Peoria ACLU marks 50 years

PEORIA, Ill. — The FBI files on the Peoria chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union are riddled with familiar names, including attorneys James Hafele and Art Greenberg, the late pediatrician Robert Easton Sr. and his wife, Ruth.

If the names aren’t familiar, some of the situations touched upon at ACLU meetings during the period, from 1969 to 1971, might be:

Vietnam War protests, a Peoria City Council decision to outlaw demonstrations in or around public school property, three Richwoods High School students — “Ridgewoods” in the files — who refused to stand up for the national anthem at a school assembly.

Through the lens of the Peoria chapter’s 50th anniversary, former president Glenn Zipp is amused at the idea of a civil liberties watchdog under FBI watch.

Though the informant was obviously an ACLU member, Zipp, a retired administrator with the National Labor Relations Board, is surprised anyone familiar with the group and its members would think they might be a threat to domestic security.

More than anything, the files’ highly-redacted contents amuse him, he says, because the person “kept better records than our own secretary at the time.”

Organized in 1961, the Peoria ACLU chapter is the oldest in the state outside of Chicago. It’s also one of the more unique, Zipp says, in that it was never affiliated with a college or university.

Though Bradley University employees have been presidents in the past, in recent years the chapter has been most closely linked to the late J.D. Wheeler, a former president and retired insurance agent.

The chapter donated and dedicated a display case in Wheeler’s honor recently at the newly-remodeled Peoria Public Library Downtown.

In the past 50 years, the Peoria chapter has done anything but amuse a succession of ministers, mayors, law enforcement, school and other government officials, all of whom, in one way or another, tried to short-circuit individual civil liberties guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution or its first 10 amendments, the Bill of Rights.

The chapter took on former Peoria Mayor Jim Maloof when he tried to start an anti-pornography campaign that would have banned adult book stores and sales of adult magazines. In the 1980s, members took on the city of East Peoria and former East Peoria Mayor James Ranney to make sure no city money went to pay for the Nativity scene during the Festival of Lights. They helped a Washington High School student who sued the school board over school-initiated prayers during graduation ceremonies.

During the 1960s and periodically since — most recently in 2007 — the ACLU has taken on local school districts for violating students’ First Amendment rights to wear different hairstyles or clothing. In recent years, the chapter has been an advocate for civil unions and against bullying homosexual students.

“The ACLU is always on the cutting edge for the times,” Zipp says. “Pricking society’s conscious, in terms of how we apply the Constitution to new eras, can be unsettling.”

Holding to the ideals of freedom of speech and expression, separation of church and state, or the right to assemble and protest can also make for a very unpopular organization.

“People thought it was a commie pinko organization,” says Brendan Liddell, a retired Bradley professor and former ACLU president mentioned often in the FBI files for his activities protesting the Vietnam War. At the time, the group was more concerned with local issues, he says, involving unfair employment practices and police harassment and brutality.

Obviously, during the height of the Vietnam War, the organization’s thrust was unsettling for at least one member, never identified, who took it upon herself to contact the FBI.

Beginning with a thick, blacked-out line, the first note in the FBI files, dated May 26, 1969, reads, “... is becoming increasingly concerned over the new left members who are becoming extremely active within the ACLU Chapter and are attempting to take over the local chapter. She is afraid the ACLU will become a Leftist Communist Organization ...”

Time has also left some former ACLU members disenchanted. James Hafele, an attorney, was not aware and doesn’t care that he was mentioned in the FBI files.

“That was a long time ago,” he says. He participated in the ACLU because he thought the Civil Rights movement was important. He stopped participating because he thought progress had been made. And he no longer believes the ACLU is doing a good job of advocating for civil liberties.

“Many of the things the ACLU claims are civil liberties are not civil liberties,” Hafele said. He would not elaborate.

But Zipp concludes the group’s sole purpose, then and now, is to preserve the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The organization didn’t take a position for or against the Vietnam War, but it did protect the right to protest it.

“Like the Patriot Act today, government sometimes overreaches in its broad sweep to find organizations that may be subversive.”