ACLU has not apologized for its support of racism in the past – KPCnews.com

ACLU has not apologized for its support of racism in the past

To the editor:

The American Civil Liberties Union was founded in 1920 to support freedom of speech. The ACLU has courageously supported freedom of speech in some cases, notably the Jehovahs Witness and the violent racists attack of African American physician Ossian Sweet who moved into a White neighborhood in Detroit. Inexplicably, they have consistently refused to defend teachers terminated for rejecting human evolution based on racism.

For the first five years of their existence, the ACLU had virtually no success in furthering the organizations goals. That all changed in 1925 when the ACLU persuaded teacher John T. Scopes to defy Tennessees new anti-evolution law that did not permit teaching human evolution in government funded public schools.

Atheist Clarence Darrow, a leading supporter and member of the ACLU National Committee, headed Scopes legal defense team. The prosecution was led by a leading Democrat, William Jennings Bryan. The law, the Butler Act, opposed teaching only human evolution in government schools, not the evolution of reptiles, birds nor even apes. The pretense for the opposition of the Butler act was to defend the separation of church and state. Bryan, a progressive nicknamed The Commoner for fighting for the common people, believed all humans were descendants of Adam and Eve, thus all were the same race, the human race. A specific concern was the high school textbook Civic Biology by George Hunter, then widely used in America including Tennessee.

On page 196, Hunter wrote under the subheading The Races of Man, At the present time there exists upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other .... These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa ... and the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America. Under the subtitle Eugenics, Hunter wrote, The science of being well-born (is actually) eugenics. He then added, Hundreds of families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease ... They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites ... If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums (and) preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race (page 261).

Professor Tontonoz in his study of the case correctly observed that Bryan could accept that lower species had evolved from simpler forms, but he refused to apply the doctrine to humans. To do so was, in effect, to lend implicit support to troubling social policies and ideologies, such as racism and eugenics. In short, Bryan aggressively opposed racism, and the ACLU aggressively opposed Bryan. One disturbing result of the trial was racism being openly taught in many biology textbooks until the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s ended this long term practice. In fact, one of the major pieces of evidence for human evolution was Neanderthal man, today acknowledged as fully human. Another major evidence of human evolution was Piltdown man, proven as an elaborate hoax in 1953. The third common evidence of evolution was so-called inferior races including Australian Aborigines and American Blacks. I collect old biology textbooks which include many illustrations featuring these examples of our evolutionary ancestors.

The ACLU has never apologized for their support for these once popular icons of human evolution which were not purged from textbooks and popular books until the 1960s.

Jerry Bergman, PhD.

Montpelier, Ohio

Read more:

ACLU has not apologized for its support of racism in the past - KPCnews.com