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[waves splashes]
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[car horn honking]
[ambulance siren wailing]
[indistinct chatter]
[Ira] I have, uh, always resisted coming back.
[train rumbles]
You have to understand, this was like a shrine to us.
This was like a religious shrine.
[railway rumbling]
And it was as if you'd had a beautiful treasured gothic cathedral
and they had torn it down and built a department store.
♪ I'm a man on fire Walking through your street♪
Behind bars and you see that little EFA,
Ebbets Field Apartments that must stand for.
So I used to say, "If you're a Dodger fan,
you ended up believing in civil rights and civil liberties
and if you're a Yankee fan, you ended up believing in oil depletion allowances."
Aside from standing on the ground geographically where I know Ebbets Field was,
uh, standing here really has no resonance for me with that experience.
I mean, I see the sign out here, but, uh, it's not real.
[interviewer 1] Ira, you want to tell her what this is about?
Yes, they're doing a film about me.
And... and I grew up in Brooklyn and I was an old Brooklyn Dodger fan
and I used to go to Ebbets Field when I was your age
and my first season of rooting for the Dodgers was 1947.
You know what 1947 was in the history of the Dodgers?
It was the year that Jackie Robinson first played in Ebbets Field
which stood right over here where these building are. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And, uh, that was really something.
[soft music playing]
[growls]
I have to... I have to slide in.
I... I always regard it as a form of sacrilege that
on the ground where Jackie Robinson stole home
there might be washing machines doing somebody's dirty laundry.
[Ira] It's been a long time since I've been here. I don't recognize it.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
[Ira] That guy we met on the street, you know, he knew about it.
But these kids, why would they know any of this history
if somebody didn't teach it to them,
if somebody didn't tell them about it?
[upbeat music playing]
♪ Yay, come dance with me
♪ Over heartache and rage
♪ Come set us free
♪ Over panic and strange
♪ I wanna see our bodies burning Like the old big sun ♪
♪ I wanna know what we've been Learning and learning from ♪
♪ Everybody want...
My first impression of him, Ira Glasser seemed to me to be a normal ordinary person.
[Jay Nordlinger] Young people know who Ira Glasser is?
It would take a very special kind of young person, I would say, very special.
Nah, of course, first impressions don't last very long. [laughs]
A bald guy with a mustache and a firm handshake and a Brooklyn accent,
Ira wasn't about to kiss anyone's ass.
♪ -Only one desire -One desire ♪
♪ -That's still in me -That's left in me ♪
♪ - I want the whole damn world -I want the whole damn world♪
♪ -To come and dance with me -Come and dance with me, yeah ♪
[indistinct chatter]
[Noam] Good evening, everybody,
welcome to the Comedy Cellar Show here on SiriusXM Channel 99
-and we have, uh, two pretty important comedians-- -[man 1] About time they--
[Noam] Now... now hold on, hold on.
Wait, I'll introduce the guest of honor first and then we can get--
Mr. Ira Glasser, who is, was... was head of the American Civil Liberties Union,
-from what years? -'78 to 2001.
-Wow. -[Noam] '78 to 2001.
Oh, I remember reading somewhere, uh, that you were credited with taking the ACLU
from like a small-time mom-and-pop operation
to becoming the national force that it is today, right?
-You're... you're that... that Ira Glasser? That's-- -Well--
I'm that Ira Glasser. It was, you know, it was...
it was pretty well established, uh, before... before me, but, um, but it grew a lot.
Yeah, it grew a lot.
[tranquil music playing]
[Ira] Much of my political growth and development happened between the '50s and the '60s.
The '50s were known, as I recall, as the silent generation.
[man 2] The cafe lounge is a perfect spot to loaf a while
and get acquainted while you enjoy a beverage or other light refreshments.
It were, I remember, as a time of not only a political quiescence,
but... but political intimidation.
We're spending an awful lot of time, a lot of money, uh,
investigating things other than the communists that we should be digging out of government.
[Ira] People were forced to sign loyalty oaths and were fired if they didn't
and it was a time when people were afraid to go to political meetings,
when they were afraid to sign petitions.
I don't remember there being any student activism.
[man 3] While with half the world already under the yoke of communism,
those nations still remaining free look hopefully to the U.S.
That changed dramatically and I mean, really, it's a quantum leap in the '60s.
[crowd cheering]
There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious,
makes you so sick at heart--
[Roger] People were extraordinarily frustrated.
Their kids were being drafted, the kids themselves were in the streets, uh, protesting.
The civil rights movement had come to a stopping point
with the passage of the Public Accommodations Act
and the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act
and, uh, yet, there still wasn't much equality.
As the political climate heated up a lot in the country,
I became less and less satisfied with sitting at a desk
and editing a magazine about what was happening
and I began to develop a strong desire
to sort of get involved more directly in the political action.
[man 4] Robert F. Kennedy, he wins the nomination on the first ballot
and Mayor Robert Wagner, a principal backer, introduces the candidate to the convention.
At the same time, uh, Bobby Kennedy had begun to emerge for me
as a kind of a unique figure in American politics.
Being a United States senator, I mean, seeing that in my own family,
I think is a position, a very lofty position,
in a position where you can accomplish a great deal.
Somewhere in... in the middle of his brother's presidential administration
and in the years afterwards when he was elected senator from New York,
he began to be one of the few and certainly the leading white politician
who became genuinely engaged with the civil rights movement.
And I wrote him this letter explaining to him
about why I thought he was a unique politician and uniquely positioned to implement
and... and initiate the kind of changes I thought he wanted,
I thought I wanted and I thought the nation needed.
The idea that somebody, you know, completely unknown
and without any public credentials at all
could write a letter like that to the United States senator
and actually get an appointment to see him was ridiculous.
Whatever reason, uh, I finally got this appointment with Senator Kennedy
and I trudged down to Washington to see him.
So, I sit down with him and he asks me a lean in question of some kind
and I proceed to tell him why I think he should run for president.
And so he just said that this was, you know, at best premature,
but he asked me to, you know, stay in touch, which I took as a great encouragement.
[soft music playing]
Then he said to me, "Well, so what are you going to be doing in the meantime,
I mean, and if you don't want to continue to edit that magazine? What are you thinking of?"
I said, "I do have another offer that a former colleague of mine at the magazine
who was now the executive director of the ACLU in New York
and had just called me and said that they were expanding a bit
and he was thinking of creating a position of Associate Director there."
And Kennedy said, "And?"
And I said, "I told him no." [laughs]
For one thing, I was interested in working for you
and for another thing, I hardly knew what the ACLU was."
I thought it was all lawyers and I was not a lawyer.
I told him that its agenda of issues focusing on litigation around the Bill of Rights
was much narrower than my range of interest in the political life.
Actually, he said, "You're wrong about the narrowness.
I think, if you work there it will get you into all the issues you care about."
He said, "You should consider that offer seriously."
I was really sort of stunned by that response
uh, because he was hardly a man of the left or of libertarian instincts.
This is the guy who worked for Joe McCarthy who had wiretapped people.
And I said, "Why do you say that?"
And he says, "The ACLU is a really unique organization
in American life.
It's founded on a set of, sort of, root principles
of what this country is about.
Uh, values of liberty and all the range of values codified in the Bill of Rights."
A month or so later after my meeting with Kennedy,
I accept this newly created position of Associate Director
of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Good morning. We are broadcasting this morning
the announcement of Democratic Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York
that he will be a candidate for the presidency.
