2026 marks the 65th anniversary of the ACLU of the District of Columbia. Since our founding by a group of volunteer lawyers in 1961, the ACLU of D.C. has been steadfast in defending fundamental rights and liberties in our nation’s capital. For nearly seven decades, we have protected First Amendment rights, championed criminal justice reform, fought for everyone’s right to live free from discrimination, and advanced self-governance for the people of D.C. And we have done all this together—supporters, members, staff, and the Board of Directors have all been instrumental in building a more just and free D.C.
We invite you to come celebrate our 65th anniversary on May 12 at our Bill of Rights Celebration, where our community will honor people who have made outstanding contributions to protecting civil rights and liberties in the District. We will also reflect on our shared history and recommit to our future. Tickets start at $51, in honor of the ongoing fight to make D.C. the 51st state.
We believe that our fundamental civil rights and liberties are worth fighting for. To that end, we hope you’ll join us at our Bill of Rights Celebration as we honor:
- The Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network (MSMA), for their outstanding commitment to keeping our immigrant neighbors safe. MSMA has done amazing work over the years organizing to fill the gap in resources for migrants arriving in D.C. Over the last year, they’ve incredibly scaled up their work to respond to the Trump Administration’s attacks on immigrant rights. MSMA is an example of community care at its best.
- Mark Zaid, a D.C. resident and lawyer who has made a career of representing whistleblowers, including federal employees, intelligence officers, and members of the media in First Amendment disputes. When Donald Trump stripped him of his own security clearance in an act of political retribution, Mark fought back with a lawsuit of his own. He’s shown courage in fighting for his rights despite pressure from the Executive Branch.
- Tim Jenkins, for his lifetime of civil rights work in D.C. and beyond. Tim first became involved in social justice as a member of NAACP Youth Council before attending Howard University. Tim is one of the co-founders and former leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and he spent years fighting for civil rights such as desegregation, voting rights, and freedom from discrimination. Tim was also a regular fixture at Howard University School of Law and served as the president of UDC. We are delighted to honor him with the Spitzer Lifetime Achievement Award.
- Mark Herzog, for his lifetime of pro bono advocacy as well as for founding the Sidley Pro Bono Fellowship Program. We are honoring him with a special posthumous award.
We are excited to mark 65 years of the ACLU of D.C. as we continue to live and build our legacy. Here are some highlights of the first 65 years of our work.
November 1961
Founded on November 8, 1961, the ACLU of D.C. began as a small group of volunteer lawyers committed to protecting civil rights and civil liberties in the nation’s capital area. Originally established as the National Capital Area Civil Liberties Union (NCACLU), covering northern Virginia and Montgomery County and Prince George’s County, the organization has evolved over time—becoming the ACLU of the National Capital Area and then the ACLU of the National Capital serving D.C. and Montgomery County and Prince George’s County and, in the 2010s, the ACLU of the District of Columbia serving the District of Columbia. While our name and geographic scope have shifted, our core mission has remained constant: to defend and protect the civil rights and liberties of our community.
Free Speech vs. State Repression
In early May 1971, tens of thousands of anti–Vietnam War protesters came to Washington, D.C. aiming to use civil disobedience to disrupt the federal government. The Nixon administration responded with an overwhelming show of force, deploying police, National Guard members, and federal troops, canceling permits, and using tear gas to disperse crowds. Over the course of several days, more than 12,000 people were arrested — the largest mass arrest in U.S. history — including thousands who were not engaged in any unlawful activity yet were detained in harsh, makeshift conditions. The National Capital Area Civil Liberties Union quickly mobilized, sending volunteer lawyers to document abuses and defend those arrested. There, the lawyers observed police circulating among the arrested demonstrators, collecting information on identities and arbitrarily assigning police as the supposed arresting officers. It was clear that this was to be a massive exercise in perjury. As a result of our involvement, nearly all of the cases were dismissed or resulted in acquittals, marking the largest mass acquittal in American history.
As we moved into the 21st century, our ACLU affiliate helped pass the "First Amendment Rights and Police Practices Act of 2004." This new law made clear that people do not need police permission to exercise their constitutional right to free speech. The law also prohibits police from arresting an entire assembly when only a few people are breaking the law, requires police to display visible identification when handling demonstrations, restricts the use of police lines to entrap demonstrators who have not broken any law, and prohibits the use of tear gas and pepper spray on peaceful protesters.
On June 1, 2020, peaceful demonstrators gathered in Lafayette Square to protest police violence against Black people, following the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Without provocation, federal officials ordered law enforcement officers to violently clear the crowd using tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and flash bombs, injuring many protesters. In 2020, we sued President Trump and other federal officials on behalf of Black Lives Matter D.C. and individual demonstrators for violations of the First and Fourth Amendments. As a result of this suit, in April 2022, the federal government made significant reforms, including not allowing U.S. Park Police to disperse crowds without providing audible warnings and a safe route to exit. Efforts to hold responsible officials accountable through damages claims continue.
