April 15, 2025: Kyle Contexts: The ACLU

[This week, my amazing younger son Kyle turns 18! So I wanted to dedicate the week’s blog series to AmericanStudying some Kyle Contexts, leading up to a repeat of his excellent Guest Post on the OJ Simpson trial.]

Three significant stages in the evolution of the nation’s preeminent civil rights organization (and one with which my blossoming future lawyer and/or activist of a younger son has connected in multiple ways over the last few years):

1)      1910s and 20s Origins: The ACLU evolved out of another organization, the National Civil Liberties Bureau (NCLB), which was founded during World War I (or the Great War, as it was then known) to defend anti-war speech and conscientious objectors among other causes. The official co-founders were Crystal Eastman and Roger Nash Baldwin, but original members also included such luminaries as Jane Addams, Helen Keller, Felix Frankfurter, and the dissenting anti-war Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin. Its WWI activisms certainly put the NLCB (which Baldwin renamed the ACLU in 1920 when he became its sole director) on the map, but it was its central role in the Scopes Trial (about which I blogged a few weeks ago) which truly launched the organization into national prominence.

2)      Japanese incarceration: I wrote at length in my book We the People about the role that Baldwin and the ACLU played in the early opposition to the Japanese incarceration policy, leading up to their key role in all of the major court cases opposing that policy, from the unsuccessful but influential Korematsu v. United States to the successful and even more influential Ex parte Endo. While in hindsight it might be easy to see those efforts as right (although these days I’m not at all sure that’d be a shared perspective), it’s important to note that Japanese incarceration was quite popular in its era, supported by a significant majority of Americans, and indeed seen by many as part of the war effort, making opposition to it potentially treasonous as well as unpopular. But the ACLU pursued that opposition nonetheless, to my mind one of the most courageous organizational actions of the 20^th century.

3)      Loving v. Virginia: A couple decades later, the ACLU took another unpopular and courageous stand, if perhaps one that also reflected a changing society that was coming around to the organization’s civil liberties and rights emphases. When young Black woman Mildred Jeter Loving wrote to Attorney General Robert Kennedy for help staying together with her white husband Richard Loving despite Virginia’s laws prohibiting their marriage, Kennedy referred the couple to the ACLU, who represented them in their landmark Supreme Court case. Given that I grew up in Virginia and that my sons are the product of an interracial marriage, it’s fair to say that this item represents a truly multilayered context for Kyle!

Next context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Lemme know any bday wishes I can pass along to my not-so-young man!