The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is an American nonprofit civil rights organization founded in 1920. ACLU affiliates are active in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. The ACLU provides legal assistance in cases where it considers civil liberties at risk. Legal support from the ACLU can take the form of direct legal representation or preparation of amicus curiae briefs expressing legal arguments when another law firm is already providing representation.
Racial segregation is the separation of people into racial or other ethnic groups in daily life. Segregation can involve the spatial separation of the races, and mandatory use of different institutions, such as schools and hospitals by people of different races. Specifically, it may be applied to activities such as eating in restaurants, drinking from water fountains, using public toilets, attending schools, going to films, riding buses, renting or purchasing homes or renting hotel rooms. In addition, segregation often allows close contact between members of different racial or ethnic groups in hierarchical situations, such as allowing a person of one race to work as a servant for a member of another race. Racial segregation has generally been outlawed worldwide.
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978), was a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States that involved a dispute over whether preferential treatment for minorities could reduce educational opportunities for whites without violating the Constitution. It upheld affirmative action, allowing race to be one of several factors in college admission policy. However, the court ruled that specific racial quotas, such as the 16 out of 100 seats set aside for minority students by the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine, were impermissible.
Ann Fagan Ginger is an American lawyer, teacher, writer, and political activist. She is the founder and Executive Director Emerita of the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute in Berkeley, California.
The term "minority group" has different usages, depending on the context. According to its common usage, the term minority group can simply be understood in terms of demographic sizes within a population: i.e. a group in society with the least number of individuals, or less than half, is a "minority". Usually a minority group is disempowered relative to the majority, and that characteristic lends itself to different applications of the term minority.
Nadine Strossen is an American legal scholar and civil liberties activist who served as the president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) from 1991 to 2008. A liberal feminist, she was the first woman to lead the ACLU. A professor at New York Law School, Strossen is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and other professional organizations.
Proposition 209 is a California ballot proposition which, upon approval in November 1996, amended the state constitution to prohibit state governmental institutions from considering race, sex, or ethnicity, specifically in the areas of public employment, public contracting, and public education. Modeled on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the California Civil Rights Initiative was authored by two California academics, Glynn Custred and Tom Wood. It was the first electoral test of affirmative action policies in North America. It passed with 55% in favor to 45% opposed, thereby banning affirmative action in the state's public sector.
"Driving while black" (DWB) is a sardonic description of racial profiling of African-American motor vehicle drivers. It implies that a motorist may be stopped by a police officer largely because of racial bias rather than any apparent violation of traffic law. It is a word play on the phrase "driving while intoxicated".
Critical race theory (CRT) is an academic field focused on the relationships between social conceptions of race and ethnicity, social and political laws, and mass media. CRT also considers racism to be systemic in various laws and rules, not based only on individuals' prejudices. The word critical in the name is an academic reference to critical theory rather than criticizing or blaming individuals.
Derrick Albert Bell Jr. was an American lawyer, legal scholar, and civil rights activist. Bell first worked for the U.S. Justice Department, then the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where he supervised over 300 school desegregation cases in Mississippi.
In the United States, affirmative action consists of government-mandated, government-approved, and voluntary private programs granting special consideration to groups considered or classified as historically excluded, specifically racial minorities and women. These programs tend to focus on access to education and employment in order to redress the disadvantages associated with past and present discrimination. Another goal of affirmative action policies is to ensure that public institutions, such as universities, hospitals, and police forces, are more representative of the populations they serve.
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.
Michael Omi is an American sociologist, writer, scholar, and educator. Omi has served on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the Associate Director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society. Omi is best known for developing the theory of racial formation along with Howard Winant. Omi's work includes race theory, Asian American studies, and antiracist scholarship. Omi sits on the faculty advisory board of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies.
Troy Smith Duster is an American sociologist with research interests in the sociology of science, public policy, race and ethnicity and deviance. He is a Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology at University of California, Berkeley, and professor of sociology and director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge at New York University. Duster is on the faculty advisor boards of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine and the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies.
Eva Jefferson Paterson is the president and founder of the Equal Justice Society, a national legal organization focused on civil rights and anti-discrimination.
The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey (ACLU-NJ) is a nonpartisan, not-for-profit civil rights organization in Newark, New Jersey, and an affiliate of the national American Civil Liberties Union. According to the ACLU-NJ's stated mission, the ACLU-NJ operates through litigation on behalf of individuals, lobbying in state and local legislatures, and community education.
Suzanne Post was a civil rights activist in the struggle against discrimination and social injustice in Kentucky. She was born to Morris and Betty Kling in Louisville, Kentucky on March 19, 1933. She joined a student branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People while a student at Indiana University Bloomington, and continued her student activism at the University of California Berkeley. In her long career, she advocated for social justice and led the way in the battle for civil rights, women's rights, LGBTQ rights, and equity in housing and education. Her Uncle Arthur Kling helped found the Kentucky Civil Liberties Union in 1955 and served on the Board of the Louisville Urban League. Michael Aldridge, a former ACLU director, in an article for the Louisville Courier Journal, wrote "the Kling family 's own personal experience with bigotry, and a shared memory of historic oppression and violence, made them fight all prejudice and restrictions on the civil liberties of others".
Racial profiling by law enforcement at the local, state, and federal levels, leads to discrimination against people in the African American, Native American, Asian, Pacific Islander, Latino, Arab, and Muslim communities of the United States. Examples of racial profiling are the use of race to determine which drivers to stop for minor traffic violations, or the use of race to determine which pedestrians to search for illegal contraband. Besides such disproportionate searching of African Americans and members of other minority groups, other examples of racial profiling by law enforcement in the U.S. include the Trump-era China Initiative following racial profiling against Chinese American scientists; the targeting of Hispanic and Latino Americans in the investigation of illegal immigration; and the focus on Middle Eastern and South Asians present in the country in screenings for ties to Islamic terrorism. These suspicions may be held on the basis of belief that members of a target racial group commit crimes at a higher rate than that of other racial groups.
Deborah N. Archer is an American civil rights lawyer and law professor. She is Margaret B. Hoppin Professor of Clinical Law at New York University School of Law. She also directs and founded the Community Equity Initiative at NYU Law and directs the Law School's Civil Rights Clinic. In January 2021, she was elected president of the American Civil Liberties Union, becoming the first African American to hold the position in the organization’s history.
David B. Oppenheimer is a Clinical Professor of Law at Berkeley Law. He serves as the Director of the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law and the Faculty Co-Director of the pro bono program. He is the author of ten books on civil rights and discrimination law, including the first law school casebook in comparative equality law.
