outbreak of war in Europe in
1939, its focus returned to conscientious objection and freedom of speech during
wartime, and to condemning the internment of Japanese aliens and Japanese-American
citizens, and then to combating postwar attacks on civil liberties through the House
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the Smith Act, state loyalty oaths, and Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI) surveillance. The ACLU also established committees to
address racial discrimination and discrimination against women during this period.
Beginning in 1950, the ACLU experienced significant growth and change. Roger Baldwin,
who fostered a small, centrally-controlled unit, retired as executive director in 1950
to take a more ambassadorial role. His successor, Patrick Murphy Malin, oversaw a change
in the ACLU's structure to a strengthened network of affiliates at the state and
regional levels, which monitor for civil liberties infringements and initiate cases in
their geographic areas. Largely due to the stronger affiliates, the ACLU grew
significantly and reached over 60,000 members by 1962, when John de J. Pemberton became
executive director. During this period, the ACLU was also continuously renegotiating the
scope and nature of its work, reconciling the multitude of views from affiliates and
members. Starting with the civil rights movement, those that favored a broad definition
of what constituted civil liberties work won out, as the organization took on cases
involving abortion rights, women's rights, affirmative action, and other areas far from
the basic principle of protecting First Amendment rights on which the ACLU was
founded.
During the 1950s, the ACLU came to the defense of Communists as it challenged the
actions of McCarthy and HUAC on the tenet that only peoples' acts, not their beliefs,
should be penalized; anything less infringed on First Amendment principles. A related
battle was fought over censorship and freedom of speech, as national security concerns
led to the desire to protect people from materials that promoted Communism or were
perceived to erode community morals. The ACLU challenged any censorship attempts as a
fundamental attack on free speech and accepted no infringement in any form. This
absolutist stance resulted in one of its most controversial cases, defending the right
of American Nazis to parade through Skokie, Illinois, home to many Holocaust survivors,
in 1977. The ACLU won the court case but lost a large portion of its membership who
resigned in protest. Executive director Aryeh Neier, who had assumed the post in 1970,
stepped down and was replaced by Ira Glasser, who stabilized the organization through an
emergency appeal to supporters that raised over $500,000.
Another significant, and sometimes controversial, area of work for the ACLU in the 1950s
was its efforts to enforce the separation of church and state. Working to end
state-sanctioned forms of religion, the ACLU sought to abolish school prayer, various
government subsidies for religious education, teaching religious concepts such as
creationism or intelligent design in public school science classes, and other
connections between government and religious activity. By the late 1960s, changes in
public attitude toward church/state issues cemented the organization's gains, although
fundamentalist religions continue challenging the laws.
Most of the ACLU's work from the 1950s onward involves the more ambiguous and complex
realm of civil rights, helping secure the rights or expanding the concept of those same
rights for those who had been denied them in the past such as African-Americans, women,
students, homosexuals, children, the mentally-ill, prisoners, and the accused. Projects
were established to address each issue through changing the law, educating the public,
and raising their own funds. The ACLU participated in all the major civil rights cases,
arguing for freedom of speech and association rights that allowed the sit-ins, freedom
rides, and other methods employed by the movement, and won many important cases before
the Supreme Court.
During the 1980s and 1990s, the ACLU faced a shift in public sentiment against its
views, to the point that ACLU membership was identified as out-of-the-mainstream, and it
became more difficult to secure Supreme Court victories. The ACLU re-fought a number of
battles over such issues as censorship, school prayer, creationism, and abortion rights.
In 2001, Anthony D. Romero succeeded Glasser as executive director. As of 2012, the ACLU
continues its program of litigation, lobbying, and public education to protect
Americans' Constitutional rights, focusing on First Amendment rights, equal protection
under the law, due process, and privacy, and working to extend rights to minorities that
have traditionally been denied them. The ACLU handles close to 6,000 cases annually and
appears before the United States Supreme Court more than any other organization except
the U.S. Department of Justice.
The ACLU has been responsible for what historian Samuel Walker has called “a revolution
of law and public attitudes toward individual liberty.” Walker estimates that modern
constitutional law has been shaped in no small measure by the ACLU, with the
organization involved in some 80% of the landmark cases in the twentieth century. The
ACLU has fostered the growth of tolerance, fought to end racial discrimination, promoted
a legal definition of privacy rights, and defended the rights of the unpopular, the
powerless, and the despised.
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Other Finding Aids
Subgroup 3 is part of the American Civil Liberties Union Records (Call Number MC001).
Due to the large volume of the ACLU records, multiple online finding aids have been
created:
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 1, The Roger
Baldwin Years, 1917-1947
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 2, 1947-1995
(bulk 1950-1980)
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 2,
Organizational Matters Series, 1947-1995
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 2, Project
Files Series, 1964-1979
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 2, Subject
Files Series, 1921-1990
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 2, Legal Case
Files Series, 1933-1990
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 2, Printed
Materials Series, 1917-1995
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 2,
Audiovisual Materials Series, circa 1920-1995
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 3, 1864-2006
(bulk 1970-1995)
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 3,
Organizational Matters, 1919-2006 (bulk 1970-2000)
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 3, Project
Files Series, 1877-2000 (bulk 1970-1995)
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 3, Subject
Files Series, 1969-1996
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 3, Legal Case
Files Series, 1864-2001 (bulk 1965-1995)
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 3, Regional
Offices Series, 1894-2005 (bulk 1970-1990)
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 3, Printed
and Audiovisual Materials Series, 1918-2006 (bulk 1978-2006)
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 4, 2011
Accessions, 1933-2002 (bulk 1970-2000)
Related Material
American Civil Liberties Union, Washington, D.C. Office
Records
The Mudd Manuscript Library holds the papers of several ACLU officers:
Roger Nash Baldwin Papers
Peggy Lamson Collection on Roger Baldwin
Osmond K. Fraenkel Diaries
Jeffrey E. Fuller Papers
Arthur Garfield Hays Papers
Laura W. Murphy Papers
Carol Pitchersky Papers
Nadine Strossen Papers
The Mudd Library also holds the records of several organizations involved in civil
rights, including:
American United for the Separation of Church and State Records
Fund for the Republic Records
Law Students Civil Rights Research Council
Records
World Press Freedom Committee Records
The Manuscripts Division at Princeton University holds the P.E.N. American Center Records.
Alternative Form Available
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 1, The Roger
Baldwin Years is available on microfilm.
Public records of the ACLU from 1917 to 1989, from American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 2, have been
microfilmed by the Microfilming Corporation of America (MCA) and University
Microfilms International (UMI). These records include minutes of the board of
directors, mailings to the board of directors, biennial conference papers, policy
guides, the national legal docket, organization manuals, constitution and bylaws,
legal briefs, and publications.
Princeton University Library Finding Aids 
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