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A Brief History of the ACLU of Illinois Civil liberties were in a sorry state when Roger Baldwin founded the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920. Citizens were sitting in jail for holding anti-war views. U.S. Attorney General Palmer was conducting raids upon aliens suspected of holding unorthodox opinions. Racial segregation was the law of the land and violence against African Americans was routine. Sex discrimination was firmly institutionalized. It wasn't until 1920 that women even got to vote. Constitutional rights for gays and lesbians, low-income people, prisoners, the mentally ill and other groups were literally unthinkable. And, perhaps most significantly, the Supreme Court had yet to uphold a single free speech claim under the First Amendment. Some of the earliest organizers of the ACLU were Chicagoans such as Jane Addams, the prominent social worker, Duncan MacDonald, president of the Illinois Mine Workers, and Clarence Darrow. A little later, they were joined by such eminent Illinoisans as civic leader Georgia Lloyd and attorneys Robert Drake and Walter Fisher, all of whom helped to establish the ACLU of Illinois. Through litigation and public education, the ACLU worked to educate people about their constitutional rights and to ensure that those rights were upheld. In 1926, the Chicago Civil Liberties Committee, the forerunner of the ACLU of Illinois, opened its offices on Washington Street. Since that time, Illinois has been one of the strongest links in the ACLU chain of affiliated state offices around the nation. The Illinois affiliate was formally incorporated with the national ACLU in 1946. One of the ACLU's most famous trials, the Scopes "Monkey Trial," occurred shortly after its founding. The ACLU initiated this case in 1925 when science teacher John Scopes volunteered to place himself in legal jeopardy by challenging Tennessee's anti-evolution statute. Chicago's very own Clarence Darrow, an ACLU cooperating attorney, was named to defend him. Scopes was convicted and fined $100. On appeal, however, the Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the law but reversed Scopes' conviction. The ACLU of Illinois challenged many civil liberties violations in the Chicago area during the mid-1930s, including police attacks on jobless demonstrators, raids on workers' halls, attacks on mixed sunbathing by blacks and whites in public parks, loyalty oaths for teachers and legislation which gagged the press. In the late 1940s, Jean Paul Sartre's play The Respectful Prostitute was censored by the Chicago Police. The ACLU of Illinois not only protested the police ruling, but presented the play at a private showing and published a pamphlet attacking the ban. The ban was later rescinded. One of the most significant cases in the history of the ACLU occurred in Illinois during the spring of 1949. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the conviction of Rev. Arthur Terminiello, a then-suspended anti-Semitic Roman Catholic priest, for disturbing the peace in Chicago. Terminiello had been convicted on the grounds that his unrestrained language in a private hall in Albany Park caused a near-riot by hostile demonstrators who broke into the hall. The Court's decision established the principle that speakers, however obnoxious their views, could not be stopped because of a hostile audience. The speaker was entitled to protection and the crowd must be controlled. Terminiello has become the basis for victory in free speech cases throughout the country. During the 1950s, the ACLU focused on loyalty-security oaths and the struggle against McCarthyism. In one ACLU case, the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the "Broyles Test Oath," which required state employees to vow that they were not members of an organization advocating the overthrow of the government. In another, however, the Illinois Supreme Court agreed with the ACLU that a law requiring loyalty oaths for public housing tenants was unconstitutional. In 1959, the organization published a study entitled Secret Detention by the Chicago Police, which exposed the police practice of arresting suspects and holding them for 17 or more hours, moving them and beating them in hopes of eliciting a confession. This led to a major ACLU of Illinois constitutional victory when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Escobedo v. Illinois that suspects are entitled to consult an attorney before they are questioned by the police. Two of the most important cases won by the ACLU of Illinois during the 1960s were challenges to racial discrimination. In the first, the ACLU was successful in the first application of the Illinois Armstrong Act, which resulted in the desegregation of the Waukegan public school system. The second case was the famous 1969 Gautreaux v. CHA case, in which the ACLU successfully proved that the Chicago Housing Authority was guilty of racial discrimination and segregation. Later that decade, the need to broaden the scope of civil liberties defense in Illinois could not be ignored. Responding to that need, in 1969 the Roger Baldwin Foundation of ACLU, Inc. (RBF) was established as the tax-deductible component of the organization. The RBF is the arm of the ACLU that provides most of the financial support for the organization's legal and public education programs. During the 1970s the ACLU of Illinois, in a landmark defense of First Amendment rights, successfully challenged a Skokie ordinance prohibiting a demonstration by American Nazis, even though it cost the organization thousands of members, and the Nazis never marched. (The Skokie Public Library has posted a digital collection of information on the event.) Later that decade, the organization made women's reproductive freedom a priority by establishing the Reproductive Rights Project in 1979. The Project provides virtually all the legal defense of reproductive rights in the state, and carries the largest docket in the nation of such cases. The ACLU of Illinois is the only legal organization in the state to successfully challenge every piece of anti-choice legislation enacted by the Illinois General Assembly. Ronald Reagan's election to the presidency brought an onslaught of attacks against civil liberties, and shaped the work of the ACLU for the 1980s. Reagan, and then Bush, packed the federal courts with ultra-conservative and even reactionary judges with hopes of overturning hard-fought civil liberties battles. In 1984, the ACLU of Illinois established the Institutionalized Persons Project to provide legal representation to Illinois residents in prisons, jails, mental health centers, developmental centers, and child-welfare institutions such as group homes, foster homes and shelters. In 1988, the Children's Initiative filed B.H. v. McDonald, a federal class-action lawsuit against the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) charging the state agency with abusing and neglecting the very children it was commissioned to protect. The suit resulted in a consent decree which mandates sweeping reforms of the system. In 1992, the Mental Health Initiative was established and successfully filed suit to reform the troubled Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities. Also during the 1980s the ACLU of Illinois established the AIDS and Civil Liberties Project to provide legal advice to HIV infected persons denied jobs, housing, access to public accommodation and medical treatment. In the 1990s, the ACLU established the Gay and Lesbian Rights Project in order to challenge increasing attacks against the civil liberties of gay men and lesbians in Illinois. The Racial Justice Project was also established to address civil liberties and civil rights violations in public housing, police protection, and education. The 1990s saw several landmark cases. In 1995, the ACLU challenged warrantless searches in the Cabrini Green Development area in Pratt v. CHA. A federal judge permanently enjoined the CHA from conducting these searches. In 1996, the Supreme Court ruled in O’Hare Truck Service v. City of Northlake, a case filed on behalf of a Northlake truck service owner who was removed from Northlake’s list of approved towing companies for supporting the mayor’s opponent, and agreed with ACLU that governing bodies may not deny public contracts because of the political associations of the company’s owner. In 1997, ACLU filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of the 40,000 mental health patients in state mental health facilities. K.L. v. Edgar resulted in improved training of state facility staff members. In Chicago v. Morales, the Supreme Court struck down Chicago’s ant-gang loitering law, which disproportionately targeted African-American and Latino youth who were not engaged in criminal activity. With future threats to individual freedom ever present, the ACLU of Illinois, with over 23,000 members throughout the state, will continue to be the champion of the rights and freedoms promised in the Bill of Rights. |
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