AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION OF MINNESOTA (SAINT PAUL, MINN.):

Interest in forming a Minnesota branch of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was first discussed at a meeting of 21 Twin Cities ACLU members on January 25, 1951 in the home of Minneapolis-based attorney Vincent Johnson. The meeting was called by Johnson; Henry E. Allen, University of Minnesota student religious activities coordinator; William Lloyd Sholes, Minneapolis attorney and ACLU state correspondent; and Maurice B. Visscher, University of Minnesota medical school professor, to discuss rising concerns about individual and minority rights in light of the Cold War and McCarthyism. A second meeting held in February of 1951 was attended by Alfred McClung Lee who represented the national board of the ACLU. Attendees at that meeting decided not to institute a state affiliate but to work toward increasing the number of Minnesotans with ACLU membership.

A year later, on May 12, 1952, more than 70 Twin Cities ACLU members were present at a meeting attended by ACLU field director George E. Rundquist. The members authorized Vincent Johnson to head a state organizing committee to canvass local support and to work with the national office on bylaws, organizational structure, and affiliation matters. Committee members included Henry E. Allen; Fanny F. Brin, member of the National Council of Jewish Women; Finch J. Cornwall, district manager, Mutual Service Insurance Companies; Earl R. Larson, attorney and later U.S. district judge; Verner Levi, University of Minnesota political science professor; Miriam Levy (Mrs. Irving Levy of St. Paul); Robert C. McClure, law professor; Russell E. Myers, executive director, St. Paul Council of Human Relations; Donald G. Peterson, University of Minnesota psychology professor; Robert W. Smith, Minneapolis Star editorialist; and Edward F. Waite, retired state district judge. An organization ballot was mailed on August 22, 1952 and in September 88 votes for state formation were recorded by the New York office of the ACLU.

The first meeting of the board of the Minnesota Branch of the American Civil Liberties Union was held on October 2, 1952. During that meeting the board elected Earl R. Larson as president, Theodore Jorgenson as vice president, and Robert McClure as secretary-treasurer. By the end of 1952 the Union had a membership of 175 individuals and the board had established a membership committee and a lawyers advisory committee. Publication of a newsletter began in 1953 and by 1957 membership had grown to around 800.

Specific issues that first caught the attention of the new Union included pending changes to the state's obscenity laws, the suspension of public employees purported to have communist affiliations, incidences of racial discrimination in housing matters, the distribution of bibles in public schools, and state reapportionment. The first case in which the Union intervened as a friend of the court was on the behalf of Harry Fredkove, a St. Paul news retailer charged in 1953 under the state's obscenity ordinance for selling a copy of Women's Barracks by Tereska Torres. Other early cases concerned the revoked security clearance of a Honeywell engineer whose wife had joined a communist organization as a teenager, the discrimination against a Dakota Indian couple by a Minneapolis cemetery, and the constitutional test of a Minneapolis vagrancy law following the arrest of a woman on an unsubstantiated charge of prostitution.

The board voted in early 1958 to hire an executive secretary and board member Marshman S. Wattson served as the first paid staff member until his death in 1962. Jack Davies, a former state senator, filled Wattson's post until 1964. Subsequent executive directors have included Lynn S. Castner, Patricia Harms, Matthew Stark, William Roath, and Michael Moore.

A local chapter was created in Duluth in 1962 and a second local was organized three years later in the Fargo-Moorhead area. By 1975 five additional chapters had been established in the Iron Range, the Minnesota River valley, Rochester, St. Cloud, and Northfield.

Public outreach efforts began in earnest in 1962 when the Union developed a civil rights training course for University of Minnesota campus police officers and also began lobbying for the creation of police review boards. Civil rights training was presented to the Minneapolis Police Department in 1965 and has remained a mainstay of the Union's educational outreach. Additional activities have included radio and television programs, letters to editors, legislative lobbying, and presentations before numerous bar associations, press organizations, educators, public administrators, religious leaders, student groups, and local civic and community clubs.