I am announcing today my candidacy for the presidency of the United States.
And suddenly out of the blue, Martin Luther King is assassinated.
[Robert Kennedy] Could you lower those signs please?
I have some very sad news for all of you
and I think, uh, sad news for all of our fellow citizens
and people who love peace all over the world,
and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight
in Memphis, Tennessee.
[crowd gasping]
You get this news and everything just freezes.
[Bryan Stevenson] I remember growing up in this poor rural segregated community.
I remember sitting there and just sensing all of this anxiety
and all of this fear and all of this, uh, outrage.
Everybody in the civil rights community remembers King's death.
It was the death of a dream.
It was an assassination that rocked this country with civil disorders and violence.
The cities were burning.
There were lots of angry riots in black communities and burning of stores.
[soft music playing]
President Johnson declared a state of emergency.
That declaration resulted in the virtually unthinkable act
of armed regular army troops deployed to protect the capitol and the White House.
[alarm ringing]
[dramatic music playing]
So it was in the spring of 1968, barely a year
since I had started at the, uh... at the Civil Liberties Union,
I was getting back in touch with... with Kennedy's staff
hoping to... to... to reignite the connection.
My thanks to all of you, and now it's on to Chicago and let's win there.
[crowd cheering]
[Ira] And then he was shot.
[people gasp]
[man 5] Lock the doors! Lock...
[dramatic music playing]
I still regarded the New York Civil Liberties Union as a temporary step,
but I had nowhere else to go.
I was having fun and fulfillment where I was, so I stayed.
[soft music playing]
Twenty years later, I wake up in a hotel room on some sort of road trip for the ACLU
and realized, "Oh, my God! I've been here for 20 years."
I really had no idea even then that would lead to a lifetime career
and moreover, the career of my dreams.
[slow beat music playing]
My top priority when I first got to the national ACLU,
I thought was going to be racial justice.
Throughout its existence, the American Civil Liberties Union has defended unpopular causes,
but now in Illinois, the ACLU is defending one that's too unpopular
for some of its members.
Actually my... my top priority turned out to be organizational survival.
The first time I heard the name Skokie, Illinois, was probably '77 or '78.
[soft music playing]
Skokie is a suburb of Chicago and Skokie liked to call itself a village
even though 70,000 people anywhere else would be called a little city.
Mostly, middle-income families living in one-family homes,
very suburban-looking, a lot of greenery, a lot of parks.
I don't know what else to say, you ran a red light.
-Drive carefully. -Okay, I will.
After the Second World War,
more and more American Jews moved into Skokie
and that included about 7,000 Holocaust survivors
among the, say, 30 to 40,000 Jews who were the total in Skokie.
We saw with my... with our own eyes what did happen and it could happen.
[woman 1] For months, American Nazi party leader, Frank Collin
has been trying to hold a march through the streets of Skokie, Illinois.
[man 6] Leader Frank Collin says he's inviting Nazis from all over the country
to march on Skokie on July 4th.
We can do it. This is only the beginning of dozens of marches.
White power!
[Frank Collin] I, uh, just see myself as a soldier.
That's the way I look at myself,
a soldier who is doing his duty to his fuehrer and his commander.
Collin decided that he was going to demonstrate in the name of free speech
because his speech was being interfered with,
but he was also going to demonstrate, essentially, Pro-Aryan, he would call them.
Collin said all these suburbs are white and they're all escaping Chicago.
I'm going to demonstrate in the suburbs where a lot of these people live
who are escaping the city.
[man 7] Mr. Collin, do you condone violence?
Uh, at times I do.
[dramatic music playing]
Mr. Stern, what does it mean to you, uh,
now that we are seeing the apparent resurgence of neo-Nazism in this country
and particularly here in Skokie?
Uh, the symbol, obviously, has some meaning to you.
[dramatic music playing]
I got a call one night from Mr. Collin saying,
"We had been planning to go to Skokie to march in front of the city hall
and we've just been served with court papers to stop us
and the hearing is tomorrow morning."
I must have called seven or eight attorneys and one after another they each said,
"David, my heart is with you, but not this case."
I became the lead attorney in the Skokie case
because in short, no one else would do it.
The idea that people wearing swastikas were going to come to their streets was unthinkable.
The passion with which some residents in the town of Skokie reacted
was based on the fact that there were people there
who had themselves been survivors of concentration camps.
I'm a Jew. Well, this is my home.
The sight of people marching with swastikas on their arms,
again, was like a nightmare.
[man 8] These people are part of a 500-member Skokie B'nai B'rith lodge
of which all are survivors of Nazi camps.
They lead the fight against the Nazis marching in their community.
The Jewish leaders talking to the officials in Skokie made them understand
that it would no longer be acceptable to the entire Jewish community in Skokie
to have these people there.
I called my general counsel, Ed Rothschild, who was a mentor
and a fantastic human being
and said, "Ed, we've just been asked to take this case."
And he said, "David, I order you to take the case."
I said, "Ed, I have the authority to take the case.
Why are you ordering me to take the case?"
To which he said, "David, you have no idea what's coming and if they come after you,
they're going to have to go through me."
I kind of choke up when I think of that because at the time I...
I had no clue as to what was coming.
We're going to continue to do what we've been doing
and that is use every possible legal means at our disposal
to see that they don't come because we don't want them here either.
The Nazis will not march in Skokie.
Should the Nazis appear, we will break their heads.
There will be violence in the streets.
[man 9] Chicago's Nazi chapter prompted angry counter-demonstrations
and sometimes led to violence.
[upbeat music playing]
What happened next was that we went into court and, frankly, all hell broke loose.
In symbolic terms and in real terms,
uh, it highlighted the issue of...
why would you ever want to defend the rights of people like that?
It basically forced me to articulate reasons
for the First Amendment position that the ACLU took
in the most hostile and uncomfortable circumstances.
I can promise this, that come hell or high water,
Supreme Court or no Supreme Court,
arrest or no arrest, violence or no violence,
Rabbi Kahane or no Rabbi Kahane, we are going into Skokie, by God, this year
and we don't care how much violence they're going to bring on our heads,
we'll give it back to them three times as much.
[upbeat music playing]
[Ira] I grew up in East Flatbush,
a kind of a working-class white, Jewish neighborhood.
Growing up there, I spent a lot of time in the streets.
There was no supervised play, there were no adults anywhere, there were no little leagues,
we just went out and played in the streets.
You'd sing doo-wop on the street corners, a cappella stuff whoever was there.
Uh, you'd play stickball, punchball on the streets.
There weren't a lot of cars.
Your parents would give you a quarter and you go buy a Spalding, which was a pink ball.
And that Spalding was your summer activity.
And you would have to figure out:
A, how do you not lose the Spalding ball,
but, second, what can you do with this Spalding ball, punchball, stickball...
stickball in the open street, stickball against the wall where you have a strike zone.
That was where we learned how to mediate conflict and how to deal with bullies,
how to handle disagreements whether it was about
whether you were safe, or out on a play, or... or anything else.
Uh, king-queen, box ball, hit the penny--
[Ira] Parents never got involved,
there were no social workers, there were no coaches,
there was just us on the street and I loved it.
Uh, and the other thing growing up in Brooklyn, we had the Brooklyn Dodgers.
[upbeat music playing]
The Brooklyn Dodgers were, um, heroes to us and in my neighborhood,
if you weren't a Brooklyn Dodger fan, there was something weird about you.
