April 15, 2025: Kyle Contexts: The ACLU

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

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

1)     1910s and 20s Origins: The ACLU evolved out ofanother organization, the NationalCivil Liberties Bureau (NCLB), which was foundedduring World War I (or the Great War, as it was then known) to defendanti-war speech and conscientious objectors among other causes. The officialco-founders were CrystalEastman and RogerNash Baldwin, but originalmembers also included such luminaries as Jane Addams, Helen Keller, FelixFrankfurter, and the dissenting anti-war Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin. ItsWWI activisms certainly put the NLCB (which Baldwin renamed the ACLU in 1920when he became its sole director) on the map, but it was its central role in theScopes Trial (about which I blogged a few weeks ago) which truly launchedthe organization into national prominence.

2)     Japanese incarceration: I wrote at length in mybook We the People about the role that Baldwin and the ACLU playedin the earlyopposition to the Japanese incarceration policy, leading up to their keyrole in all of the major court cases opposing that policy, from the unsuccessfulbut influential Korematsuv. United States to the successful and even more influential Ex parteEndo. While in hindsight it might be easy to see those efforts as right(although thesedays I’m not at all sure that’d be a shared perspective), it’s important tonote that Japanese incarceration was quite popular in its era, supported by asignificant majority of Americans, and indeed seen by many as part of the wareffort, making opposition to it potentially treasonous as well as unpopular.But the ACLU pursued that opposition nonetheless, to my mind one of the mostcourageous organizational actions of the 20th century.

3)     Loving v. Virginia: A coupledecades later, the ACLU took another unpopular and courageous stand, if perhapsone that also reflected a changing society that was coming around to theorganization’s civil liberties and rights emphases. When young Black woman Mildred Jeter Lovingwrote to Attorney General Robert Kennedy for help staying together with herwhite husband Richard Loving despite Virginia’s laws prohibiting theirmarriage, Kennedy referred the couple tothe ACLU, who represented them in their landmarkSupreme Court case. Given that I grew up in Virginia and that my sons arethe product of an interracial marriage, it’s fair to say that this itemrepresents a truly multilayered context for Kyle!

Nextcontext tomorrow,

Ben

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