60 American Civil Liberties Union people

Laura Jane Addams was an American settlement activist, reformer, social worker, sociologist, public administrator and author. She was an important leader in the history of social work and women's suffrage in the United States and advocated for world peace. She co-founded Chicago's Hull House, one of America's most famous settlement houses. In 1910, Addams was awarded an honorary master of arts degree from Yale University, becoming the first woman to receive an honorary degree from the school. In 1920, she was a co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Michelle Alexander is a writer, civil rights advocate, and visiting professor at Union Theological Seminary. She is best known for her 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, and is an opinion columnist for The New York Times.

Roger Nash Baldwin was one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). He served as executive director of the ACLU until 1950.

Kevin Stuart Bankston is an American activist and attorney, who specialized in the areas of free speech and privacy law. He is currently Privacy Policy Director at Facebook, where he leads policy work on AI and emerging technologies. He was formerly the director of the Open Technology Institute (OTI) at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C.

Shenna Lee Bellows is an American politician and a non-profit executive director, best known for her work with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). She is the 50th Maine secretary of state. On December 2, 2020 the Maine Legislature elected her to be Maine secretary of state. She is Executive Director of the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine.

Francis Beverley Biddle was an American lawyer and judge who was the US Attorney General during World War II. He also served as the primary American judge during the postwar Nuremberg Trials as well as a United States Circuit Judge of the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Robyn Ellen Blumner is an opinion columnist, civil rights expert and the current president and chief executive officer (CEO) of the secular educational organization Center for Inquiry (CFI) and executive director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. She holds a J.D. degree and worked for several years as director of local affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union advocating for civil liberties and civil rights before becoming a newspaper columnist and editorial writer in Florida.

Lyle Benjamin Borst was an American nuclear physicist and inventor. He worked with Enrico Fermi in Chicago, was involved with the Manhattan District Project, and worked with Ernest O. Wollan to conduct neutron scattering and neutron diffraction studies.

Benjamin Brewster was the Episcopal Bishop of Maine and Missionary Bishop of Western Colorado.

Clarence Seward Darrow was an American lawyer who became famous in the early 20th century for his involvement in the Leopold and Loeb murder trial and the Scopes "Monkey" Trial. He was a leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and a prominent advocate for Georgist economic reform.

Lisa Michele Daugaard is an American criminal justice reform activist. She is the director of the nonprofit organization Public Defender Association and a commissioner of the Community Police Commission in Seattle. She received a 2019 MacArthur Fellowship for her criminal justice reform work.

Alan Morton Dershowitz is an American lawyer known for his work in U.S. constitutional law and American criminal law. He taught at Harvard Law School from 1964 through 2013, where he was appointed as the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law in 1993. Dershowitz is a regular media contributor, political commentator, and legal analyst.

Harmeet Kaur Dhillon is an American lawyer and Republican Party official. She is the former vice chairwoman of the California Republican Party, and a National Committeewoman of the Republican National Committee for California. She is the founder of a law practice called Dhillon Law Group Inc. In 2018, she helped launch the nonprofit Center for American Liberty, which does legal work related to civil liberties. She is a regular guest on Fox News.

Michael Stanley Dukakis is an American retired lawyer and politician who served as governor of Massachusetts from 1975 to 1979 and again from 1983 to 1991. He is the longest-serving governor in Massachusetts history and only the second Greek-American governor in U.S. history, after Spiro Agnew. He was nominated by the Democratic Party for president in the 1988 election, losing to the Republican nominee, Vice President George H. W. Bush.

Crystal Catherine Eastman (June 25, 1881 – July 28, 1928 was an American lawyer, antimilitarist, feminist, socialist, and journalist. She is best remembered as a leader in the fight for women's suffrage, as a co-founder and co-editor with her brother Max Eastman of the radical arts and politics magazine The Liberator, co-founder of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and co-founder in 1920 of the American Civil Liberties Union. In 2000 she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York.

Morris Ernst was an American lawyer and prominent attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). In public life, he defended and asserted the rights of Americans to privacy and freedom from censorship, playing a significant role in challenging and overcoming the banning of certain works of literature and in asserting the right of media employees to organise labor unions. He also promoted an anti-communist stance within the ACLU itself, and was a member of the President's Committee on Civil Rights.

James Lawrence "Larry" Fly was an American lawyer, famous as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and, later, director of the American Civil Liberties Union. He helped inaugurate standards for commercial television broadcasting, and vigorously opposed wiretapping throughout his career.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was a labor leader, activist, and feminist who played a leading role in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Flynn was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union and a visible proponent of women's rights, birth control, and women's suffrage. She joined the Communist Party USA in 1936 and late in life, in 1961, became its chairwoman. She died during a visit to the Soviet Union, where she was accorded a state funeral with processions in the Red Square attended by over 25,000 people.

Felix Frankfurter was an American lawyer, professor, and jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Frankfurter served on the Supreme Court from 1939 to 1962 and was a noted advocate of judicial restraint in the judgments of the Court.