In 1965 the Union opened an office in St. Paul which was moved shortly thereafter to the Upper Midwest Building in Minneapolis. The MCLU Foundation, an arm of the Union that raised funds for legal expenses was also established in 1965. In 1967, with a membership of over 1,500, the name of the state branch was changed to Minnesota Civil Liberties Union.

The Union hired its first full-time legal counsel in 1972. The first appointment was held by R. Michael Wetherbee through 1974 when he was joined by Randall Tigue. Subsequent staff counsel have included Katherine Berkvam, Owen Gleason, Patsy Reinard, Amy Silberberg, Janlori Goldman, Deborah Gilman, and Alexander Dolce. Volunteer lawyers have included Peter Dorsey, Frank Farrell, Douglas Hall, Kenneth Tilsen, Chester Bruvold, George Stephenson, Larry Leventhal, Newton S. Friedman, Patsy Reinard, Linda Ojala, Janet Benshoof, Mark Anfinson, and many others.

Since its formative years the Minnesota branch has participated in hundreds of cases concerning censorship and the right to read, leafleting, separation of church and state, criminal justice procedures, mental commitment proceedings, involuntary medical and psychiatric treatments, voting rights, selective service laws and administrative rules, reproductive freedoms, intrusions on the right to privacy, and racial, gender, sexual preference, age, and class discriminations. These cases represent the Union's mission to protect rights guaranteed by the first, fourth, fifth, sixth, ninth, and fourteenth amendments, most specifically those rights to freedom of speech, press, assembly, petition, and religion; probable cause before arrest; protection against unreasonable search and seizure; due process; representation by counsel; equal protection; and the rights guaranteed to native Americans under U.S. Indian treaties.

The organization was originally known as the American Civil Liberties Union--Minnesota Branch. Around 1968 the name was changed to Minnesota Civil Liberties Union, and still later to American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota.

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The collection includes correspondence, minutes, policy statements, financial information, membership data, committee files, project records, publicity materials, news clippings, records of local branches, legal casework, reel-to-reel audio tapes, and other materials revealing the many facets of the organization's operational, educational, legislative advocacy, and litigious activities in the fields of civil rights and civil liberties. Also included are records of the MCLU Foundation formed in 1965 to raise funds for legal expenses.

The historical files include materials regarding MCLU's long-term president and executive director Matthew Stark, and records related to the MCLU's history compiled by Minnesota Historical Society director Russell Fridley between 1966-1993.

The subject files comprise about half of the collection and are arranged into nine major topics: freedom of belief, expression, and association; equality before the law; due process; the military draft; abortion and reproductive freedom; privacy and data collection; freedom of information; miscellaneous topics; and public education, student rights, and teacher education. The first topic concerns academic freedom at universities and colleges; censorship; freedom of the press, speech and assembly; rights of public employees; religion and the public schools; and pornography and obscenity issues. The second topic covers discrimination issues of all types including housing, employment, race, age, sex, and economic status (welfare issues). Voting rights and issues involving the sovereignty of native American tribes also are included here. The due process topic covers police and law enforcement issues, rights of prisoners and hospital patients, drug testing, and issues involving attorneys, judges, and the court system. The draft topic includes the records of the Minnesota Committee Against Registration and the Draft (MCARD) as well as issues of conscientious objection during the Vietnam War era. The abortion files contain records the Reproductive Freedom Project of the ACLU as well as a good deal of statistics and other publications for a twenty year period from the early 1970s to early 1990s. The privacy, data collection, and freedom of information files comprise about two boxes and date from the early 1970s to the early 1990s as well. The topic regarding education includes materials related to student and teacher rights, teacher training, religious liberty in education, education legal cases, discrimination and sex equity in education, and legal education. The final miscellaneous category contains files not really belonging anywhere else. Included in this alphabetically arranged sequence are files on AIDS, ABSCAM, the CIA, El Salvador, the Olympic boycott, the Reagan crime bill etc.

