For most of the twentieth century, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was the principal defender of the rights that citizens can assert against their government. The ACLU fostered the growth of tolerance, fought to end racial discrimination, promoted a legal definition of privacy rights, and defended the rights of the unpopular, the powerless, and the despised. This database includes bills, briefs, correspondence, court documents, legal case files, memorandums, minutes, newspaper clippings, reports, scrapbooks, and telegrams. Significant subjects include: the first “Red Scare” following the Russian Revolution of 1917, debates in the 1920s on immigration, the American Birth Control League, lynchings in the 1930s, debates on aliens and immigrants in the years immediately preceding the U.S. entry into the Second World War, and the ACLU’s involvement in two of the mid-century’s most important issues: the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement. In the Second Reconstruction, 1945-1968, the ACLU played a vital role in the gradual but progressive movement to provide full political rights for African Americans and to begin to redress longstanding economic and social inequities.

• American Civil Liberties Union Papers, Part I, 1912-1990: consists of two major collections comprising myriad subseries. The Roger Baldwin Years, 1912-1950, contains subseries with clippings and files on academic freedom, censorship, legislation, federal departments and federal legislation, state activities, conscientious objectors, injunctions, and labor and labor organization correspondence. Years of Expansion, 1950-1990, encompasses foundation project files on the Amnesty Project, 1964-1980; the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee, 1964-1976; and subject files on freedom of belief, expression, and association; due process of law; equality before the law; international civil liberties; and legal case files, 1933-1990.
   
• American Civil Liberties Union Papers, Part II, 1912 - 1990: Southern Regional Office documents the ACLU’s legal battle to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in thirteen Southern states. This collection is an indispensable resource for understanding the complete history of the civil rights movement. Consisting of case files, correspondence, newspaper clippings, manuscripts, and more, this collection offers a primary source perspective on civil rights issues from voting rights to the dismantling of the Jim Crow system.