Published by Scholarly Resources, Inc.

The Project Files of the ACLU document the organization's involvement in two of the twentieth century's most important issues: the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement. The Files are divided into two sections, The Amnesty Project and the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee. These records are a rich source for the study of the Vietnam era, the Civil Rights movement, the peace movement, and American legal and political history.

Amnesty Project, 1964-1980 [bulk 1971-1977]
The Project on Amnesty operated from 1972-1975, and these files document amnesty and clemency issues for draft evaders, military deserters, and veterans holding other-than-honorable discharges. In the fall of 1974, the American Civil Liberties Union merged the Military Rights Project headed by David F. Addlestone into the Amnesty Project, which was headed by Henry Schwarzschild. The Clemency Litigation Project, under litigation director Edwin J. Oppenheimer, also came under the umbrella of the Amnesty Project; it focused on litigation for war resisters. The staff of the Project on Amnesty and the Military Rights Project (MRP) both worked for the Clemency program on the "exclusion" of individuals who had relinquished their American citizenship. The Project on Amnesty ended in 1975, but the National Military Discharge Upgrading Project, in affiliation with Georgetown University Law School, began operating on July 1,1975.

The files are grouped under four headings: administrative, subject files, clemency litigation division, and project director's records, each arranged alphabetically within each heading. The materials grouped under the administrative files heading record the history of the Project itself and the ACLU's policy on amnesty. The records contain correspondence, background material, statistics on the draft and the Vietnam War, and documents on President Ford's establishment of a Presidential Clemency Board. There is substantive material covering "Separation Program Numbers (SPNs)," a code the Army used to denote reasons why an individual was discharged. The ACLU ran a series of advertisements offering to inform veterans what the SPNs on their discharge papers meant.

The project subject files, which contain the bulk of the material, include Henry Schwarzschild's correspondence with the staff of other amnesty organizations and the Selective Service System, attorneys in the Departments of Defense and Justice, and members of United States Congress. There are a few historical papers which cover amnesty in American history prior to the Vietnam War era, public statements on amnesty, and congressional testimony. The files on other amnesty organizations cover many groups.

The files of the Clemency Litigation Division include correspondence, project reports, and legal dockets. The Division handled a variety of military, draft, immigration, and Reconciliation Service cases.

The Project Director's files are subdivided into two sections: project files and project subject files. The records span 1964 to 1979 and include material which pre-dates and post-dates the existence of the project. The project files contain correspondence with officials of other amnesty organizations such as the Center for Social Action, National Council of Churches, and Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Included is correspondence with the Selective Service System regarding statistical summaries of the draft population. Correspondence with the Presidential Clemency Board and its chairman, Charles E. Goodell, and General Counsel Lawrence Baskir includes summaries of pending clemency cases. There are also numerous internal memoranda critical of the Presidential Clemency Program. Also included is material pertaining to a minority report issued by a few members of the Clemency Board, led by Gen. Lewis Walt. There are also letters to and from Congressmen, including information pertaining to a list compiled by Senator Edward Kennedy of men under indictment for draft evasion.

The project subject files contain broad files on "conscientious objection" and "conscription" filled with press releases, minutes, memoranda, miscellaneous legal documents, newsletters, and clippings consisting chiefly of background information from the late 1960s. Other major subject files include a file on amnesty legislation containing draft and final bills from the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, along with correspondence regarding those bills; a file on the implementation of President Ford's Clemency Program consisting of rules and regulations and presidential statements and proclamations; and a file of general background information consisting of various drafts of policies, reports, articles, and statements.

Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee, 1964-1976 [bulk 1964-1968]
Founded in the summer of 1964 to assist the civil rights movement, the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee (LCDC) solicited lawyers to provide volunteer legal representation for worthy or significant cases. Typically, a volunteer lawyer would travel to a small town in the South and spend one month working on cases in coordination with one of the LCDC's regional offices. While these regional offices handled case work locally, the headquarters in New York handled lawyer solicitation, fundraising, publicity, and other general activities. In December 1967, the LCDC was merged into the Roger Baldwin Foundation (the tax-exempt arm of the ACLU), becoming the LCDC project of the Foundation. As the civil rights movement grew in popularity, the LCDC's practical and ideological goals were met by other organizations, most notably the United States Justice Department.

The Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee subseries documents the administrative activities of the LCDC and legal case work done in the southern United States. It is divided into administrative, correspondence, publicity and legal files. The administrative files contain minutes, field office files, miscellaneous material, financial matters, and national ACLU material. The correspondence consists mostly of Henry Schwarzschild's contacts with various individuals and organizations concerning LCDC administration. The publicity files contain statements, press releases, dockets, and newspaper clippings. The legal files contain documents relating to the Sobol v. Perez case, in which the LCDC's New Orleans field office director Richard Sobol was charged with practicing law without a Louisiana license (a measure that threatened to block any out-of-state lawyer from trying cases in Louisiana).

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