Criminal Justice Reform
In 1978, our ACLU affiliate helped end strip searches for everyone entering the D.C. Jail, spurred by a case in which then-law student (who would become the Dean of the University of the District of Columbia's Law School) Katherine Broderick was pulled over for unpaid parking tickets. Ms. Broderick was arrested and strip-searched at both the police headquarters and at the detention center. Our attorneys represented Ms. Broderick in a lawsuit that reversed this damaging policy and awarded her monetary damages.
In 1995, we challenged an unconstitutional D.C. juvenile curfew law that violated the rights of both juveniles and their parents. A judge ruled that the law infringed both the fundamental right of minors to freedom of movement and the fundamental right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children. The judge also ruled that the law was not sufficiently narrow to serve the government's compelling interest in reducing juvenile crime and crime against juveniles.
In November 2005, D.C. police arrested Lindsay Huthnance for disorderly conduct after she wondered aloud how a group of police officers were fighting crime by being in a 7-Eleven at midnight. We challenged the District’s policy that allowed for arrests on “contempt of cop” charges. After five years of contentious litigation, a jury awarded Ms. Huthnance $97,500 in damages, finding that she had been unconstitutionally arrested. In part because of the facts uncovered by discovery in this case, the D.C. Council enacted a comprehensive revision of the District’s disorderly conduct laws, which has resulted in a dramatic decrease in “contempt of cop” arrests.
Freedom from Discrimination
Few cases are more aptly named than Loving v. Virginia (1967), which pitted an interracial couple – Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving – against Virginia's “miscegenation” laws banning marriage between Black and white people. After marrying in Washington, D.C. and returning to their home state in 1958, the couple was charged with unlawful cohabitation and jailed. The Lovings left Virginia and went to live with relatives in Washington, D.C. When they returned to visit family five years later, they were arrested for traveling together. Inspired by the civil rights movement, Ms. Loving wrote to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy for help. The couple was referred to our ACLU affiliate, which represented them in the landmark Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia. The Court ruled that state bans on interracial marriage were unconstitutional.
In 2005, we sued on behalf of Diane Schroer, an accomplished and decorated Special Forces officer whose government job offer was unlawfully rescinded because she was transitioning genders. Schroer had accepted a position as a terrorism research analyst at the Library of Congress, but when she told her future supervisor that she was in the process of gender transition, they rescinded the job offer. In 2008, a federal district judge ruled that the Library of Congress illegally discriminated against Schroer, in a groundbreaking decision that found that discriminating against someone for changing genders is sex discrimination under federal law.
In February 2013, we filed a lawsuit on behalf of William Pierce, a deaf resident of the D.C. Jail who had received almost no accommodation for his disability while serving his 60-day sentence. In September 2015, the court ruled that the District has a duty to assess the accommodation needs of people with disabilities held at the D.C. Jail, and that the District had violated the law by not accommodating Mr. Pierce. In May 2016, the jury awarded Mr. Pierce $70,000 in damages.
The Path to Statehood
Our ACLU affiliate has publicly supported autonomy for the people of D.C. in the form of statehood or home rule since at least 1965, when we actively supported a Senate bill, a House bill, and even a way for the president to bestow self-governance to D.C. residents.
In 1999, we filed a lawsuit challenging Congress’s attempt to stop the counting of votes on a local medical marijuana ballot initiative. On September 17, 1999, a judge ruled that Congress did not have the power to stifle or prevent political speech, which included the ballot initiative. This ruling allowed the District to tally the votes from the November 1998 ballot initiative, which passed with 69% of the vote.
In 2019, the ACLU submitted a statement and testimony in support of the Washington, D.C. Admission Act ("H.R. 51") to the House Oversight and Reform Committee for its hearing on D.C. Statehood. H.R. 51 would have granted statehood to the residential areas of the current District of Columbia as the State of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth. The statement included our legal analysis, which found that H.R. 51 was a valid and defensible exercise of congressional power. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) called our legal analysis and conclusions “particularly important to our effort to secure statehood for D.C.”
The Fight Continues
We are 65 years into our fight for civil rights and liberties in the District of Columbia, and the stakes are high. With your support, we are continuing to make history defending civil rights and liberties in our nation’s capital.
There’s no sugarcoating it: the second Trump administration has brought difficult and destabilizing challenges to the nation and the District. But we have risen to the challenge since day one. On January 22, just two days after the president took office, the ACLU-D.C. filed our first lawsuit against the second Trump administration, in which we challenged an unlawful attempt at fast-tracking deportations.
Since that day, we have filed 12 additional lawsuits, advocated for D.C. democracy, trained hundreds of people on their rights, and responded to nearly 1,500 civil rights and liberties violation complaints. Our message to the Trump administration has been loud and clear: no president is above the law.
Since the founding of this nation, it has been up to all of us to defend simple and foundational principles of our democracy. We are honored to have been fighting for freedom and justice for 65 years, and we know that, together, we can secure America’s promise of equality, freedom, and justice for all.