[man 10] The Brooklyn Dodgers, the Ebbets fielders, the Bums,
the most colorful team in the Major Leagues.
[Ira] I didn't know any Yankee fans.
They were... they were really like alien and they were, uh, uh... at the time,
I didn't know any New York Giants fan either, um,
they were the team from Manhattan or the Yankees from the Bronx
and that was like you needed a passport to go there.
[Norman Siegel] You know, I remember as a kid when I went on a Friday night
to see the Dodgers play the Cubs,
I don't know, I was seven or eight, with my father
and I walked up the ramp and I saw this green,
it was like, "Ah, I've never seen..."
This is what heaven's supposed to look like,
the lights were on, and green grass, the field, the white bases.
Ah, I close my eyes, I still... I see it.
[Ira] I had that kind of religious relationship with the Dodgers,
that's who they were... and that's what Ebbets Field was.
Ebbets Field was a shrine to us and it was our cathedral.
[man 11] What other team could run the bases so nimbly,
so adroitly, so alertly, and so much finesse?
The real genesis of my passion for... for baseball and my interest
came when I was about nine years old.
Now, for a lot of kids, that is normal.
I mean, they... they are aware of baseball, but... but, you know,
it's not until they're 8, 9, 10, where they get engaged in rooting for a team,
but for me, being 9 years old in 1947 coincided with Jackie Robinson.
[man 12] Jackie Robinson, a trailblazer in the world of sports.
[upbeat music playing]
[Ira] Those teams from the late '40s into the late '50s,
the Brooklyn Dodger team were a team of legendary players.
These are five great, not just ball players but people as well.
So, in the middle, significantly, in my opinion, is 42 Jackie Robinson.
Every one of them was an outsized hero to us
and a player of major accomplishment.
And on that team of outsized heroes, Robinson comes in in 1947
and for, certainly for me, but for many of us,
I mean, he instantly becomes our favorite player.
[Norman] Here comes this four-lettered man from UCLA
who's telegenic,
uh, who plays the game magnificently
and he brings the team together to another level.
I was really totally unaware of the racial situation in the United States.
There was nobody black anywhere that I could see.
As a matter of fact, I never saw anybody who wasn't white and Jewish.
New York City had the reputation for being what sociologists at the time called
a melting pot of racial and ethnic and religious communities,
but the truth was, that was true only if you looked at the city as a whole.
In reality, the city was a collection of very insular,
segregated tribes. [chuckles]
And I hear, by Red Barber, the baseball announcer in the course of the play-by-play
that when the Dodgers are playing in St. Louis,
Robinson and the other black players on the team cannot stay at the same hotels
where the rest of the team is staying,
cannot eat at the same restaurants, have to be put up somewhere else,
often in private homes, black homes, and that is how I first learn.
That's the first time I ever hear about segregated public accommodations.
That's how I learn about segregation in hotels, segregation in restaurants.
That's how I learn about Jim Crow.
And that's where I come to hate it.
And we don't hate it because we have any prior commitment to civil rights.
We don't know anything about that.
We hate it because he's our guy.
When I went to Ebbets Field, then and a year or two later by myself,
there were black people in the stands.
I would sit next to a 35-, 40-year-old black guy
and we were on the same side.
So you grew up in an atmosphere of black and white together, we shall overcome.
And that that was an experience, uh, that I don't think
any 9-, 10-, 11-year-olds in the country had,
ever had except in the confines of Ebbets Field,
which I, years later, would describe as probably the only integrated public accommodation
in the country at the time.
So, this was the core, and as you can see two blacks, three whites
uh, and, you know, it was... it was an era
where young people like Ira and I, we grew up on this stuff.
It was... it was what the world was supposed to be about.
And... and then we found out... I, for sure, when I went to Mississippi and Georgia
in the summer of '66, it ain't that way, so what are you going to do?
So, we decided we make them live by all those words in the constitution about
equal justice for all.
That fight still goes on today.
[dramatic music playing]
[man 13] What happened in 1958?
Well, in 1958 one of the three great villains of the world, uh,
the other two being Hitler and Genghis Khan,
Walter O'Malley took the Dodgers away and moved them to Los Angeles.
[Ira] I was devastated when they tore down Ebbets Field
after the Dodgers were kidnapped and stolen to the West Coast.
I remember, you know, describing it as like losing a parent
when you're, you know, when you're still a kid.
It is a loss from which you... you never fully recover.
[dramatic music playing]
We were driving home from some party in Brooklyn,
I make this left turn on the way back to Manhattan
from where we... where we had been
and there was Ebbets Field, half torn away.
The car come to a jolting halt and, uh, my later-to-be-wife, Trude,
sort of half asleep in the front seat, she just sort of startled to awakeness,
and I am sitting there, sort of just stunned looking at this half torn away cathedral.
And, um...
Uh...
It's hard not to be emotional even now about it.
It... it was a... it was a... a... a unique place
for those of us who grew up with it
and, um, so yeah, it was... it was... uh, I've always rooted for the San Andreas Fault
to take care of the Dodgers in Los Angeles ever since.
[laughs]
[upbeat music playing]
[indistinct chatter]
[Noam] You were the man behind the decision to defend the Nazis
-when they wanted a march in Skokie. -No, no.
Actually, at that time, I was, uh, not the National Head of the ACLU,
I was the Head of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
So, I was really, had no part in the initial decision.
I had a large part in defending that decision, but... but not... not in making it.
-And you defended it wholeheartedly? -[Ira] Yes.
-And you would defend it again today, if you had to? -Yes.
The Skokie case began in Chicago.
It didn't begin in Skokie.
There's a theme or a slogan which we in the party have used as regards Skokie
and that is "The path to Marquette Park leads through Skokie."
[soft music playing]
The first time I heard the name Frank Collin was when they called the office
and said the City of Chicago is not letting me use the city parks for my assemblies.
I want to use Marquette Park which is several blocks away from my office
on the southwest side of Chicago
and I want to hold a public assembly there
to protest the fact that African-Americans are starting to move into Marquette Park.
[Ira] On one side of the park was a kind of a white ethnic community
that was feeling severely embattled by school integration efforts.
[Edgar Jackson] Children who have recently moved on the periphery of that area,
they are going to school way back over here on 43rd in Indiana, etc.,
because they fear to go to school in their own district because of this racist climate.
[indistinct chatter]
[Frank Collin] This is our community. This is our neighborhood
and we're going to keep it our neighborhood.
You know, basically, he felt it was his turf.
[Philippa] Collin tried to host a rally in exactly the same place
that the Martin Luther King Jr. Coalition wanted to have a rally
and that really is what became the problem for Chicago.
[Philippa] Chicago wasn't any more welcoming, however,
to the Martin Luther King Jr. Coalition.
[upbeat music playing]
Eventually, the city of Chicago in its wisdom decided
to make it pretty impossible for any group it didn't like
to hold a rally or a demonstration in Marquette Park.
[chanting]
They're using Marquette Park as a right to use that Park facility, the First Amendment.
Wait a minute, man, this is freedom of speech, man.
[Frank Collin] We are not allowed to speak in public.
We are the only organization in America
that's been banned our basic right to First Amendment speeches in the parks.
We cannot pass out literature beyond Chicago.
They try to close our headquarters.
We are constantly harassed by the police.
I'm asking you--
[screaming]
All right, everybody--
First, the city, the Chicago Park District said you can't come and they lost that one.
