American Civil Liberties Union

Overview

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a nonprofit organization founded by Roger Baldwin and others in New York City in 1920 to champion constitutional liberties in the United States (Britannica). It works in three basic areas — freedom of expression, conscience, and association; due process of law; and equality under the law — and it pursues those goals chiefly by affecting the outcome of specific legal cases in the courts (Britannica). Since its founding it has initiated test cases as well as intervened in cases already before the courts, either by directly providing legal counsel or by filing a “friend of the court” (amicus curiae) brief (Britannica). A century later, that same case-driven method is visible in a Colorado school-library fight, where its state affiliate sues over removed books while two conservative legal organisations defend the district (Chalkbeat).

Origins: from wartime dissent to a permanent organisation

The ACLU was born out of the United States’ entry into World War I, when wartime hysteria and popular support for American participation led to censorship of opposition to the war and to harassment or imprisonment of individuals who opposed American entry (EBSCO). To protect the right to free speech, members of the pacifist American Union Against Militarism formed the Civil Liberties Board, and after resignations over that group’s embrace of the radical left, a number of members formed the nonpartisan National Civil Liberties Board (EBSCO). That board could not successfully fight the curtailment of civil liberties during the war or during the postwar Red Scare, when the government harassed and prosecuted thousands of citizens suspected of holding Marxist and other left-wing ideas (EBSCO). In 1920, its members created the restructured ACLU under the leadership of Roger Baldwin, a Boston attorney who had been the guiding spirit of the earlier board (EBSCO). The organisation’s broad base and its commitment to considering all violations of civil liberties distinguished it from other existing civil rights groups, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Anti-Defamation League (EBSCO).

The ACLU’s basic objective, as EBSCO summarises it, is to monitor and protect the constitutional rights of all American citizens and groups (EBSCO). It uses the courts to achieve its objectives, petitioning state courts but working mainly in the federal courts, where almost all of its cases bear on constitutional issues and some have led to landmark decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court (EBSCO). Its critics accuse it of having a specific political agenda, but the organisation claims political neutrality and has in fact championed individuals and organisations from both extremes of the political spectrum, including overturning laws banning the Communist Party and defending the right of Nazis to march in Jewish neighbourhoods (EBSCO).

A century of test cases

One of the ACLU’s most famous test cases was the Scopes trial of 1925, in which it supported Tennessee science teacher John T. Scopes in defying a Tennessee law forbidding the teaching of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution (Britannica). It has been active in overturning censorship laws, often through test cases resulting from the deliberate purchase of banned material and consequent arrest and trial, and although it has not always succeeded in these trials, the public airing of the issues has often led to success on appeal or in later legislative reconsideration (Britannica). As a result of its efforts against censorship, books such as James Joyce’s Ulysses could be imported into the United States (Britannica). The ACLU provided defense counsel in the Sacco-Vanzetti case in 1921 and the Scottsboro case of 1931–35, and one of its most significant freedom-of-religion cases involved the defense in the late 1930s of Jehovah’s Witnesses who refused, on grounds of conscience, to allow their children to salute the flag in public classrooms (Britannica).

In the 1950s and 1960s the ACLU handled cases questioning the constitutionality of loyalty oaths and the blacklisting of supposed left-wing “subversives,” and it played a role in Supreme Court decisions banning prayer in public schools as a violation of the separation of church and state (Britannica). In the 1960s it participated in cases that established the right of indigent defendants to legal counsel in criminal prosecutions, and in the same period it was involved in decisions barring the use in court of evidence obtained through illegal searches or seizures by the police (Britannica). Over the next several decades it was involved in many of the most renowned cases and issues in American society, including the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the rights of conscientious objectors, the Smith and McCarran anti-Communist acts, abortion rights, antiwar protests, and many others (EBSCO).

