The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)Where do you go if someone is threatening your personal rights? Do you go to the police or maybe the government? What if the police and the government are the parties that threaten your rights? All you have to do is simply call the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union). Sounds like a commercial, right? The ACLU covers the United States with its legal protection. He is involved in so many aspects of the civil liberties struggle that it is difficult to cover them all. To fully understand what the ACLU has done for the United States would take much longer than I have. Therefore, I have chosen a couple of incidents that, to me, exemplify what the ACLU is and how they have affected our society. The ACLU, American Civil Liberties Union, is an organization that began the fight to protect the civil liberties of the American people. The ACLU is defined as a nonpartisan U.S. organization that offers legal and other assistance in cases involving violations of civil liberties. (Websters) Civil liberties contain a substantial body of laws including: freedom of speech and press, separation of church and state, free exercise of religion, due process of law, equal protection, and privacy. (Walker 3) The Encyclopedia of the Constitution defines civil liberties as “those rights which an individual citizen may assert against the government.” In a formal sense, the ACLU is a private, volunteer organization dedicated to defending the Bill of Rights. Officially founded in 1920, the ACLU today has more than 270,000 members. With offices in most states and the District of Columbia, the ACLU rightly calls itself “the nation's largest law firm.” (Walker 4) The ACLU, despite its noble goal, has a terrible public image. The reason for such hatred or support is the fact that civil liberty cases generally involve moral and personal issues. These issues are the ones that evoke feelings from all corners of society. The rights that the ACLU generally protects are those segments of society that least agree with mainstream society. The ACLU promised to protect everyone's rights. These rights include the right to free speech of detested groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, Nazis and Communists. The Skokie case is an example of the classic free speech case that the ACLU would take. This case, which hit the media on April 28, 1977, concerned American Nazi Frank Collin's right to demonstrate in Skokie, Illinois. (Walker 323) This case, like many others before and since, defended the rights of a person who espoused one of the most universally despised ideologies in the country.