And then they said, "Well, you can only come if you use one of the four forums
that we have designated in all of Chicago."
And we won on that one.
And then, they added a bond requirement.
[man 14] The Chicago Park District said the Nazis could come here
only if they posted an insurance bond to cover damages.
Now, the problem with the $250,000, uh, bond requirement
in order to demonstrate in a public park was that
no insurance company will sell you one.
[David] The city and Mayor Daley was determined to try to shut him down.
Those insurance bond requirements had been the classic mechanism
by which white southern towns used to ban civil rights demonstrations
throughout the '50s and '60s
and that old bands had always been struck down
as violative of the First Amendment,
precisely because they effectively banned speech in public places.
♪ We shall overcome
Because Frank Collin had been shut out of his home park
down on the southwest side of Chicago, it was his position that he had to find a forum.
He said, "If we can't demonstrate in Chicago,
I'm going to go to demonstrate in the suburbs surrounding Chicago."
So, he writes a letter to a dozen suburbs, 11 of these suburbs ignore him.
Skokie reacted like a bull to a red flag.
[woman 2] Residents have held protest demonstrations and the village has passed laws
to stop the Nazis from marching.
We don't want them here. If they don't come here, we'd be delighted.
[upbeat music playing]
The village of Skokie used several approaches
to trying to prevent his assembly.
The first approach was simply to get an injunction
on the theory that his speech was akin to obscenity
and it was so offensive that it wasn't protected by the First Amendment.
If you were an ACLU lawyer this was what you were there for.
Thirty years ago, we Jews stood and, in a sense,
watched the Holocaust take place.
We spit in the graves of six million Jews if we allow the Nazis to march.
[clapping]
[dramatic music playing]
Uh, a week ago, one of my constituents came up to me and said,
"I hear that you're going to make a speech at the ACLU
and I hear those people go around defending communists."
And I said, "Oh, no. You've got it wrong.
They defend communists and socialists, fascists, atheists, racists,
segregationists, members of the Ku Klux Klan."
The fellow said, "Well, it... it sounds like a mighty nice organization."
[laughing]
People get up and say, "Norman Siegel, you're the lawyer for the Klan."
And I say, "No, no, no.
We represent the Klan, but I'm the lawyer for the First Amendment
and the First Amendment is for everybody."
The ACLU is supposed to defend the free speech of Nazis.
They're supposed to defend the free speech of Black Panthers.
Why else do we have an ACLU?
[dramatic music playing]
[man 15] Did you ever have to defend the rights of people that you disagreed with?
-Oh, all the time. -[man 15] Or even found... even found repulsive?
Oh, yeah. Uh, one of my...
One of my, uh, most vivid memories, I guess you'd say, is
we were, uh, representing the Klan.
They wanted to use the statehouse steps for a demonstration.
Well, the statehouse steps are used by pro-life and pro-choice,
they're... I mean, they're... It is a public forum.
They get to use it. I hate them.
[Ira] Defending crazies who walk around with swastikas on their arms,
was the kind of a case that every ACLU affiliate took once or twice a year, uh...
You took them because... because if you didn't take them,
the... the government would gain the power to restrict speech it didn't like.
It means you can't make any exceptions to say,
"Well, it's all right to have civil liberties here, but not there."
That's a classic doctrine of civil liberties.
This hazmat as Oliver Wendell Holmes says, "Freedom for the ideas we loathe."
[Roger Baldwin] Yes.
[man 16] And the case came up in Skokie, Illinois, where that principle had to be applied.
They should have a right to parade however offensive it was.
[Ira] The first violation of rights
and the first target of the violation of rights is nevertheless.
If you give the government the power to stop the right wing from marching in the street,
they will acquire the power to decide who they think is dangerous enough to stop.
No matter who you are, no matter what you believe,
you are entitled to certain fundamental rights,
merely by virtue of being a human being.
And those certainly include equality of opportunity before the law,
freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience.
All we say to America is, "Be true to what you said on paper."
[crowd cheering]
If I lived in China or even Russia or any totalitarian country,
maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions.
Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges
because they haven't committed themselves to that over there.
But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly.
Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech.
Somewhere I read of the freedom of press.
Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for rights.
[crowd cheering]
When Dr. King wanted to march from Selma to Montgomery,
they had to go to the federal court to get Frank Johnson,
the federal court, a Republican, to then give them the permit to march.
It is that power to single out disliked viewpoints
which is what led Martin Luther King to constantly be prosecuted and arrested
and convicted and to write his famous letter from a Birmingham jail.
[Bryan] You can't understand civil rights in this country.
You can't understand the effort toward justice
if you don't understand that people had to stand up
when others were saying sit down.
That people had to speak when they were being told to be quiet.
And these restrictions on speech, and on truth telling
have been part of the great struggle for a just society.
[Ira] I was on the Donahue Show once with Hosea Williams.
[Phil] This is the Reverend Dr. Hosea Williams.
You know him as a follower of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,
a civil rights leader, and you know we wouldn't do a show like this
without a card-carrying member of the ACLU.
Here's Ira Glasser--
[Ira] We were discussing the rights of the Klan.
He was on that show ostensibly to debate me about it and he surprised everybody.
--head of the, uh, United States Civil Rights Commission.
Well, Phil, one thing we must understand, uh, a right is not a right in America,
until it's extended to every American.
And even though they beat and brutalize us in seeking that right,
if they take the Ku Klux Klan off the cable today--
[Phil] The N... the NAACP is next, you think?
-They're going to take the NAACP off tomorrow. -[Phil] You think so?
He understood because he had been through it.
I was Dr. King's field general. I organized a major march.
The problem with the black struggle in America has been
black leaders like King didn't have the ability to communicate with the masses.
Once that ability to communicate with the masses, things changed.
What you've got to be willing to do is to say,
"If you're going to ban what he says because you don't like it,
then when Dr. Williams goes to Forsyth County, where they threw rocks at him,
and the majority in that county is going to ban him from speaking."
Now, do you want... do you want every little town to decide which speech is permitted?
There isn't a necessary apposition between the First Amendment
and social justice goals.
Whether you're talking about the civil rights demonstrations, anti-war protesters,
gay rights demonstrations, labor union organizing,
women's right to vote demonstrations,
if banning hate speech had been in force on college campuses in the '60s,
their most frequent victim would have been Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver,
not David Duke.
The First Amendment is what permits people to organize for social justice goals.
[upbeat music playing]
A court injunction by Skokie officials blocked the Nazi march,
but the Nazis appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court
after Illinois judges refused to hear their case.
The issue is still tied up in the courts and the Nazis say,
they will not march here until the legal hassle is solved.
[whistles]
There were three ordinances that the town of Skokie passed and went into court
to try to enforce which was what started the case.
We're comfortable with the ordinances and we feel that they are valid.
The permit ordinance which has the $350,000 insurance provision
is similar to that which was enacted recently by the Chicago Park District.
If you allow the government to impose such an insurance bond requirement for anybody,
they could impose it for everybody.
One, I think was a... an ordinance that banned people from marching in uniforms,
in military-style uniforms which was later used against the Jewish War Veterans in Skokie.
There were three lawsuits all together
and I think that one could go a little bit bonkers trying to keep track of them.
A national organization espousing Nazi doctrine won an important legal victory
in the Supreme Court today.
