[14][78] The ACLU is often criticized when it represents an individual or organization that promotes offensive or unpopular viewpoints, such as the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, the Nation of Islam, the North American Man/Boy Love Association, the Westboro Baptist Church or the Unite the Right rally.

[90] The ACLU developed from the National Civil Liberties Bureau (CLB), co-founded in 1917 during World War I by Crystal Eastman, an attorney activist, and Roger Nash Baldwin.

[1] Although a handful of other organizations in the United States at that time focused on civil rights, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the ACLU was the first that did not represent a particular group of persons or a single theme.

[1] Like the CLB, the NAACP pursued litigation to work on civil rights, including efforts to overturn the disfranchisement of African Americans in the South that had taken place since the turn of the century.

[120] The case became known as Pierce v. Society of Sisters, a United States Supreme Court decision that significantly expanded coverage of the Due Process Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment.

[78] In that year, H. L. Mencken deliberately broke Boston law by distributing copies of his banned American Mercury magazine; the ACLU defended him and won an acquittal.

The ACLU, led by Morris Ernst, appealed her conviction and won a reversal, in which judge Learned Hand ruled that the pamphlet's primary purpose was to "promote understanding".

[129] The ACLU played a significant role in passing the 1932 Norris–La Guardia Act, a federal law that prohibited employers from preventing employees from joining unions and stopped the practice of outlawing strikes, marriages, and labor organizing activities with the use of injunctions.

ACLU leaders were of mixed opinions about the New Deal since many felt that it represented an increase in government intervention into personal affairs and because the National Recovery Administration suspended antitrust legislation.

[140] The ACLU attorney Osmond Fraenkel, working with International Labor Defense, defended De Jonge in 1937 and won a major victory when the Supreme Court ruled that "peaceable assembly for lawful discussion cannot be made a crime.

"[141] The De Jonge case marked the start of an era lasting for a dozen years, during which Roosevelt appointees (led by Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, and Frank Murphy) established a body of civil liberties law.

[11] ACLU leader Arthur Garfield Hays proposed a compromise (supporting the auto workers union, yet also endorsing Ford's right to express personal opinions), but the schism highlighted a deeper divide that would become more prominent in the years to come.

The board decided not to challenge the eviction of Japanese American citizens; on June 22, instructions were sent to West Coast branches not to support cases that argued the government had no constitutional right to do so.

[167] The ACLU offices on the West Coast had been more directly involved in addressing the tide of anti-Japanese prejudice from the start, as they were geographically closer to the issue and were already working on cases challenging the exclusion by this time.

Eventually, Collins agreed to present the case alongside Charles Horsky; however, their arguments before the Supreme Court remained based on the unconstitutionality of the exclusion order Korematsu had disobeyed.

[172] Legal scholar Peter Irons later asserted that the national office of the ACLU's decision not to challenge the constitutionality of Executive Order 9066 directly had "crippled the effective presentation of these appeals to the Supreme Court".

The national organization prohibited local branches from representing the renunciants, forcing Collins to pursue the case independently, although Besig and the Northern California office provided some support.

[195] The national ACLU was divided on whether to defend employees who had been fired merely for pleading the fifth amendment, but the New York affiliate successfully assisted teacher Harry Slochower in his Supreme Court case, which reversed his termination.

[221] The ACLU lost an important press censorship case when, in 1957, the Supreme Court upheld the obscenity conviction of publisher Samuel Roth for distributing adult magazines.

[239][240] During the 1960s, the ACLU underwent a major transformation in tactics; it shifted emphasis from legal appeals (generally involving amicus briefs submitted to the Supreme Court) to direct representation of defendants when they were initially arrested.

[255] A major crisis gripped the ACLU in 1968 when a debate erupted over whether to defend Benjamin Spock and the Boston Five against federal charges that they encouraged draftees to avoid the draft.

[278] However, the ACLU played a key role in the 1968 King v. Smith decision, where the Supreme Court ruled that welfare benefits for children could not be denied by a state simply because the mother cohabited with a boyfriend.

[280][281][282] In 1980, the Project filed Poe v. Lynchburg Training School & Hospital which attempted to overturn Buck v. Bell, the 1927 US Supreme Court decision which had allowed the Commonwealth of Virginia to legally sterilize persons it deemed to be mentally defective without their permission.

The memo listed several factors to consider, including "the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values."

According to Jeremy W. Peters of The New York Times, critics of the ACLU saw the firing as "a sign of how far the group has strayed from its core mission — defending free speech — and has instead aligned itself with a progressive politics that is intensely focused on identity.

[335] In March 2004, the ACLU, along with Lambda Legal and the National Center for Lesbian Rights, sued the state of California on behalf of six same-sex couples who were denied marriage licenses.

[363] The ACLU responded by filing a lawsuit against the ban on behalf of Hameed Khalid Darweesh and Haider Sameer Abdulkhaleq Alshawi, who had been detained at JFK International Airport.

[368][non-primary source needed] Besides filing more lawsuits than during previous presidential administrations, the ACLU has spent more money on advertisements and messaging as well, weighing in on elections and pressing political concerns.

[371] In February 2024, the ACLU signed a letter to US Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona calling on him to reject redefining antisemitism to include political criticism of the government of the state of Israel, saying it would lead to First Amendment violations.

"[377] In December 2024, the ACLU criticized a federal appeals court ruling that upheld the law, claiming it "sets a flawed and dangerous precedent, one that gives the government far too much power to silence Americans' speech online.