The Next Generation

By Rachel Neumann, AlterNet. Posted October 15, 2004.

At the recent ACLU national conference in San Francisco, the new guard wasn't hard to spot. They were the ones sitting on the floor instead of on chairs in the debates and panels. They escorted members of the press and gave tours to those who were visiting San Francisco for the first time. They seemed to travel in packs, one slightly older young person leading a group of five or six teenagers. If you didn't know this was a conference dedicated to protecting our constitutional civil liberties, you would be forgiven for thinking it was some kind of rock concert.

Courtroom victories and media attention aside, you can often tell the health of an organization by how many young people are joining. By that simple measure the ACLU is in fine form at 84 years old. The ACLU has over 400,000 members, more than 200,000 of those have joined in the last two years and 34 percent of those new members are under 25. The organization is as sharp as ever, striking down provisions of the Patriot Act with biting briefs that manage to be both legal analysis and passionate critique. And the organization's heart seems to be working just as effectively. They have sponsored visits for released detainees to speak in Washington, D.C. and director Anthony Romero recently visited Guantanamo Bay, along with an Amnesty International representative, and wrote moving letters about what he witnessed there.

Can the new ACLU keep up with itself? Caroline Friedman, 16, an intern in the New York office, seems to think so. When asked about Romero, Friedman said, "I'm awed by all his energy." When a teenager who gets straight As in school and is active in a host of extracurricular activities says that, it seems like the highest compliment.

Friedman was at the national Membership Conference, held in July in San Francisco, talking with Morgan McDonald, 21, co-chair of the Youth Affairs Committee and William Walker, 24, a member of Northern California chapter. She spent her summer learning about the Patriot Act and teaching other teenagers in New York about its consequences. "Because of my parents, I've always had a political awareness," she says. "But after the Patriot Act passed and I read sections that said that any library book or video I take out was subject to government scrutiny," I got angry and wanted to get more involved." When she looked around for who was doing the most active organizing against the Patriot Act, she found the ACLU.

McDonald thinks that the infusion of youth energy makes the ACLU more assertive, a necessary thing in these times when civil liberties seem a low government priority. "Before, I think the ACLU would wait for people to come to them with complaints," says McDonald. "Now we have to be out there because rights are being eroded at an accelerated pace. There are more field teams and more young organizers."

"My first involvement with the ACLU was actually a direct action protest," says Walker, a tall African American young man. "I got involved in protesting Proposition 21 and got a lot of young people to get involved around juvenile justice issues." He's quick to point out though that the Northern California chapter might be more open to more grassroots activism. "The closer you get to the national level the harder it is to talk about direct action or nonviolent protest," he said.

Binah Palmer, a 25-year-old field and legislative associate with ACLU Washington finds that a lot of the organizing that people are doing locally mirrors what's happening at the state and nationwide levels. In the past two years, she's seen a huge growth of youth interest and the inception of two new Washington state high school chapters. Two new college chapters of the ACLU have sprung up just in the last six months. "Students are urging their student bodies to pass resolutions protecting civil liberties and rejecting the Patriot Act," she says. The University of Washington, Whitman College and Washington State University have all recently passed resolutions that mirror the resolutions passed by the Bill of Rights Defense Committees at the city and state levels.

Rachel Neumann is Rights & Liberties Editor at AlterNet.

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