Joan Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1993 until her death in 2020. She was nominated by President Bill Clinton, replacing retiring Justice Byron White, and at the time was generally viewed as a moderate consensus-builder. She eventually became part of the liberal wing of the Court as the Court shifted to the right over time. Ginsburg was the first Jewish woman and the second woman to serve on the Court, after Sandra Day O'Connor. During her tenure, Ginsburg wrote notable majority opinions, including United States v. Virginia (1996), Olmstead v. L.C. (1999), Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services, Inc. (2000), and City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York (2005).

Richard N. Gottfried is an American attorney and politician serving as a member of the New York State Assembly from the 75th district. Gottfried has been a member of the Assembly for more than 50 years, making him the longest-serving member of the body.

Frank Porter Graham was an American educator and political activist. A professor of history, he was elected President of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1930, and he later became the first President of the consolidated University of North Carolina system.

Vanita Gupta is the United States Associate Attorney General, serving since April 22, 2021. Gupta served as the president and chief executive officer of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and as the head of the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice, where she was the chief civil rights prosecutor for the United States from 2014 to 2017.

Swinburne Hale (1884–1937) was an American lawyer, poet, and socialist, best remembered as one of the leading civil rights attorneys of the decade of the 1920s. Hale was a Harvard College classmate of Roger Nash Baldwin and law partner of Walter Nelles and Isaac Shorr and was active in the establishment and early work of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Hale also played a role in the progressive politics of the early 1920s as a leading member of the Committee of Forty-Eight and a spokesman for the fledgling Farmer-Labor Party.

Maya Lakshmi Harris is an American lawyer, public policy advocate, and writer. Harris was one of three senior policy advisors for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign's policy agenda and she also served as chair of the 2020 presidential campaign of her sister, Kamala Harris.

Alison Holcomb has served as criminal justice director of American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Washington and in 2014 was named national director of the ACLU Campaign to End Mass Incarceration. Holcomb wrote Initiative 502, which legalized recreational cannabis in Washington, has been called "Pot Mama". In her role as director of the Campaign to End Mass Incarceration, she will work "to reform state-level criminal justice policies that have increased incarceration rates dramatically during a period of declining crime and have exacerbated racial disparities".

Quincy Howe was an American journalist, best known for his CBS radio broadcasts during World War II.

Gursharan Kaur is an Indian history professor and author who is the spouse of the former prime minister of India Dr. Manmohan Singh, the 13th Prime Minister of India.

Helen Adams Keller was an American author, disability rights advocate, political activist and lecturer. Born in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, she lost her sight and hearing after a bout of illness at the age of nineteen months. She then communicated primarily using home signs until the age of seven when she met her first teacher and life-long companion Anne Sullivan, who taught her language, including reading and writing; Sullivan's first lessons involved spelling words on Keller's hand to show her the names of objects around her. She also learned how to speak and to understand other people's speech using the Tadoma method. After an education at both specialist and mainstream schools, she attended Radcliffe College of Harvard University and became the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. She worked for the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) from 1924 until 1968, during which time she toured the United States and traveled to 35 countries around the globe advocating for those with vision loss.

Ryan Dean Kiesel is a former Democratic Party member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, representing District 28. He is now Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma.

Judith Fingeret Krug was an American librarian, freedom of speech proponent, and critic of censorship. Krug became director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom at the American Library Association in 1967. In 1969, she joined the Freedom to Read Foundation as its executive director. Krug co-founded Banned Books Week in 1982.

Corliss Lamont was an American socialist and humanist philosopher and advocate of various left-wing and civil liberties causes. As a part of his political activities he was the Chairman of National Council of American-Soviet Friendship starting from the early 1940s.

Yasmin Lee is a transgender pornographic film actress and model. She appeared in the film The Hangover Part II as Kimmy.

John de Leon is a retired Cuban-American attorney known for his work on immigration and civil rights issues. His cases were the subject of reports in The New York Times and ABC News and he was a frequent guest on Spanish-language news and opinion programs and local media discussing immigration and other human-rights topics. He also appeared as a legal commentator on CNN.

Arthur Oncken Lovejoy was an American philosopher and intellectual historian, who founded the discipline known as the history of ideas with his book The Great Chain of Being (1936), on the topic of that name, which is regarded as 'probably the single most influential work in the history of ideas in the United States during the last half century'.

Louise Frankel Rosenfield Noun was a feminist, social activist, philanthropist, and civil libertarian.

John Whiteside Parsons was an American rocket engineer, chemist, and Thelemite occultist. Associated with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Parsons was one of the principal founders of both the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the Aerojet Engineering Corporation. He invented the first rocket engine to use a castable, composite rocket propellant, and pioneered the advancement of both liquid-fuel and solid-fuel rockets.

Harriet Fleischl Pilpel was an American attorney and women's rights activist. She wrote and lectured extensively regarding the freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and reproductive freedom. Pilpel served as general counsel for both the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood. During her career, she participated in 27 cases that came before the United States Supreme Court. Pilpel was involved in the birth control movement and the pro-choice movement. She helped to establish the legal rights of minors to abortion and contraception.