Case or issue	ACLU role, as reported
Scopes trial, 1925	Supported teacher John T. Scopes against Tennessee’s anti-evolution law (Britannica)
Sacco-Vanzetti, 1921	Provided defense counsel (Britannica)
Scottsboro, 1931–35	Provided defense counsel (Britannica)
Jehovah’s Witnesses flag salute, late 1930s	Defended parents refusing, on conscience grounds, to let children salute the flag (Britannica)
School prayer, 1950s–60s	Role in decisions banning prayer in public schools (Britannica)
Indigent counsel and illegal searches, 1960s	Participated in cases establishing counsel rights and barring illegally seized evidence (Britannica)
Skokie, 1976	Defended a proposed American Nazi Party march; the defence split the membership (EBSCO)

The Skokie episode remains the ACLU’s most unpopular cause among its own membership: the organisation took up the Nazis’ petition after Chicago refused a rally permit and Skokie denied a parade permit on public-nuisance grounds, and although the controversy was resolved without a march through the suburb, championing the Nazis’ cause split the organisation almost to the point of extinction (EBSCO). The union suffered a 15 percent drop in membership renewal and found itself with a half-million-dollar deficit, reorganised, cut staff, and brought in new leadership (EBSCO). In the years following Skokie, it faced the issues of the day, including LGBTQ rights, the rights of people with AIDS, the war on drugs, reproductive rights, immigrant rights, voting rights, and privacy rights (EBSCO).

Structure: a national office and a 50-state network

The ACLU is a private organisation of volunteers whose membership in 2025 numbered about 1.1 million, and it relies on more than two thousand volunteer lawyers for its litigation (EBSCO). Besides its two national offices in New York and Washington, DC, it has affiliates in all fifty states and Puerto Rico (EBSCO). Britannica likewise places its headquarters in New York City and describes it as headed by a national board of directors, with work performed by thousands of volunteers and about 100 staff attorneys in its older account (Britannica). That affiliate structure is what makes the Colorado case below possible: the national organisation does not have to bring every fight itself, because a state affiliate can sue in its own state under the same constitutional theories.

The Elizabeth School District book case

In the fall of 2024, the Elizabeth School District in conservative-leaning Elbert County, Colorado, decided to pull 19 titles from school libraries because of content school board members deemed not age appropriate, overly graphic, or highly sensitive, though one of the books was not actually removed because it had been checked out and was never returned (Chalkbeat). The removed books are primarily by or about LGBTQ people, people of color, or both, and include The Bluest Eye and Beloved, both by Toni Morrison, and The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (Chalkbeat). In December 2024, two students, a chapter of the NAACP, and an authors group, all represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, sued the district over the book removals, alleging that the removals violate students’ First Amendment rights to access information and ideas and authors’ rights to communicate those ideas to students (Chalkbeat). Colorado Public Radio’s account names the same plaintiffs — two students, the NAACP, and the Authors Guild — and describes the suit as challenging at least 19 removed books, primarily by or about people of color and LGBTQ people, on the ground that removing books because of disagreement with their ideas violates state and federal constitutions (CPR).

Lawyers for the district rebutted those claims in a 2025 legal filing, saying that a school library’s curation decisions are government speech immune from First Amendment scrutiny (Chalkbeat). A court ordered the district to return the removed books to its libraries and prohibited it from removing additional books based on their views, and the principal of Elizabeth High School confirmed to Colorado Public Radio that the books had been replaced, even as the district appealed the decision (CPR). In January 2026 the district dismissed that appeal days before final arguments were scheduled, saying its limited resources were best directed at preparing for trial, and it agreed to pay all of the plaintiffs’ costs on the appeal (CPR). Then, in July 2026, lawyers from Alliance Defending Freedom and the Heritage Foundation filed paperwork to join the legal team representing the district, about five months before a December jury trial was set to begin in federal district court (Chalkbeat). The case thus places the ACLU’s historic free-expression method — a test of what a public institution may remove from shelves — against the conservative legal organisations that now defend the removals.

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not claim a single settled founding day: it dates the founding to 1920 because one EBSCO account gives January 18 and another gives January 19, 1920. It does not claim a single removed-book count, reporting both Chalkbeat’s 18-effectively-removed account and the 19-book framing used by Colorado Public Radio and the plaintiffs. It does not name current national ACLU leadership, because no leadership names appeared in a source read in full for this profile. It does not report an outcome for the Elizabeth case: the January 2026 appeal dismissal and the July 2026 expansion of the defence team are the last verified developments, and the December 2026 jury trial is reported only as scheduled. Finally, it does not present Alliance Defending Freedom’s founding story here; ADF appears only as opposing counsel in the Elizabeth case, which is the relationship Chalkbeat verifies, while the site’s ADF profile carries ADF’s own founding account with its own sourcing.