[Ira] Ultimately, we won the Skokie case in every court
because the courts upheld the same principle in the Skokie case
as the courts had upheld in many previous cases.
Well, I said it's over, you know, the Supreme Court has made it clear,
there are First Amendment rights here, it's over.
And on the contrary, at that point, it became a national phenomenon.
President Carter was asked about the case during one of his presidential briefings.
The President deplores Nazi activity in Skokie, Illinois,
but believes it best to let the courts continue to handle the matter.
[upbeat music playing]
[David] There was a show at the time, Phil Donahue Show.
He invited me to talk about Skokie.
People in Skokie have relatives who died in ovens, mothers, brothers, children,
and you step forward, David Goldberger, to say
that the First Amendment entitles these people,
however repugnant their views to you to march?
Well, steps forward, the ACLU steps forward, an American lawyer,
and steps forward indeed a proud Jew.
I suspect that's probably one of the reasons I have stepped forward
is that it is a tradition, the Jewish tradition is a tradition that tells us all
that we must protect free speech.
Later, referred it to as one of his most important broadcasts.
I guess I want to know why are you concerned,
what... what is the... what is the ACLU concerned will happen?
What we're concerned about is that what is... what is sauce for the goose today
will be sauce for the gander tomorrow.
What we will do to one group that we hate today, can be... be done so easily tomorrow
and it's been done decade after decade.
[Phil] Give me a gander.
Well, look at the difficulty the Martin Luther King Jr. movement had going
into the southwest side areas in order to protest the lack of open housing down there,
for example, and we represented them.
Look at the problems that the anti-war movement had in the '60s,
where they were called traitors.
People were accused of treason.
It just doesn't make sense to cut these people off
by changing the laws with for those that we hate.
Because what he did was he packed the audience with people from Skokie without telling me.
So it was quite a hot, you know...
I don't believe that, uh... my position is not that anyone should hide.
My position... my position is that there are many peaceable, very effective ways
of communicating one's feelings and ideas much more effective than... than violence
or the threat of violence by... by the people in Skokie.
He'll be the first one to be shot.
-By... by the... the... the-- -By the Nazis.
But these ideas, I saw this and I can show you my number on my arm.
-I have been through this. -We see this? Please, can you help me?
Tell me what that means?
[man 17] This mean I've been through Auschwitz, Buchenwald, in a dozen other camps
and I saw this idea in the swastika what they do with the people.
We never had any doubt that we would prevail legally.
Legally, the Skokie case did not represent a noteworthy precedent.
Politically and socially and in terms of public opinion, it did.
[dramatic music playing]
[Philippa] Jewish organizations outside of Skokie got involved,
not officially organized people of Skokie.
There was a lot of talk about a counter-demonstration.
Their answer was, "This is what we did when the Nazis came in Germany.
We pulled down our shades because we thought they would go away and they didn't.
We're not going to make the same mistake again."
He's not going to march anywhere.
Nobody after Auschwitz is going to carry signs reading "Gas Jews" anywhere,
not in Marquette Park, not in Skokie, they're not anywhere.
We want the confrontations now.
[crowd protesting]
[dramatic music playing]
[upbeat music playing]
Welcome to a special Firing Line Debate.
Our topic tonight is "Resolved: The ACLU is Full of Baloney."
Now, it's not my place as moderator to comment on the wording of debate topics,
I only work here.
It's William F. Buckley's show.
[man 18] William F. Buckley Jr., rich, sophisticated,
a limousine kind of guy who wouldn't be caught without one.
This son of a millionaire educated in Europe and later at Yale
was the most articulate voice of conservatism in America.
Before Reagan, before Rush, there was Buckley.
Bill Buckley can properly be called the founder of the conservative movement.
National Review, the conservative magazine
founded by William F. Buckley Jr. in the 1950s.
Bill and National Review were more or less synonymous for a long time.
[man 19] And he's been the host ofFiring Line since 1966.
[Jay Nordlinger] Firing Linewas a wonderful platform for Bill, a wonderful arena,
sometimes a debate and sometimes a conversation.
The over winning social problem in America is the loss of moral coordinates
and the ACLU tries to clamp down on religion wherever it shows its public face.
The need for civilized restraints has met with encouragement to people
who want to parade in Skokie with their Nazi banners.
The ostensible aims of the ACLU are admirable.
It is a national pity that it has now become, to use Sunday-suited language,
a bunch of baloney.
The captain of the opposing team also needs no introduction to regular Firing Lineviewers.
He's the master baloney chef himself, Ira Glasser.
[applause]
Well, Bill, uh, you warned me not to list what is commendable about the ACLU
because you know as well as I do that there's so much more of it
than the nonsense you were describing.
The regularity and the constancy
of my appearances on Firing Line with Buckley
did sort of elevate my visibility and my persona
in a way that it had not been before.
I think it's a pity that an organization
which ought to be limited to the enhancement of civil liberties
is now embedded for a civil liberty every time they find a grievance group
that they want to defend.
The overwhelming bulk of the ACLU's work has been in the interest of most Americans
and most Americans know this.
You have to remember that there were many fewer stations at the time.
We had the three big broadcast networks. We had PBS.
♪ Something special On your public TV station ♪
♪ Tune in tonight Tune in tonight♪
[Jay] Anyone who was on television was a big deal.
The week goes by, the ACLU hasn't discovered it, right?
-You think of yourself as irresponsible and slothful. -Well,
that's what eternal vigilance is about, you know,
and as long as there's folks like you running around, God knows--
The jousting with a major, uh, public figure, uh, like... like Buckley.
That's like saying that... that faster grass grows, the more people drown.
Both things happen when it gets hot in the summer,
but you would hardly enhance water safety by buying a lawn mower.
-These things are not connected. -Ira.
-I would... I would abandon that metaphor if I were you. -It's ridiculous argument.
It... it kind of hurts that metaphor.
Yeah, it hurts you.
I would find people stopping me in the subways in New York, uh, which didn't happen before.
Bill Buckley was the erudite conservative on race, on everything else.
Ira disagreed with Bill Buckley and took him on.
-You know-- -But Bill... but Bill, people were being shot and lynched
for trying to vote because of their color of their skin.
This was not an abstract issue.
This was the leading moral crisis of your lifetime and mine
-and you came up short, didn't you? -[Bill] [inaudible]
[Ira] You came up short.
-Now, wait a minute. -I'm astonished that you don't concede that now.
-I really am. -I hope you don't suggest that
anything I ever wrote, said, or associated with--
They were intelligent. They... they liked intelligent discussion and discourse
and that's how Ira Glasser became friends with Bill Buckley.
[interviewer 2] Asking you what your impression of
Ira and William F. Buckley's relationship was.
[Norman] It was strange.
[soft music playing]
Here you've got this kind of, uh, aristocrat from Yale
dealing with this street guy from... from Brooklyn, Ira Glasser, rough and tough.
[crowd gasp]
I think part of the attraction we had for each other in that relationship
was how different we were.
Bill was interested in a great, great many things,
but he was not interested in sports except for sailing.
[Bill] It was a few years ago that I first sailed across the Atlantic on Cyrano,
a passage I'm not likely to forget.
Bill had lived a long full life and had never been to a ball game.
Ira sort of insisted and further he insisted that Bill take the subway.
[man 20] Subway, Buckley.
Don't worry, you... you will be protected.
[man 20] Next thing you know, he'll be hanging out with the head of the ACLU.
By the way, that's Ira Glasser, the head of the ACLU.
