Ira Glasser served as the fifth executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1978 to 2001. The following is an excerpt from is recent article (at FIRE): “Social justice requires free speech.”
Prevailing political power has always been antagonistic to social justice and has sought relentlessly to restrict speech advocating social justice. That is why social justice has always required speech to nurture and grow its movements.
That was true for the nascent labor movement in the early 20th century; the anti-war movement around 1917 (and again in the 1970s); the birth control movement around 1916, when Margaret Sanger distributed informational leaflets on the streets of New York; the movement to gain the right of women to vote; the anti-lynching movement when the crusading journalist Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) used the only weapons she had — articles and speeches — to rally opposition to the epidemic of lynching; and, in our time, the gay rights and civil rights movements. All of them and others depended critically on speech rights, and all would have been extinguished without speech rights.
That is why John Lewis (1940-2020) said that “Without freedom of speech and the right to dissent, the Civil Rights movement would have been a bird without wings.”Progressives forget that at their and our peril.
I am usually loathe to accept a qualifier to the word “justice.” In this case, I don’t want to debate Glaser about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. What I hear him discussing in this piece is the application of equal rights before the law without regard to race, creed or national origin. That’s a specific set of measures that can be described as civil rights. He chooses to use the wording social justice. We’re talking about the same thing.