CIVIL SOCIETY A look back at the first 50 years of the ACLU of Nevada
BY KRIS VAGNER
I
n 1920, just after World War I, U.S. Attorney General Mitchell Palmer,
fearing a communist revolution, ordered hundreds of foreign citizens
deported and had thousands of leftists and anarchists arrested without
warrants. Nine people organized to protest the abuse of civil liberties. Thus was born the national American Civil Liberties Union. The group soon broadened its scope to include protecting free speech and combating racism and discrimination. By the mid 1960s, the ACLU’s national group had 80,000 members and a long list of civil rights to defend. That’s when the ACLU of Nevada was formed in Reno. high school, “on a bus trip through Virginia, Rusco inadvertently sat next to an African-American passenger. Obeying the segregation customs, the passenger rose and went to stand in the rear section of the bus. This firsthand experience with the demeaning system of racial segregation was, in Rusco’s words, ‘a shock to my system.’” He went on to study racial inequality as a scholar and campaign against it as an activist. As for Siegel’s motivation for joining a civil liberties group, he had been raised in a tradition of social justice. “My father had been president of his synagogue in Brooklyn, New York,” he said, his Brooklyn accent still half intact after half a century in the West. “My mother had been president of the sisterhood of the synagogue, so I think that in part that started my involvement.”
EstablishmEnt yEars At the beginning, the ACLU of Nevada operated on a shoestring. There were no paid employees, only volunteers. They relied on the Mountain States Office in Denver for legal assistance. Siegel volunteered as a lobbyist, working 10 to 25 hours a week during legislative sessions while teaching full-time, writing and publishing. He also found time to co-found the Nevada Coalition Against the Death Penalty and serve as co-president of the Jewish Community Counsel of Northern Nevada. “We started working on fairly local things,” he said. “Marijuana—crackdowns on possession.” In the ’70s, he said, “We won an early case for access for the physically disabled at UNR.” The group also focused on gender issues then. “We testified constantly on the Equal Rights Amendment, which ultimately lost. And we were also involved in helping to find the issue of Roe v. Wade into the Nevada Constitution. It was passed by a substantial margin.” In the 1980s and ’90s, the ACLU of Nevada saw an increase in diversity. The national ACLU pushed the affiliate to add minority representation to what Siegel called an “essentially all-white” organization. The group was able to comply, in part by depending on the
racially diverse faculty of the newly forming law school at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. During that same era, Shields was interested in gay rights. “We made national news by supporting the gay rodeo,” said Siegel. Another turning point came in 1989, when the ACLU of Nevada moved from Reno to Las Vegas, largely because the southern city by then had a larger population. “I was reluctant to do this because I knew that our stronger activist base was in Washoe [County],” Siegel said. “I was afraid we would lose the momentum if we moved to Vegas. It turned out that the transition … helped us form a stronger affiliate.” Beginning in the 1990s, Allen Lichtenstein—who Siegel called “one of the best first amendment attorneys in Northern Nevada”—made freedom of speech and freedom of press cases a major focus of the ACLU of Nevada. It took quite a while for the group to establish a financial foothold. “We did not have financial stability for most of the first 35 years,” said Siegel. “We were like many cause organizations. Every $10,000 was critically important to us—and rarely did we get a donation that was $10,000.” Fundraising picked up under Gary Peck, who was executive director for 13 years beginning in 1996. “He was the best one-on-one fundraiser,” said Siegel. This was before the widespread advent of the internet, so one-on-one fundraising meant inviting people to lunch. “Around 2000, we got two major inheritances worth, together, well over a million dollars, from people we absolutely had no knowledge of,” he said. “That was completely blind luck. The organization is still financially stable as a result of those inheritances.”
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“Around a quarter, maybe fewer, of states, had chapters,” said Richard Siegel, long-time board president, currently “unofficial, emeritus” adviser. “A dozen people or so signed the founding document in 1966.” The Nevada group was deemed an official affiliate by ACLU national in 1967. Nevada’s laws prohibiting nonwhites from attending school and prohibiting interracial marriage had only been repealed a few years earlier, in 1959. Siegel, then a recently hired political science professor at the University of Nevada joined the local group soon after its inception. Another early member was Elmer Rusco, Siegel’s colleague from the political science department. According to Nevada Humanities’ Online Nevada Encyclopedia, in the 1940s, when he was fresh out of
Being Jewish, he said, “has a political justice component, at least on its left.” (He pointed out that “probably a third to a quarter” of the leadership of ACLU of Nevada in the 1970s was Jewish.) Another important contributing factor to some of the early members’ worldviews was their knowledge of world politics. “The UNR political science department produced key parts of the first 15 years of leadership of the organization,” said Siegel, listing, in addition to Rusco and himself, fellow political science professor Jim Shields, who would, in 1983, become the group’s first executive director. “Of course we as political scientists had knowledge and sensitivity to civil liberties issues,” said Siegel. “I started out teaching Soviet affairs. … You teach about a quote-unquote totalitarian society—you’re sensitive to human rights issues.”
Only in nEvada “I think it was assumed that every state needed to have the ACLU affiliate,” said Siegel. “It’s accepted in the ACLU universe that the only way you can deal with the issues at hand in a given state is by having a presence in that state.” “A state is permitted to allow for more freedom than the federal government in some circumstances,” said Holly Welborn, ACLU of Nevada’s Policy Director. “Nevada’s constitution allows for things like concealed carry,
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