Since its founding in 1920, the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been involved in some of the most well-known constitutional law cases in American history. In the "Scopes Monkey Trial" of 1925 (which inspired the acclaimed play and film
Inherit the Wind), the ACLU partnered with attorney Clarence Darrow to defend a biology teacher arrested for teaching evolution in his Tennessee classroom. In the 1960s, the ACLU provided free legal assistance to Richard and Mildred Loving, arrested for violating Virginia's ban on interracial marriage; the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision
Loving v. Virginia subsequently struck down prohibitions on interracial marriage on equal protection grounds. More recently, the ACLU has challenged Trump administration executive orders concerning immigration and border security.
Researchers at Duke now have access to archival materials from the ACLU
's work in the twentieth century. The Goodson Law Library has just subscribed to
The Making of Modern Law: American Civil Liberties Union Papers 1912-1990. The searchable collection consists of legal case files and news clippings on ACLU activities, organized into two sub-collections:
- 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.
The earliest materials, which pre-date the official formation of the ACLU, include correspondence and news clippings on jail conditions, sedition trials, and conscientious objectors during World War I. the collections can be searched on the main screen, or browsed under
"Explore Collections." Keyword searches for broad topics like
marriage will return thousands of pages of ACLU research and legal documents; a search for a case name, such as
Loving v. Virginia, will retrieve a narrower set of results, with the relevant pages within each result flagged in a sidebar.
The digital collection provides a fascinating view of American history through the work of ACLU lawyers. For more information about the history of the ACLU, try a subject search of the
Duke Libraries Catalog for
American Civil Liberties Union. For assistance with using the new database or with locating other ACLU materials, be sure to
Ask a Librarian.
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