The third series deals with the MCLU's relationship with the news media, including newspapers, radio and television. Files consist mainly of correspondence, press releases, and letters to the editor. The fourth series contains material from and correspondence with other civil rights and civil liberties organizations. Material is arranged in alphabetical order by name of the organization and includes both Minnesota and national organizations. The investigation files concern incidents the MCLU researched concerning possible civil rights violations and the necessity of litigation. These files are arranged in numerical order (I-3396 means the 33rd case of 1996) and date primarily from 1994 to 1999. Fund raising events cover events around the state from 1977 to 1992 and lobbying files document MCLU's efforts at the Minnesota legislature between 1965 and 1997.

The case files comprise about thirty boxes and reflect MCLU's participation in litigation concerning book and press censorship (including pornography), church and state relations, due process, commitment and treatment of the mentally ill, resistance to the military draft, law enforcement (including police-community relations), racial minority rights, abortion, child protection policies, and high school and college youth freedoms. Exemplary case files document the attempt to secure a place on the Minnesota ballot for Communist Party candidates, the case of Lanny Engberg involving unlawful detention in a state hospital, the case of David Lykken concerning illegal police procedures, and the case of Sharon Kowalski regarding guardianship appointments.

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These records are organized into the following sections:

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Access Restrictions:

Access to records less than 25 years old requires written permission. News releases, newspaper clippings, photographs, commonly available publications, and like material of a public nature are excluded from this restriction. Researchers wishing to access restricted materials must apply in writing. Please consult the reference staff for more information.

Research files relating to proposed amendments to the Minnesota state constitition are excluded from this restriction.

Use Restrictions:

Use and written permission. News releases, newspaper clippings, photographs, commonly available publications, and like material of a public nature are excluded from this restriction. For further information concerning copyright status and/or permission to publish, please consult the reference staff.

Preferred Citation:

[Indicate the cited item and/or series here]. Minnesota Civil Liberties Union Records. Minnesota Historical Society.

See the Chicago Manual of Style for additional examples.

Accession Information:

Accession numbers: 14,123; 14,383; 14,673; 15,385; 15,562; 15,576; 16,127; 16,488; 16,783; 16,832; 17,725

Location of Master Files:

Digital masters of audio reels are maintained on the Society's secure digital collections storage servers and are managed and preserved in accordance with archival best practices.

The original audio reels were disposed after the material was digitally reformatted into wav files.

Processing Information:

Digitization and encoding by April Rodriguez, February 11, 2021.

Digital audio transferred from the master audio reels by the Minnesota Historical Society for preservation purposes (January, 2021).

Digitization was made possible by the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund through the vote of Minnesotans on November 4, 2008.

Catalog ID number: 990017294970104294

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The Organizational Files contain early materials that document the formation of the Minnesota branch as well as ongoing materials that document the managerial direction, policy positions, financial status, membership levels, press relations, and public outreach activities of the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union. This section also documents the Union's relationship with regional branches and the formation, activities, and financial status of the fund raising MCLU Foundation. Included are correspondence, minutes, policy statements, financial statements, committee files, news releases, newsletters, letters to the editor, project materials related to a censorship survey and a joint court observer project with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom; and copies of investigative materials regarding the MCLU that were compiled by the FBI. Also included are files on MCLU awards and memorials and correspondence between MCLU and ACLU officials.

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Consists of biographical articles and publications regarding the MCLU's long-term president and executive director Matthew Stark, and miscellaneous memoranda, reports, articles, minutes, and notes compiled by Minnesota Historical Society director Russell Fridley.

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Included within each topic are correspondence, committee minutes and reports, printed circular matter of national and local groups, background information, magazine articles, and news clippings.

The Subject Files are arranged into the following nine topical areas reflecting the organization's core mission:

Freedom of belief, expression and association.

Equality before the law.

Due process.

The Draft.

Abortion and reproductive freedom.

Privacy and data collection.

Freedom of information.

Education.

Miscellaneous files.

Topic I: Freedom of Belief, Expression, and Association

Topic II: Equality Before the Law

Topic III: Due Process