Items18The creator’s order
  1. 1Norman ThomasNorman ThomasBorn 20 Nov 1884In 1942 most American liberals, and a majority of the American Civil Liberties Union's national board, accepted Roosevelt's order removing Japanese Americans from the West Coast as a wartime necessity. Thomas, the Socialist Party leader and a long-serving ACLU board member, refused. He opposed the…0i
  2. 2Ralph Lawrence CarrRalph Lawrence CarrBorn 11 Dec 1887Colorado's Republican governor was almost alone among Western officials in 1942 in saying publicly that Japanese Americans were citizens with the same rights as anyone else. While other governors refused to accept evacuees, Carr told his own voters and party that Colorado would take them and that…0i
  3. 3Margaret Chase SmithMargaret Chase SmithBorn 14 Dec 1897On 1 June 1950, four months after Joseph McCarthy's Wheeling speech, Smith became the first Republican senator to condemn her fellow Republican on the Senate floor. Her "Declaration of Conscience", co-signed by six other Republicans, defended "the right to criticize, the right to hold unpopular…0i
  4. 4Helen SuzmanHelen SuzmanBorn 7 Nov 1917For 13 years from 1961 Suzman was the only Progressive Party member of South Africa's whites-only parliament, elected by affluent white voters in Houghton and spending her time attacking the laws most of them benefited from. She was the lone vote against the 1963 law allowing 90 days' detention…0i
  5. 5Andrei SakharovAndrei SakharovBorn 21 May 1921Few people had more reason to stay loyal: Sakharov was a principal designer of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, three times a Hero of Socialist Labour and a full member of the Academy of Sciences. In 1968 he circulated an essay arguing that intellectual freedom was essential to humanity's survival, lost…0i
  6. 6Frank ChurchFrank ChurchBorn 25 Jul 1924Watergate made it easy for a Democrat to investigate a Republican White House. What Church's Senate committee did in 1975 and 1976 was harder: it documented decades of abuses by the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency under presidents of both parties, including the FBI's campaign against Martin…0i
  7. 7Aryeh NeierAryeh NeierBorn 22 Apr 1937Neier was born in Berlin in 1937 and escaped Nazi Germany as a child; many of his relatives did not. As executive director of the ACLU in 1977 he defended the right of a neo-Nazi group to march in Skokie, Illinois, a town with many Holocaust survivors. Around 30,000 members resigned and the…0i
  8. 8Nat HentoffNat HentoffBorn 10 Jun 1925Hentoff spent half a century as a columnist for The Village Voice, a jazz critic and a self-described "Jewish atheist civil libertarian", and he lost friends on the left with regularity. He attacked campus speech codes in the 1980s and 1990s, defended the speech rights of people he despised, and…0i
  9. 9Sergei KovalevSergei KovalevBorn 2 Mar 1930A biologist who served ten years in Soviet camps and exile for documenting human rights abuses, Kovalev became a Yeltsin ally after 1991 and Russia's first human rights commissioner. When Yeltsin sent the army into Chechnya in December 1994, Kovalev went to Grozny, stayed through the bombardment…0i
  10. 10Nadine StrossenNadine StrossenBorn 18 Aug 1950Strossen, the ACLU's first woman president, from 1991 to 2008, took on fellow feminists in 1995 with Defending Pornography, arguing against the anti-pornography ordinances promoted by Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin on the grounds that censorship laws are most often turned on women and…0i