We were established in 1985, incorporated in California, headquartered in Washington, D.C. since April 2001, and are recognized by the IRS as a 501(c)(3) organization.

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CURRENT PROJECTS (updated September 2006)

Frank Wilkinson Book: Our newest book, FIRST AMENDMENT FELON, a biography of Frank Wilkinson, has been written by Robert Sherrill. Sherrill follows Wilkinson’s life, as he traveled the country learning his work, discovering the intensity with which the government tried to destroy his efforts, and then organizing to shut down the House UnAmerican Activities Committee specifically and the J. Edgar Hoover/Joe McCarthy Era in general. His purpose has been empowerment through education, active vocal opposition and solidarity.

As we continually plan promotion of the Frank Wilkinson book, please let us know if you or others you know might be willing to share your experience with the Red Scare, COINTELPRO, or post 9/11 First Amendment or due process issues. Please contact us at (202)529-4225 or by emailing us at info@firstamend.org.

Grassroots America Conference: For most of 2003, we helped design and coordinate the Grassroots America Defends the Bill of Rights – First National Conference. See more about this conference at www.grassroots-america.org. The conference, held October 18 & 19, 2003, brought together for the first time the many local activists and organizers who develop and seek to pass bill of rights resolutions in their areas. These resolutions are grassroots efforts to protect key constitutional rights on a local or statewide level. More than 150 resolutions on local to state-level have passed with hundreds more in process. As well, many policy experts on issues of civil liberties, privacy, immigrants’ rights, balance of powers concerns, etc. participated. They were joined by representatives of dozens of national organizations who have taken positions of concern regarding greatly changed federal policies and laws following the horrible 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks. Kit Gage, Director of the Foundation, served as “chief nudge” for planning, and as one of the formal hosts for the conference.

Civil Liberties At Risk: Immediately following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Foundation helped mobilize to prepare for a barrage of new laws and policies. (You can read Kit Gage's brief Public Eye piece about First Amendment concerns Post-911 and her Public Eye Article that describes the consistent pattern by which the government historically has demonized dissent.) The government almost always seeks to cut back dramatically on due process and First Amendment activity in times of crisis and/or war. Historically each time, the rights violations have later been undone. They have been ruled unconstitutional, policies have been retracted, laws changed, and regretted – sometimes formally – as in the Japanese American internments.

Our Foundation role has been to speak out, to work with the press, to help share information with activists, organizers and the public in general. We try to limit the damage. We have an historical perspective on federal responses to crises, and advocate strongly that government response be tied to better law enforcement – connect the dots, don’t criminalize dissent, ethnic groups and whole religions. Apply policies across the board, rather than discriminatorily.

Books Tell the Story: One of the key ways we talk about history is by writing about it.

Dick Criley’s FBI v The First Amendment told of the decades the FBI spent trying to neutralize our sister organization, NCARL – the National Committee to Abolish HUAC (the House UnAmerican Activities Committee). Criley told the story with the unlikely window of the Foundation’s FBI files, which we obtained throughout an 8 year Freedom of Information Act legal battle. All 136,000 pages of the files obtained through the suit document a history of abuse of power and blatant disregard for the First Amendment. You can visit our Books Page for more information by clicking HERE.

Jim Dempsey and David Cole wrote Terrorism & the Constitution, Sacrificing Civil Liberties in the Name of National Security for us in 2000. Then they updated it in January 2002 and are updating it again for 2005, incorporating some of the massive legal changes post 9/11/01. In one slender volume it summarizes the history of government targeting dissent, of movements for political change and particularly to limit government abuses. It traces the ebb and flow of policy changes, case law and legislation brought about by crises and peoples’ demands. But it’s really also a way of understanding civil liberties in the 20th century. You can visit our Books Page for more information by clicking HERE.

Now Robert Sherrill is writing of a life. Sherrill follows Frank Wilkinson’s life, as he traveled the country organizing to shut down the House UnAmerican Activities Committee specifically and the J. Edgar Hoover/Joe McCarthy Era in general. Frank was founding and long time director both of NCARL and the Foundation. His life is a great story about strengthening political dissent in the U.S., told by a gifted storyteller, and coming soon. You can visit our Books Page for more information by clicking HERE.

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EARLY PROJECTS

The First Amendment Foundation funded a variety of educational programs in its first 15 years, including:

FILM: The Vigil: Remembering Lovejoy – a documentary/drama on Reverend Elijah Lovejoy, this nation’s first martyr to the cause of a free press.

SEMINAR: Political Dissent and the Law – Loyola Law School, Los Angeles

NEWSLETTER: The Right to Know and the Freedom to Act

TRIBUTE: to Thomas I. Emerson – 1907-1991 – Lines Professor of Law, Yale University; founding member of the First Amendment Foundation Board. A Conference dedicated to his work – FBI v. the First Amendment, 1991, Washington, DC

BACKGROUND

First Amendment of the Bill of Rights:
“Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Critical Analyses:
Free thought and speech are “the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.”

Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo.

“The First Amendment seems to me to be a very uncompromising statement. It admits of no exceptions. It tells us that the Congress and, by implication, all other agencies of the government are denied any authority whatever to limit the political freedom of the citizens of the United States.
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... [O]ur doctrine of political freedom is not a visionary abstraction. It is a belief which is based on long and bitter experience, which is thought out by shrewd intelligence. It is the sober conviction that, in a society pledged to self-government, it is never true that, in the long run, the security of the nation is endangered by the freedom of the people. Whatever may be the immediate gains and losses, the dangers to our safety arising from political suppression are always greater than the dangers to that safety arising from political freedom.”

Alexander Meiklejohn,
Testimony on the Meaning of the First Amendment to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, 1955

The history of dissent in the United States – both symbolically and actually – is a story of people demonstrating in the face of their government exercising its formidable power to suppress the dissenters. In every struggle for political or social change, the government has investigated, harassed, intimidated and/or tried to neutralize the forces for change. Indeed, the FBI was formed to investigate and stop immigrant groups seeking rational limits to their working conditions and hours. As well as pursuing criminals, the FBI has prioritized neutralization of dissidents throughout its history in the 20th Century, in a well-documented trail of tears.

Because of the relative clarity of the Bill of Rights, dissenters often have been able to obtain records of the abuses, attempt to redress grievances, and seek to prevent future spying and neutralization campaigns by the government. They have sought to educate the public and obtain its assistance in part to facilitate their pursuit of specific changes and protections through the Congress and in the courts.

The First Amendment Foundation’s tasks are to help people understand their First Amendment rights, the actual history of the abuse of these rights, and mobilize to shore up these rights.

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BOARD MEMBERS

Frank Wilkinson was the first Executive Director
and Chauncey Alexander served as founding President of the Foundation.

Board:

Woody Kaplan, President
Ramona Ripston, Vice President
Chuck Lapine, Treasurer/Secretary
James X. Dempsey, Assistant Secretary
Carole Goldberg
Elizabeth Poe Kerby
Kate Martin
Nancy G. McDermid
Victor Navasky
Gifford Phillips
Frank Rosen
Rabbi David Saperstein
Howard Unterberger, Esq.
Gore Vidal
Reverend C. T. Vivian

Staff:
Director
Kit Gage

Assistant to Director
Katie Roberts