[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 20th 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!
