The American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts (ACLUM) (established 1920) is a civil rights organization in the United States, and it is the Massachusetts affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union.
The ACLU-Massachusetts was actually founded a few months prior to the national organization, initially as the Massachusetts Civil Liberties Committee, and then the Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts (CLUM). In 1995, CLUM changed its name to the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts (ACLUM) to better reflect its relationship with the national organization.
History and leadership
Kirtley F. Mather - Harvard geologist, chair of the MCLU, 1936-1958. He was an outspoken critic of McCarthyism, and a co-founder of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis.
Susan Estrich
Jerome Grossman - Chair, CLU-M Foundation
Marjorie Heins
Dunbar Holmes - Church-State Committee Chairman, 1952-1967
Wendy Kaminer
Eva Moseley - MCLUF trustee, 1970-2003
John Roberts - CLUM Director, 1986-1999
Carol Rose
Harvey Silverglate
Recent and current work
1920s - 1945
Censorship struggles against Mayor James Michael Curley
loyalty oath work: Galardi v. Hague, U. S. Navy (Mass.) (1946-1948) federal employee loyalty oath; against the teachers' loyalty oath
Nicholls, Jr. v. Mayor and School Committee of Lynn (Mass.) (1935-1939), a compulsory flag salute case
Commonwealth v. Nichols (Mass.) (1938) leaflet distribution
1945-1960s
Establishing Massachusetts Fair Employment Practices Commission
Organizer of anti-McCarthyism struggles
Commonwealth v. Struik and Winner (1951-1956) - anarchism
Gallagher v. Crown Kosher Super Market (Mass.) (1961-1962 censorship)
Vietnam War era (1960s-1970s)
1968 - The Massachusetts affiliate took the card-burning case of David O’Brien to the Supreme court, arguing that the act of burning was a form of symbolic speech, but the Supreme Court upheld the conviction in United States v. O'Brien, 391 US 367 (1968).
Massachusetts Teachers' Oath case, Richardson v. Cole and Greenblatt (Mass.) (1969 state employee loyalty oath)
1970s-1980s
B.U. Exposure - First Amendment suit (1977-1984) brought against BU President John Silber
1990s-present
NAMBLA - In 2000, the ACLU's Massachusetts affiliate represented the North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), on first amendment grounds, in the Curley v. NAMBLA wrongful death civil suit that was based solely on the fact that a man who raped and murdered a child had visited the NAMBLA website.
PrivacySOS.org - Privacy and surveillance activism
2014 - ACLU-M urging dismissal of all 40,000+ criminal cases tainted by falsification of evidence by Annie Dookhan.
2013-2014 - Investigations of the Ibragim Todashev killing by the Boston FBI in May, 2013
2014 - Response to end shackling of pregnant women prisoners while giving birth
2014 - Commonwealth v. Augustine (Mass. S.J.C. Feb. 18, 2014) - ACLU-M along with the National ACLU litigated a case requiring that a warrant be required when state or local police track Massachusetts resident cell phones. The case applied Massachusetts and federal constitutional protections, and significantly distinguished Smith v. Maryland, which found that installation of pen registers to track call data was not a Fourth Amendment search that required a warrant, because cell site location information (CSLI) reveals a person's movements and other information that a fixed phone would not remove.
Shawn M. Lynch, "'In Defense of True Americanism': The Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts and Radical Free Speech, 1915–1945" (Ph.D. Dissertation, Boston College, December 2006)
Walker, Samuel (1990), In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-504539-4
American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, The Operations Manual of the Board of Directors of the ACLU of Massachusetts and The ACLU Foundation of Massachusetts, 1996.
ACLU of Massachusetts Wikipedia (Text) CC BY-SA
