Today voters are going to the polls in South Carolina to exercise their most fundamental democratic right: the right to vote. This week we celebrated the life and work of Martin Luther King, and in doing so we recall his championing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Recognizing the pitifully low number of blacks who were eligible to vote at that time, Dr. King believed that until all African Americans were able to participate in the electoral process, there could be no real justice in this country.

Forty-seven years later, we are seeing the resurgence of efforts to enact laws that will have the effect of reducing the number of black people participating in the election. So instead of moving closer to the all-inclusive democracy King dreamed of, we are seeing steps which are calculated to fragment the nation along racial lines. We see this in the thinly veiled, coded references designed to gain support by appealing to uglier, racial feelings. In a sense, the discussions surrounding the South Carolina primaries may be a portent of the coming campaign and the likelihood that King’s dream of a unified country may ever be achieved. Trying to gain political advantage by balkanizing the country may yield short term victories but bodes ill for the country as a whole.

The fact that Martin Luther King seems like an increasingly distant historical figure is only partly explained by the relentless passing of time. The rest can be explained by the limited way in which his life and work is often described. King is most frequently linked with his protests against segregated buses and lunch counters and other examples of apartheid that seem far removed from the present era, a time when an African American occupies the nation’s highest office.

Any complacency about society’s success in addressing the most obvious forms of discrimination is unwarranted. In fact, significant parts of King’s dream remain unrealized and seldom commented upon. Throughout his struggle, King emphasized economic inequalities in American society. In his “I Have a Dream Speech” he railed about the fact that, a hundred years after emancipation, African Americans still lived “on a lonely island of poverty.” He complained that the passage of a century did not change the fact African Americans “still languished in the corners of American Society.” On the day he died, he was protesting the mistreatment of Memphis sanitation workers, a mistreatment that was in part economic.

What would the Martin Luther King who was concerned with the economic justice make of the fact that, in a period of general economic crisis, African Americans are hit twice as hard, enduring an unemployment rate twice that of the nation as a whole? How would he regard the 20 to 1 white/black wealth disparity, a disparity far worse than when he was living? What would he think of the explosive growth in the number of black men incarcerated since his time? How would the man who said “we cannot be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity” view the draconian and unfair policies which push black children out of schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems?

Most topically, what would the man who dreamed of African-American inclusion in the political and social life of the country make of the role of race in the discussions during the 2012 election year? At a time when race still figures prominently in American life, discussion about it is either suppressed or used as a tool of fear to manipulate voter emotion. Now that economic issues have eclipsed the fear of rising crime, the spectre of Willie Horton has given way to the image of the lazy black person living off unemployment. No doubt he would share the view that talking about black people living off of other people’s money or suggesting that poor black children need to learn the “habit of work” is a calculating and cynical view given the unavailability of employment opportunities for poor black adults and the harsh realities faced by those who can find jobs but who need to work multiple jobs to scrape by.

If King were alive today, he would be continuing the struggle for racial justice and we must too. In the end, we honor him most not by celebrating his achievements but by fighting to achieve the unrealized parts of his dream.

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During what is often referred to as the holiday season, a variety of cultures and religions honor an equally diverse number of both religious and secular traditions. Christmas, Hanukkah, and Bodhi Day are just some of the religious holidays that are celebrated this time of year. And for many who don’t subscribe to a particular faith tradition, the season is still seen as an occasion to gather with friends and family.

No matter why you are celebrating this holiday season, we can all celebrate living in a country where religious freedom is a fundamental value. The First Amendment's Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses not only protect the right to believe (or not to believe), but also the right to express and to manifest religious beliefs.

In honor of our country’s proud history of promoting religious freedom, and the ACLU’s commitment to protecting the rights of all religious believers to practice their faith, this holiday season we are highlighting 12 cases we have brought on behalf of a variety of faiths defending religious liberty and the right to religious expression.

Twelfth Day: Standing Up For Christmas
Invariably during the run-up to Christmas, the ACLU is wrongfully disparaged for waging a mythical "War on Christmas." In fact, the ACLU zealously defends the right of both non-believers to practice no religion at all and religious believers, including Christians, to practice their religion freely. And the ACLU’s zeal certainly does not take a vacation during the holidays.

In 2003, The ACLU of Rhode Island interceded on behalf of an interdenominational group of carolers who were told they could not sing Christmas carols on Christmas Eve to inmates at the women's prison in Cranston, RI. Because of our efforts, the prison relented and the prisoners were treated to caroling.

That same year, the ACLU of Massachusetts sued on behalf of a group of high school students who were disciplined by school officials for distributing candy canes with religious messages just before Christmas. The students, members of the school’s Bible Club, each received a one-day suspension for handing out the candy canes. The ACLU argued that the school’s actions interfered with the free speech rights of public high school students under both state law and the First Amendment, which proects their speech as long as it does not disrupt the educational process.

