ACLU Expels Elizabeth Flynn (1940)

Wed May 08, 1940

Image

Image: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn addressing strikers in Paterson, N.J. (1913) [socialistworker.org]

On this day in 1940, the leadership of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), voted to expel labor radical and founding member Elizabeth Gurley Flynn for her Communist Party membership.

Flynn was a radical labor activist who prominently organized with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). She had a long history of labor organizing, playing a leading role in the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913 and a free speech fight in Spokane, Washington, where she chained herself to a lamppost to delay her inevitable arrest. She was also a member of the Communist Party of the United States of America, joining in 1936.

In February 1940, the ACLU board adopted a controversial resolution that effectively barred communists from serving. For her part, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn refused to leave, forcing the organization to vote to remove her.

Later, the ACLU would also fail to come to the defense of W.E.B. Du Bois, a prominent communist activist and co-founder of the NAACP, while he was facing trial for gathering signatures for a global nuclear non-proliferation treaty in 1951.