“Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty.”
-- Thomas Jefferson

Welcome!

Welcome to the website of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas (ACLU of Arkansas) and the Arkansas Civil Liberties Union Foundation (ACLUF). Defending your rights is what the ACLU and ACLUF are all about. Select here for the difference between ACLU and ACLUF.

Mission

The ACLU and ACLUF are dedicated to promoting, defending and expanding civil liberties in Arkansas. These liberties include free speech, religious freedom, racial and ethnic justice, due process, privacy, LGBT rights, and reproductive freedom. We want to make sure that the promises of the founders of this country, preserved in the Bill of Rights, are a reality for everyone in Arkansas.

We like to say that our client is the Bill of Rights and its principles. Civil liberties are what protect the people from the power of government and what John Stuart Mill called the “tyranny of the majority.” Government, in the form of legislative bodies, law enforcement agencies, and even schools, has a great capacity to affect the lives of those under its control. Yet because we possess civil liberties, these government agencies are barred from doing things that they might be inclined to do. For example, a city council may decide to prohibit public speech critical of the mayor, but that law will be struck down under the First Amendment as a violation of free speech. A wayward police officer may decide to enter and search your home on a whim and without a warrant, but whatever contraband she may find will be excluded from evidence because of the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of a warrant. And a school board, consisting only of people of one religious faith, may decide that schoolchildren must recite that faith’s prayers, but that policy will be struck down under the First Amendment’s “Establishment Clause,” which protects us from government establishment of religion.

Civil liberties protect us from other people who would like to impose their will on us, as well. Even though a majority of the people in a city may agree with the actions of either the city council or the police officer or the school board in the above scenarios, the civil liberties of those adversely affected cannot be breached. And even though the mayor’s critics may be few, and the subject of the house search may have committed a crime, and there is only one child in the school district of a different religious faith, the civil liberties of these individuals are protected under our Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Why is protecting our rights sometimes unpopular or controversial? Because it is often a small or unpopular person or group or position that is being defended. (And because those in the majority are in power, and do not need defending!) But it is actually the right that is defended. It is because these unpopular people or groups can have these rights, that all of us have these rights. Our rights to freedom of speech, due process, freedom of religion, equality and privacy do not depend on what others, no matter how many or how powerful, think of us: this is liberty. We can vote for whomever we like, get a fair trial, and go to a house of worship (or not) as we please, whoever we are, great or small.

The ACLU and ACLUF are so dedicated to these principles that we may defend the rights of those with whom we disagree, and even those who would work against the very principles we defend. But we believe, like many Americans, that these principles are inviolable, and are what keep us a free nation. It is not the person who burns an American flag who is the most serious threat to freedom: it is the government body that passes laws prohibiting burning an American flag that has the real power to destroy our way of life—our liberty.

We invite you to join us in the cause of keeping us free. Join the ACLU.

History

The ACLU of Arkansas was founded in 1969 to defend and protect civil liberties in Arkansas. It was born on the heels of a court case, Epperson v. Arkansas, which challenged a statute passed in 1928 banning the teaching of evolution. The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in 1968 the Arkansas law was overturned. (The famous Scopes case out of Tennessee never got to the U.S. Supreme Court, so the unconstitutionality of evolution bans was not officially “the law of the land” until the Arkansas case.)

Not having learned its lesson, the state passed another law in 1981 requiring "balanced treatment for creation-science and evolution-science." The ACLU challenged the law in a case (McLean v. Arkansas) that garnered national attention, calling such illustrious witness for the plaintiffs as Stephen J. Gould. This law, too, was overturned by the federal court.

(Since then, legislators have continued to introduce bills that attempt to establish religion, one way or another. However, with the help of the now robust lobbying efforts of the ACLU, these bills have been rejected, heading off costly lawsuits.)

The founders of the ACLU of Arkansas (ACLU)—a combination of labor lawyers, professors and other civil libertarians—wanted to ensure that there was an organization in Arkansas to take on threats to civil liberties through litigation, education, and lobbying. Some were motivated by racial justice issues, some by the Vietnam War and the rights of protesters, and some by the Epperson case or other issues.

Since that time, the affiliate has grown in stature, capacity and influence. What started as an operation run out of the first secretary’s home, is now a fully staffed office with an executive director, an attorney, an office manager, and a part-time lobbyist.

Some of our other important cases include:

• Howard v. Arkansas
  We successfully challenged an Arkansas ban on foster children being placed in a foster home where an adult gay man or lesbian lived. The American Civil Liberties Union brought the lawsuit against the state in 1999 on behalf of three prospective foster parents. The ban effected not only prospective gay and lesbian foster parents, but a straight foster parent adult who had a gay or lesbian adult—a child or a grandmother, for instance—living in the home.
  Read the press release.
  Read the Howard v. Arkansas decision.
• In August of 1993 we filed suit against the State and counties for non-compliance with voter accessibility laws which demand that the polls be handicapped-accessible.
• Pulaski County jail
• United States v. Chris Burch
  On July 4, 1999, Independence Day, Chris Burch and a number of other people walked through the Joplin Recreation Area on Lake Ouachita in Arkansas and distributed flyers announcing a public meeting on July 21, 1999. Since 1997, Burch has biked, hiked and bird watched in the park, which is open to the public and is administered by the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers. A Park Ranger approached Mr. Burch and asked him to stop handing out the flyers. Burch informed the Ranger that he thought he had a First Amendment Right to hand out the flyers. The Ranger left; later a state trooper appeared and cited Burch for violation of the rules and regulations regarding public use of Corp of Engineers projects.
  Read the ACLU of Arkansas’ Motion to Dismiss.

The Arkansas Civil Liberties Union Foundation (ACLUF) was founded in 1975, so that people could make tax-deductible donations to an organization that would engage in litigation and education, while the ACLU continued to influence legislation and public policy.

Make a donation to the ACLUF.

Some Quotes on Civil Liberties:

On the tyranny of the majority:
“… [W]hen society is itself the tyrant — […]its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates; and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since […] it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose[…] its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development and, if possible, prevent the formation of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence; and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs as protection against political despotism.”
--John Stuart Mill