Religious expression is a valued and protected part of the First Amendment rights guaranteed to all citizens.  Christmas is pervasive in our society, both publicly and privately, and, except when the government is being used to promote and favor religious beliefs, it is entirely constitutional. Read more…

See previous days »

For more instances of the ACLU rigorously defending the rights of all religious believers to practice their faiths, please visit our website.

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2011 was certainly a year in which a number of the issues the ACLU works on really disturbed our blog readers. To sum up the year, we present you with some of the top issues from the past 12 months by taking a look at our most popular blog posts.

National Defense Authorization Act
This past year, there was no topic hotter on the Blog of Rights than the National Defense Authorization Act. In May, we blogged about the vote in the House of Representatives on a troubling expansion of war authority. Though the House passed the NDAA with the provision to authorize worldwide war, the Senate Armed Services Committee passed its version of the bill without that provision. Unfortunately, this version did include provisions for indefinite detention.

Outraged by indefinite detention provisions that would allow this president—and every future president — the power to order the military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians anywhere in the world, blog readers took action to ask their Senators to vote against the provisions. Despite our efforts, both the House and Senate passed the NDAA with the indefinite detention provisions. As I write this, the NDAA is sitting on the President’s desk. According to reports, the President's advisors are recommending that he not veto this legislation despite earlier promises to do so. We need to tell the President to listen to the American people.

FBI: If We Told You, You Might Sue
In May we blogged about some documents released to us by the government as part of a Freedom of Information Act request. In the documents, the government explains that it doesn't want you to know whether your internet or phone company is cooperating with its dragnet surveillance program because you might get upset and file lawsuits asserting your constitutional rights.

Tennessee Principal's Reaction to GSA T-Shirt Raises the Question: Who's Really Causing the Disruption Here?
Blog of Rights readers were also heated about Tennessee Principal Maurice Moser, who threw a fit in school about student Chris Sigler’s Gay-Straight Alliance t-shirt. Opposed to allowing a GSA at the school, Moser charged into Chris's economics class, interrupted the students in the middle of taking a test and ordered everyone except Chris to leave.

License Plate Scanners Logging Our Every Move
Last month, we found out that the District of Columbia is engaging in widespread tracking of citizens’ movements using automated license plate readers (ALPRs). It has now become clear that this technology, if we do not limit its use, will represent a significant step toward the creation of a surveillance society in the United States.

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Early Tuesday morning in Wisconsin, the Madison School Board voted 5-2 against a proposal to start a charter school that would have segregated students on the basis of sex, relying on a model of “gender specific” instruction.  The vote marked the culmination of a year-long advocacy campaign in which ACLU-WI collaborated closely with numerous allies.  

The proposal was defeated largely on grounds that the school was to use non-union teachers with little school board oversight.  Although those issues predominated at the hearing, the ACLU of Wisconsin made sure that the school board could not ignore the gender equality issues. 

As ACLU-WI ED Chris Ahmuty explained in an op-ed published Monday:

The proposal still fails to explain why or how sex segregation would close the racial achievement gap, raises serious questions about the equality of opportunities to be offered to boys and girls, and falls far short of satisfying the requirements of federal law.

Though the revised proposal promises identical curriculums for boys' and girls' classes, the Urban League has recently confirmed that it supports "gender specific" teaching methods — or the theory that boys and girls learn so differently that they require different teaching styles.

Although this may sound relatively benign, most people would be shocked at what it actually looks like in practice: Boys are allowed to toss footballs and jump and run around during academic classes, while girls sit quietly in circles and work collaboratively; teachers shout at boys and speak softly to girls; boys are presumed to be more interested in subjects like hunting or sports, and girls in relationships and beauty.

These are nothing more than archaic sex stereotypes, repackaged as "science." Such stereotypes limit opportunities for boys and girls alike, and they have no place in publicly funded schools.

They are also unlawful. The Supreme Court has held that educational institutions can't structure their programs based on overbroad generalizations about the different talents and capacities and preferences of men and women. Officials, including the school district and the Department of Public instruction, have recognized that sex segregation is legally risky, but have otherwise punted on definitively determining the plan's legality, deferring to future decision-makers. But the buck stops here; the School Board cannot afford to take gender equality equally lightly.

Madison clearly cannot afford to ignore racial inequality in education, and the board’s vote should not mean the end of that aspect of the debate.  But as Chris explained, “coeducation didn't cause the racial achievement gap, and programs that reinforce stereotypes about boys and girls will certainly not fix it.”

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