Taking Buckley to a baseball game was Ira's way
if Buckley was taking him to the Metropolitan Opera.
[man 20] Bill Buckley who works in New York hasn't set foot on a subway there in 30 years.
So, what's going on here? Mr. Limousine conservative with Mr. ACLU liberal?
[Ira] I had this... this crazy theory that, you know, if you could take somebody like this
and expose him to real people, it might change how he saw things.
He's been sealed off from reality for a long time
and this is, you know, we're... we're bringing him out.
For Ira to... to sort of bring him down, you know,
to... to a... a working person's level was a victory.
Everybody has a lacuna and this is mine.
-This is your lacuna? -Yeah.
[man 20] That's right. Lacuna, it's a gap in one's knowledge.
I knew that.
While the game was going on, Ira was explaining to him all the nuances of the game
and Buckley was as gracious and as nice.
I always thought it was like a fish out of water.
[Cora] It was just remarkable that this relationship
that grew up around controversy and arguments in the public eye
ended up with a kind of evening of the playing field.
[Ira] The central goal in talking and working with people who you don't agree with
is to persuade them that there is a common interest between us
in the rights that we have and the rights that we depend on.
There were issues that Buckley and I agreed on.
We agreed, uh, that the drug prohibition was a disaster
and was a violation of personal rights.
I was one who suggested, you know, "If we both have the same position on this
that would really astonish our enemies and amaze our friends
and maybe we should do one of your shows on it."
Politics make strange bedfellows and so do drugs for that matter.
Tonight, we've got William F. Buckley
teamed with the head of the dreaded American Civil Liberties Union.
[Ira] He had a show with Charlie Rangel, a die-hard liberal congressman,
and I don't think I disagreed with Charlie about anything except... except the drug war.
And I think he came on the show thinking that, uh, I was going to support him
and Buckley was going to attack him and we both attacked him.
Would we grow it or would we import it?
Whichever... whichever, um, is cheaper.
I see. And that goes for... it goes for the opium as well?
-Sorry. -Opium as well?
It is our position that our policies will do better for the drug addicts,
better for innocent people and better, uh, to reduce crime than your policies will.
[Charles Rangle] I respond to him since he's identified--
[announcer] All right, all right.
-Let me explain something to you in a way that's-- -But it's got to be a question
-and a brief one. -You have no idea how many...
-Answer, yes or no. -...how many bills have--
[laughing]
I had a heart attack in... in... in 1998, uh,
and, uh, it was only a coincidence that
it happened the day after we had dinner at his house, I think.
Uh, but the next week, you know, he called Trude, not his secretary.
He called Trude at home here to find out how I was
and, um, I often wondered, you know.
I wondered if I would have done that if he had, had the heart attack.
He was always very charming and... and very solicitous
and, you know, he was the perfect gentleman.
[Ira] So this was a letter that Bill Buckley sent after my retirement dinner
to which I had invited him.
I think the next day or two, he writes me this cute short letter.
"Dear Ira, I have been to a lot of tributes but never to one that matched yours on Friday.
Everything about it was festive, except maybe the Constitution."
"The beautiful hall, the exuberance of the speakers,
I can't imagine how much time was required to do it with such art and wit.
I had to force myself to remember how awful you and your influence are.
It was very generous of you to place me at your table and Trude looked simply wonderful.
Bless you and any time it is convenient,
think of Stamford as a waystation for points east, Bill."
Um...
I... I remember the end of an essay that was part of a book
written by a French theorist that I read at Yale and...
two men are sitting sipping coffee in a coffee house in... in Paris
and one turns to this stranger and said, uh, "Excuse me, do you like Jews?"
"No."
[cackles]
-"Well, do you like Catholics?" "No." -[man 21] Yes.
"Uh, well, who do you like?" "I like my friends."
[laughs]
I thought that was a marvelous way to cut through
categorical qualifications for friendship. I like nice people.
[dramatic music playing]
Good morning, everyone.
There will be no march by American Nazis this Sunday in Skokie, Illinois.
Because we agitated for free speech and won our right to free speech back completely
that the demonstration scheduled for Sunday in Skokie is henceforth canceled.
In the end, after we won the case finally, uh, in Skokie
and the Nazis had the right to go and demonstrate, they never did.
[soft music playing]
[man 22] Nazi leaders said all along that Skokie was not their real objective
and that they would probably cancel Sunday's march in the largely Jewish community,
if they could rally instead in Chicago, closer to their headquarters.
Federal Judge George Leighton ordered the Park District
to let the Nazis march in a Chicago park on July 9th without any bond.
This means that free speech for the white people on the southwest side is restored.
It's amazing how fast democracy goes--
[interviewer 3] What would have happened had he did march?
Well, I think there would have been some bloodshed.
[dramatic music playing]
By the time he wins the right to demonstrate in Skokie
and in Chicago, in Marquette Park, he doesn't go to Skokie,
but he does decide to do it in Marquette Park in Chicago because that is his turf.
That's where it all started. That's really what the Skokie case was all about.
[man 23] They know where the bullhorn is?
[Ira] The same thing that was about to happen in Skokie did happen in Marquette Park.
[suspenseful music playing]
No, it's not a march, it's just a rally.
Where... where are you gonna be?
Over at Marquette Park.
With an enormous amount of police protection because by that time, they're worried,
you know, he's going to go there with his dozen people and there's going to be a riot.
-Down with the-- -[screams] Down with the fucking Nazi!
[man 24] I wonder if the Reds are going to try anything today.
-It's a good-sized crowd. -Where's our... where's our banners?
-I don't see. -You tell us.
-Where are the banners? -They're out there somewhere.
Where are our people? I don't see our... we should see our white victory bash.
-It should have gone up about 15 minutes... -Don't worry about it.
-What the hell? Is everybody here now? -[man 24] Yeah.
We need an extension cord. They didn't bring it?
-No, they didn't bring it. -Oh, shit.
-Do you know where it is? -Do you know where it is?
Do you know where it is?
He starts his little demonstration and he gets drowned out
by these thousands of demonstrators, who in effect, he created.
This is ridiculous.
They can't even see us.
Look at this pathetic situation here. Look at this.
Well, they can't even see us. I hope they can hear us.
All right, can you put the truck over it?
No, no. We gotta wait for the extension cord.
All right, we'll have to just wait.
What a pathetic... Goddammit!
Isn't this pathetic though? They can't even see us.
-Isn't that really pathetic? -[man 24] Oh, bullshit. They should--
[Frank] Look at this. They can't... Nobody... No one will see--
[man 25] Scuffles broke out and the police moved in quickly
taking some of the combatants to nearby police vans.
Hey!
[Ira] So, when we finally win everybody's right, not just his, to free speech,
he is so outnumbered by people who oppose him
that he gets vanquished in a way that attempting to ban him couldn't possibly have done.
He slinks away and that's the end of the Skokie case.
The guy was crazy and he was followed around by at most 20 people.
There were never very many members. It had no resources.
Collin himself lived in an apartment right above their offices,
lived there with a couple of other people.
It's fair to say he was a little bit confused about his identity.
He actually was Jewish by birth.
The family changed its name once his father, who was a survivor of Dachau,
came to the United States.
The name had been Cohen and it was changed to Collin.
The family didn't like what he became,
so he was an outlier even in his own family
and then he certainly became an outlier in terms of American Values.
All right, let's see.
Why don't we just take it on the paper cutter and cut it off here.
