1923-1940 | 1940-1960 | 1960-1980 | 1980-present
Since our inception, three years after the national ACLU was founded in 1920, we have been fighting to preserve and expand the rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.
It was literally labor that brought the Southern California ACLU into existence, midwived by the radical author Upton Sinclair (pictured with police above). In 1923, striking San Pedro longshoremen were banned from holding public meetings by the Los Angeles Police Department. At a rally protesting the ban, Sinclair and five friends tried to read aloud the First Amendment ofthe Constitution in support of the workers' right to free speech and assembly. Though the police warned them to "cut out that Constitution stuff," they continued and were arrested and charged with criminal syndicalism, or agitating to overthrow the government.
Even in the best of times, defending the right to free expression is a difficult undertaking, but in those days it took enormous courage. As Sinclair wrote to the police chief upon his release: "All I can say, sir, is that I intend to do what little one man can do to awake the public conscience, and that meantime I am not frightened by your menaces. I am not a giant physically . . . I freely admit that when I see a line of a hundred policemen with drawn revolvers flung across a street to keep anyone from coming onto private property to hear my feeble voice, I am somewhat disturbed in my nerves. But I have a conscience and a religious faith, and I know that our liberties were not won without suffering, and may be lost again through our cowardice. I intend to do my duty to my country."
In the wake of the San Pedro strike, Sinclair, already a member of the newly-founded national ACLU in New York, helped to form the first ACLU affiliate here in Los Angeles. Due in large part to Sinclair's influence, the ACLU/SC took an early and radical stand against worker exploitation. To this day, we are the only ACLU affiliate to advocate an economic Bill of Rights.
Throughout the twenties and thirties, the ACLU of Southern California continued to defend the right of workers to strike — indeed to organize at all, since California's Criminal Syndicalism Act effectively criminalized union membership. It was also widely used to crack down on the political speech of socialists, communists, and civil rights advocates.
In 1931, we hired our first — and the nation's first — civil rights attorney, Al Wirin, who carried our fight to protect political speech into the courts. In 1934, Wirin drove out to the Imperial Valley armed with injunctions to prevent growers and businessmen from breaking up the meetings of Mexican farm workers. Called away from his dinner in a Brawley hotel by a mysterious page, he was seized by a vigilante mob and with the aid of police, taken out into the desert, beaten, threatened with murder, robbed of everything he was carrying and his shoes, and then turned loose. Undeterred, he responded by suing the governor, the head of the highway patrol, the captain of the Red Squad of the LAPD, the police chief of Brawley, and 25 John Doe vigilantes.
At a time when union organizers hid by day in order to be free to organize at night, and police routinely produced confessions with rolled telephone books that left no bruises, the ACLU/SC continued to fight the Criminal Syndicalism Act. It took almost fifty years to have it declared unconstitutional, but we persisted and in 1971 we finally prevailed.
1923-1940 | 1940-1960 | 1960-1980 | 1980-present
