News & Commentary

On the 150th Anniversary of the 14th Amendment, we’re talking about a promise of equality that was bookended by violence. On the front end was the vicious enslavement of Black people; on the back-end was the Jim Crow era, a response that successfully and brutally reinforced racial segregation in opposition to the rights afforded Black people by the 14th Amendment. In both cases, violence was protected and condoned by the legal system in the laws as written during slavery, and in the failure to provide equal protection of the law in the face of that violence during Jim Crow.

June is Pride month, a month to celebrate the strength and activism of LGBTQ people. We at the ACLU of California are excited to be working on three LGBTQ-related bills this year to make things better for students, youth in foster care, and people in jail or prison.

President Trump's executive order has no plan to reunite over 2,300 children who have been take away from their parents. We will be monitoring the administration’s to see if family separations really stop.

As public outrage around family separation mounts, members of Congress demand access to government-run facilities, and the United Nations condemns us, the Trump administration is attempting to shift the blame — fast.

On Monday afternoon, civil rights, religious, and community organizations are taking their demand that Amazon stop providing face surveillance technology to governments, including police departments, to the company’s headquarters in Seattle. The groups will deliver over 150,000 petition signatures, a coalition letter signed by nearly 70 organizations representing communities nationwide, and a letter from Amazon shareholders.

As stories of state violence against Black men and boys occupy many of the calls for police reform, countless stories of Black women and girls subjected to excessive force and police misconduct remain untold. We must say their names.

In past elections, DA candidates ran largely unopposed, but this year, there were more contested DA races in California than in recent memory – perhaps ever before. Although incumbents retained their seats in most counties, all elected DAs in California now know they are under an unprecedented level of public scrutiny.

Whether you realize it or not, July 9, 1868 was a day that changed your life and ours. Why? Because it was the day that the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified.

Starbucks. Colorado State College. Air B&B. Nordstrom Rack. Yale University. Grandview Golf Club. Oakland's Lake Merritt. In the last month, “incidents” in each of these locales have made headlines, incidents in which white people have called the police on people of color—either African American or Native American—accusing them of everything from burglary to acting suspicious to golfing too slowly. What is remarkable is not that these “incidents” are happening, but that they are being covered by national news outlets, documented by passers-by, and spread on social media.  People of color know these kinds of “incidents” are not unusual. They happen every day. It is also remarkable that in every one of these cases, no person of color was shot by the police. Instead, apologies are issued, CEO’s promise to make changes and/or require training, and they assert that “what happened does not represent the culture of our company/university/community, etc.”