Then it'll look... no, it looks good. It looks like--
Frank Collin's father supposedly is Jewish.
Why do you think he's turned Nazi?
I'm not a psychiatrist.
[Philippa] Collin got a lot of attention out of this.
I suppose one could say in that sense he succeeded,
but not really, because shortly thereafter,
he was actually kicked out of his own party.
Probably the reason was that the party had discovered
that he was sexually abusing boys in the party's headquarters
and in 1980, Collin was convicted of doing so
and was sent away to prison, stayed, uh, in prison for three years.
When he got out, he became a new ager and saying very carefully to anybody who asked,
"I'm not a Nazi anymore."
[serene music playing]
In retrospect, the Skokie case was a defining pivotal moment for the ACLU.
The reason it was defining and pivotal is that...
the reaction to the Skokie case threatened our existence.
[woman 3] It is not the first time the ACLU has defended an unpopular cause,
but this one has brought the organization financial trouble.
The ACLU stood up for the principle of free speech
that had always said it believed in
at a moment when its viability as an organization was threatened.
They accused the ACLU of selling out.
We've got to protect people based on the right involved
and not how we feel about the individuals.
I feel that the ACLU should spend more time and energy
protecting the civilized rather than the uncivilized
and that things have turned upside down because of people like you.
They accused the ACLU of racism because the ACLU was defending free speech.
Turned out that the members were very persuadable
by laying out the reasons the ACLU decided to oppose the city of Skokie.
By the 1980s, the Skokie case enabled us to understand, explain,
and rally, uh, people who agreed with us, uh, to the principle of free speech.
This is a quote from Michael Dukakis,
a card-carrying member of the ACLU,
American Civil Liberties Union.
[applause]
Here it is.
This is the little piece of paper that
you've been hearing about that's caused all the trouble.
The ACLU functioned in a period of... of great upswing
throughout the '80s and '90s.
Anyone in power is going to violate civil liberties sooner or later,
some more than others and some less than others,
but we end up suing everybody, including our members.
So, it was a period of enormous growth infrastructurally for the ACLU
and, therefore, for our ability to defend civil liberties.
What you are talking about is when a policeman who has violated the Fourth Amendment
and violated the rights of innocent people, comes in and says,
"He thought he was doing it the right way."
-A judge can say, "Okay, we'll look the other way." -[host] No, wait a second...
And what that will do is encourage the police to do what they already do,
which is violate the rights of many innocent people
in order to catch a few who are guilty.
That is not our system and your proposal changes our system.
Let me go to Mr. Giuliani. Mr. Glasser says it would violate the basic premise
that people are innocent until proven guilty.
I've gotten the general impression that Mr. Glasser
is not enamored of these proposals.
Uh, I think maybe it's the perspective that he... that he comes from.
What counts in these struggles,
we have learned over and over and over again
is never how much power they have or what they do.
What counts is how much resistance we offer and what we do in response.
The tide of liberty and individual rights, and equal justice is clearly with us,
but only if we keep swimming. Thank you.
[applause]
[soft music playing]
[man 26] The chaos in Charlottesville had been building for months.
Since the city voted in April to remove the Robert E. Lee statue,
there have been three protests, counter protests, and now violence.
Surely, Charlottesville is a lot like Skokie.
This is clearly about white supremacy and we're not going to have it here.
The rally in Charlottesville supposedly was generated by the movement to pull down statues.
White supremacists wanted to demonstrate near a Confederate statue,
Robert E. Lee, one of the Confederate leaders
was in a very central position in that town.
[man 27] Organizers of Saturday's planned rally had said
it was meant to honor history and save the statute.
In fact, I think it's pretty clear
that white supremacists were looking for a way to flex their muscles.
At the very last minute, after the permit had been granted
for the August demonstration,
a member of the city council sought to move the demonstrators.
We are not backing down. We are going to be in Lee Park.
Of course, it stirred old memories.
These people are trying to replace us with Third World immigrants.
They are trying to replace us with Muslims.
They put propaganda out in the movies and in our school system
talking down to white people, trying to make us to blame for everything.
There was an attempt to get an injunction to stop the demonstration in Charlottesville
and on its face, that's really no different from the Skokie situation.
That's what led the ACLU together with some other organizations
to oppose that, saying that it was viewpoint discrimination.
It was only because of hatred of the ideas of the white supremacists
that there was this effort to move them away.
If you weren't already planning on coming out to Charlottesville,
you need to come out to Charlottesville.
We're going to be demonstrating in Lee Park.
I'm an American Jew. I'm a woman.
I feel very strongly that those are really horrible, horrible people with noxious ideas,
but there's no question in my mind that they had an absolute right to demonstrate
under the American constitution.
I was at a conference
and I saw news flashes constantly on my phone
about what was happening and that was extremely distressing.
[chanting]
[Nadine] White supremacists to the horror
and unpreparedness of all law enforcement agencies
showed up the night before the rally,
marching through campus brandishing lighted torches.
[chanting]
I woke up listening to the radio and hearing....
it's the first thing I remember hearing when I woke up
was the chants of the demonstrators,
"You will not replace us. Jews will not replace us."
And you could imagine the chills that sent down my spine
as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor.
What had happened in ensuing days, uh, is not the fault of free speech
or the people that champion free speech.
What happened in ensuing days was the fault of the police and the government
for not providing ample protection.
[soft music playing]
[clamoring]
[man 28] Police say Fields used his car
to intentionally mow down a crowd of anti-hate demonstrators on Saturday
killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.
When Heather Heyer was run down by an automobile,
there was literally not a single police officer
in that vicinity at all.
In our reports, we kept noting, I'm looking around, I'm not seeing any police here.
There... there was no police presence.
Now, in criticizing police, the Charlottesville police chief told CBS news, "Wait a minute.
I had officers and the help of the National Guard
and they moved in when the time was right."
[somber music playing]
I guess my question, and I'm not trying to be contentious for the sake of it,
it's... it's an honest question,
"If people show up with guns and clubs,
some of them wearing what looks like tactical armor and they're chanting,
"Jews will not replace us."
At what point is it fair for a Jewish person who comes from a culture that
people have been hunted and killed, at what point is it fair
for them to feel like violence is imminent?
Oh, no, no. They... they can feel that,
but the fact of the matter is is that a lot of that is symbolic.
When people burn flags, they got arrested for inciting violence.
When people carry guns in a demonstration,
in a society where they're allowed to carry guns,
you got to make a distinction between speech,
including symbolic speech, and conduct.
Now the difficult question is where does the speech bleed into conduct
and at what moment do the police step in?
Is it fair to have a concern that if hate speech incites violence
that you should control it?
Well, you know, the... the key phrase there is "incites violence."
You have to remember that in Charlottesville, the instrument of killing was a car.
[Noam] That's right.
The police did a poor job of anticipating and protecting speech
of both sides in a volatile situation.
All right, now. But we're going gonna have a little bit of a traffic tie-up when he's--
I got three guys taking are of traffic.
Yeah, but what are we gonna do with the traffic?
If we send them this way, they'll likely get a brick thrown...
No diversion, just stop it until we're through crossing, then we'll let it go.
The police have to be good enough and competent enough
to anticipate a volatile situation and protect the rights of both sides to speak,
but keep them separate and have enough of a show of police force
to prevent the chaos that happened in Charlottesville.
[clamoring]
Can I ask you a very difficult question?
