The ACLU’s Operation Southern Justice takes on the racial injustice embedded in the administration of law itself.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU, Norman grantee 1967–1995) was founded in 1920 to defend the individual rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States. When Charles Morgan Jr. — a white Birmingham lawyer who had lost his law practice after publicly condemning the 1963 church bombing that killed four young Black girls — opened the ACLU’s Southern Regional Office in Atlanta in 1964, he set his sights on a form of racial injustice that was hiding in plain sight: the systematic exclusion of Black people from the administration of justice itself. Under Morgan’s leadership, the office launched Operation Southern Justice — a coordinated campaign to challenge the exclusion of Black Americans from grand and trial juries across the South, and to represent Black death row inmates who had been indicted, convicted, and sentenced to death by all-white juries. The campaign produced a landmark Supreme Court victory, Washington v. Lee, which held that the racial segregation of prisons and jails in Alabama was unconstitutional — leading to the desegregation of prisons, jails, and county road gangs throughout the South. 

Norman earmarked grants to the ACLU for Operation Southern Justice from 1967 to 1976. Across nearly thirty years, Norman provided $691,450 in cumulative grants to the ACLU Foundation and its state affiliates in New York and Georgia — one of the largest and most sustained commitments in the foundation’s history.

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