Jeannette Pickering Rankin was an American politician and women's rights advocate, and the first woman to hold federal office in the United States. She was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Republican from Montana in 1916, and again in 1940. As of 2021, Rankin was still the only woman ever elected to Congress from Montana.

Robert Leonard Reynolds was an American historian.

Anthony D. Romero is the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. He assumed the position in 2001 as the first Latino and openly gay man to do so.

Deborah Ross is an American lawyer and politician who is the U.S. Representative for North Carolina's 2nd congressional district, based in Raleigh. Ross previously served as a Democratic member of the North Carolina House of Representatives representing the state's 38th and then 34th House district, including much of northern Raleigh and surrounding suburbs in Wake County.

Edward Alsworth Ross was a progressive American sociologist, eugenicist, economist, and major figure of early criminology.

Gabriel Rothblatt, born October 5, 1982 is a technoprogressive political activist, a 2014 congressional candidate, and a writer and speaker in the futurist and transhumanist movements.

Rose Schneiderman was a Polish-born American socialist and feminist, and one of the most prominent female labor union leaders. As a member of the New York Women's Trade Union League, she drew attention to unsafe workplace conditions, following the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, and as a suffragist she helped to pass the New York state referendum of 1917 that gave women the right to vote. Schneiderman was also a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union and served on the National Recovery Administration's Labor Advisory Board under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. She is credited with coining the phrase "Bread and Roses," to indicate a worker's right to something higher than subsistence living.

Herbert E. Selwyn was an American attorney and businessperson. Selwyn worked as a criminal defense attorney and was counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union in the 1950s. His role as a LGBT rights advocate led to the incorporation of the first gay organization, the Mattachine Society.

Arjun Singh Sethi is a Sikh American civil and political rights writer, human rights lawyer, and Adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center and Vanderbilt University Law School.

Faiz Shakir is an American Democratic political advisor. Most recently the campaign manager for Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign, Shakir previously worked as an aide to Congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, was an editor-in-chief of the ThinkProgress blog, and was the political director of the American Civil Liberties Union. Raised in Florida by Pakistani immigrants, Shakir is a progressive liberal and an advocate for Muslim American communities.

John Howard Francis Shattuck is an international legal scholar and human rights leader. He served as the fourth President and Rector of Central European University (CEU) from August 2009 until July 31, 2016. He is a senior fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and he joined the faculty of Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in January 2017.

Reginald "Reggie" T. Shuford is a Philadelphia-based lawyer and executive director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania.

Norman Siegel is the former executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), New York's leading civil rights organization, under the umbrella of the nationwide American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), as well as a former candidate for Public Advocate in New York City and a noted civil rights attorney.

Tania Simoncelli is Senior Advisor to the Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Prior to that position, she worked for two years as Assistant Director for Forensic Science and Biomedical Innovation within the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. From 2010–2013, she worked in the Food and Drug Administration Office of the Commissioner. From 2003–2010, Simoncelli worked as the Science Advisor to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), where she advised the organization on emerging developments in science and technology that pose challenges for civil liberties.

Chase Strangio is an American lawyer and transgender rights activist. He is a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Joan Straumanis is an academic administrator, philosopher, second-wave feminist, mathematician, civil libertarian, public speaker, and American pioneer in women's studies. She co-created the first women's studies program outside a public university, and served as president of both Antioch College and the Metropolitan College of New York and as academic dean at other institutions.

Norman Mattoon Thomas was an American Presbyterian minister who achieved fame as a socialist, pacifist, and six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America.

Herbert William "Herb" Titus was an American attorney, writer, and politician. He was a candidate for Vice President of the United States in the 1996 U.S. presidential election on the Constitution Party ticket.

Antonio Ramón Villaraigosa is an American politician who served as the 41st Mayor of Los Angeles from 2005 to 2013. A member of the Democratic Party, Villaraigosa was a national co-chairman of Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, a member of President Barack Obama's Transition Economic Advisory Board, and chair of the 2012 Democratic National Convention.

Witold "Vic" Walczak is the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania.

Lillian D. Wald was an American nurse, humanitarian and author. She was known for contributions to human rights and was the founder of American community nursing. She founded the Henry Street Settlement in New York City and was an early advocate to have nurses in public schools.

Jon Wiener is an American historian and journalist based in Los Angeles, California. His most recent book is Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, a Los Angeles Times bestseller co-authored by Mike Davis. He waged a 25-year legal battle to win the release of the FBI's files on John Lennon. Wiener played a key role in efforts to expose the surveillance as well as the behind-the-scenes battling between the government and the former Beatle and is a expert on the FBI-versus-Lennon controversy. A professor emeritus of United States history at the University of California, Irvine and host of The Nation's weekly podcast, Start Making Sense. he is also a contributing editor to the progressive political weekly magazine The Nation. He also hosts a weekly radio program in Los Angeles.