-Sure. -Which is, do you believe that those protesters
who were there in Charlottesville on that day
had the right or should again have the right to express their views?
I do, and that's not a popular view. And I will tell you why.
Uh, I'm not telling you why it's not a popular view, I think that's obvious.
But, um, I think once we take away
the right to free speech, we may never get it back.
My big concern with losing free speech is who makes the decision,
-what speech is allowable and what speech is not. -Right.
And once you set it up so that there's always one group deciding,
that group can change at any given time.
Well, what about when we represented the Black Panthers
and they would stand there with their guns back in the '60s?
What about the defense and justice team in Mississippi and Louisiana in the '60s
who had guns all the time on them and had them as a deterrent to the people in the Deep South?
You can't have a double standard.
Everybody's talking about the First Amendment and we have a preamble to our constitution
that is supposed to pro... uh, promote domestic tranquility.
So it seems so clear of what would be right and what would be wrong.
-[man 29] Right. What's wrong? -Because this is promoting hatred,
it is not promoting domestic tranquility.
So Mr. Stoner should not be allowed to say these things?
-Not on TV. -[Mr. Stoner] Excuse me, but I'm--
No, he should... they should not.
-Hang on one second. -[Mr. Stoner] I'm the leading advocate
of peace and tranquility in the country.
I advocate a program where we'll only have a white Christian America
-and then we will have peace and tranquility. -[man 29] Okay.
-No more lawlessness. -[man 29] Now, the point--
Nobody says--
Let me ask you... let me ask you this question about domestic tranquility.
Thirty years ago, 25 years ago in the South,
what was disturbing domestic tranquility was civil rights marches.
-But that, no, to me that's, it's very clear. -[Ira] Well, to you.
-[woman 4] That is not. -But you're not the one who got to decide.
That is not domestic tranquility.
We condemn in the strongest possible terms
this egregious display of hatred, bigotry
and violence on many sides, on many sides.
It's probably too early to know what the impact of Charlottesville will be,
but I would hope given the state of American First Amendment law,
all of the law that was built before Skokie, that was built in part by Skokie,
that's been built since, I hope American judges would understand
that their obligation is to let speech be heard
and not to let what happens in a really mishandled situation in Charlottesville
prejudice their attitude towards the really important goals of the First Amendment.
[tranquil music playing]
Meeting Ben Stern was for me, uh, a surprisingly emotional experience.
I mean, this is a guy who was arrested by the Nazis in Poland when he was 15,
separated from his family whom he never saw again,
uh, survived, escaped from and recaptured and escaped from and recaptured,
a bunch of concentration camps.
[Ira] The first time we met, his daughter picked me up,
brought me to her house for lunch, met him.
You know, he's a short little 96-year-old man
and he had this kind of almost pugnacious bulldog, you know, jaw jutting out,
shakes my hand, smiles and says,
"I know we're not going to agree and we're not going to change each other's minds,
but we're going to be friends."
And it... and it happened that way. It happened that way.
He showed me all these pictures of... he had his family tree, uh, on the wall.
And he... he... he sort of drew an imaginary line three-quarters of the way down and said,
"Everyone on top of that line is dead. They were all killed."
[Ira] All the reaction of the Holocaust survivors themselves
was always to me very understandable.
[Ira] The town of Skokie was wrong on both counts.
On the one hand, it tried to ban the neo-Nazis' speech,
on the other hand, it tried to prevent people like Ben Stern
uh, from organizing speech in opposition.
After Charlottesville and Boston,
Nazis decided to rally in both San Francisco and Berkeley.
I asked my father what he was going to do.
He said, "I'm going to be there."
And he said, "I hope I will not be standing alone."
The mayor of Berkeley told us to stay home,
close the shades, let it pass.
The city council voted to stay home.
"All citizens should stay home."
The police commissioner said, "Stay home."
Ben Stern is not staying home.
When we got to the rally, he was not on the speaker list.
He asked to speak and he spoke for a few minutes
to thousands of Muslims, Arabs, LGBT,
blacks, Jews, whites, everyone.
You could have heard a quarter drop in those minutes that he spoke.
So, Ira's right.
We stay home at our peril.
I do hear you.
[chuckles]
[Ira] So, I come to you actually as a time traveler from the '60s.
I was mostly known for two issues
when I was at the ACLU in all those years.
I was known for being a near absolutist on First Amendment rights
and I was known for my advocacy for racial justice.
I was one of those small number of people who brought the issue of racial justice
into a high priority at the ACLU during the years I was there.
Were there conflicts between free speech and racial justice? Sometimes.
Uh, but there was never once where I thought
that we had to tone down our defense of free speech.
[light music playing]
That was the beauty and the power and the majesty of the Ira Glasser,
Executive Directorship.
He never allowed race to trump civil liberties principles or vice versa.
The ACLU was in good shape when he retired.
He was leaving a very healthy organization that, um, that... that as I've said,
that as I think a lot of people have said that he brought into the 21st century.
He didn't just stay in an office and... and sign papers and checks.
And he got out there and he was visible.
And he was vocal and he embraced an activist tradition.
And I think that kind of leader-activist identity is something
that will be his legacy and that has inspired a generation.
He's one of the Americans who protected and enhanced, uh, the constitutional principles
that are the framework of American democracy.
He's an unsung hero.
We cannot forget history.
We cannot forget what... what our... our leaders, our mentors
and... and champions did for society.
[Ira] I had certainly had my shot at it and I was happy to pass the baton on to others.
[soft music playing]
[interviewer 4] Could you read the "Ira at the Bat" poem?
-The poem? -Yeah, here it is.
[Ira] So, this was a poem that was written by a colleague
that was on the search committee of the board that selected me
and he was one of the ones who preferred and voted for one of, uh, the other candidates.
And the poem goes...
The outlook wasn't brilliant For the CLU that day
The deficit was rising The piper yet to pay
Then when Neier hit the road And donors turned away
It was as bleak as Brooklyn When the Dodgers went L.A.
The CLU went searching for A leader bold and true
For a leader its directors Would love and would not rue
For a liberties exponent Who could talk till he was blue
For a CEO most brilliant And a money-raiser, too
[serene music playing]
And when the dust had settled In September '78
With a smile upon his face 'Twas Glasser at the plate
The ACLU's whole future was Now tied to Ira's fate
The members, They could only hope That he would bat his weight
Somewhere EOs tremble And directors scream and shout
Somewhere programs falter And the future is in doubt
Somewhere the non-profits Have all but lost their clout
But they're all smiles On 43rd Street Mighty Ira knocked one out
He writes, "Congratulations on your successful reign
from the author of the search committee minority report.
Everybody can be wrong once in a while." [laughs]
[serene music playing]
[slow music playing]
Nearly 2,000 prisoners got the triangle,
not... no one else.
We were permitted only to go to second perimeter to go to work.
-What did they call you? -We were dangerous Jews.
-Dangerous Jews? -Yeah.
-Well, they were right about that. -Huh?
They were right about that.
-You're still dangerous. -You were a dangerous Jew. You're still a dangerous Jew.
[Charlene] You're a dangerous Jew. [laughs]
The title really describes the culture of the streets of Brooklyn where I grew up.
"Where... where did you go?" "We were out."
"What did you do?" "Nothing."
Hey, Jackie Robinson, my old bat because I can still fucking hit this--
[laughter]
[interviewer 5] Go ahead, right to the camera.
[laughs]
[serene music playing]