Lady Java wanted to dance. Ali wanted to see his brother. Robert wanted to hang out with friends. Yetta wanted to wave a red flag. Betty wanted to teach. Ernest wanted to stay in the country he proudly served. Daisy wanted her vote to count.    

All these people, and many thousands more, were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California that this year celebrates its 100th anniversary. Their fights were often lonely until the ACLU SoCal got involved and their outcomes, in many cases, affected millions of people throughout Southern California and across the nation.  

We mark the launch of this landmark year with some of our organization’s representative stories. Not all ended successfully — but they all represent our unwavering fight for justice. 

Lady Java

Transgender performer Lady Java (a.k.a. Sir Lady Java) was hugely popular in 1960s Black nightclubs in Los Angeles, where her act included dancing, singing, comedy, and impressions. But in 1967, LAPD officers warned a club owner that Lady Java’s act violated City Rule No. 9 that stated: “No entertainment shall be conducted in which any performer impersonates by means of costume or dress a person of the opposite sex, unless by special permit.” That permit was denied. With the support of an ACLU SoCal attorney, Lady Java took her case against the rule to the California Supreme Court, losing on a technicality — the court ruled that a club owner had to bring the suit against Rule No. 9 for it to be heard. Lady Java and her ACLU lawyer could not find a club owner willing to take on the cause. In 1969, a ruling in a separate case on cabaret licensing nullified the rule, but the ACLU SoCal let it be known that it would take on LGBTQ cases. 

 

Ali Vayeghan

In 2017, Ali Vayeghan boarded a flight from Tehran to visit his brother and other relatives in Los Angeles. He had no idea that the Trump administration’s heinous Muslim ban was in full swing at LAX. Though Vayeghan had a proper visa and other documentation, he was essentially imprisoned at the airport and not allowed to see his relatives. The next day, under protest, Vayeghan was literally carried onto a flight headed back to Iran. But while he was in the air, the ACLU SoCal scored a landmark victory against the ban by successfully obtaining a court order allowing Vayeghan into the U.S. When he finally re-arrived, hundreds of supporters, relatives, members of the press, and the mayor of L.A. were on hand to greet him, many singing “This Land Is Your Land.” 

Yetta Stromberg

In 1929, Yetta Stromberg was a 19-year-old teacher at the Pioneer Summer Camp in San Bernardino County. She oversaw the daily raising of a red flag, leading camp goers in reciting allegiance “to the worker’s red flag.” It was that flag that got her arrested by a local sheriff for violating a 1919 state law banning public display of a red flag “as an aid to propaganda.” The ACLU SoCal took on her case — she was convicted in state court and in danger of being imprisoned, but in a 1931 landmark decision the U.S. Supreme Court found that California’s red flag law was “repugnant to the guaranty of liberty.” 

 

Robert Mitchell

Robert Mitchell, a Black man, knew his rights when Bakersfield PD officers pulled over the car in which he was riding as a passenger with his friends in 2017. Black residents of the area were used to being pulled over for the slightest of reasons (in this instance, police said that the car fresheners hanging from the rear-view mirror were improper) and then questioned. Mitchell refused to answer their questions, saying he was not a suspect in any crime and therefore not required to do so. He was correct, but his stance so infuriated the police that he was arrested, handcuffed, and taken to jail. The ACLU SoCal sued and won a settlement on his behalf.  

 

Betty Brooks

Betty Brooks was teaching a popular course called “Women and their Bodies” as part of the Women’s Studies Program at Cal State Long Beach in the early 1980s, when the program became a target of evangelicals and a group affiliated with anti-feminism leader Phyllis Schlafly. University officials caved to the demands of the right-wing protesters — Brooks was suspended and the class canceled. In 1982, the ACLU SoCal sued the university for violating program instructors’ rights to free speech, due process, and equal protection under the law. The university finally settled the suit in 1991 with payouts to the plaintiffs, and the university now offers a major in Women’s Studies. 

 

Ernest Wakayama

Ernest Wakayama seemed the perfect candidate to test the legality of imprisoning people of Japanese descent in internment camps during World War II. Wakayama, who was born in Hawaii, was hardly a radical. He was a U.S. citizen, World War I veteran, and American Legion officer. But he contacted the ACLU SoCal in 1942 to ask about mounting a challenge to the forced evacuation. ACLU SoCal attorney A.L. Wirin filed documents in the case, but before there could be a full hearing, Wakayama and his wife — according to accounts at the time — became so embittered that they gave up their citizenship and were eventually deported. In later years, Wakayama told several people that the renouncement of citizenship was not voluntary — it was forced by officials. 

 

Daisy Lopez

Daisy Lopez lives in Riverside County, where nearly half the residents are Latine. But in the 129-year history of the county’s board of supervisors, there has been only one Latine member elected to the board. In 2021, the board approved a redistricting plan that split Latine communities, all but ensuring that the voting power of Latine residents would be diluted, keeping the old guard in charge of how tax dollars were spent. “The warehousing industry in Riverside has seen unmatched economic growth in the southland,” Lopez said. “However, only a very small amount of this growth reaches the homes of the thousands of warehouse workers who move the goods.” The ACLU SoCal co-filed a lawsuit on behalf of Lopez and other residents to force the district map to be redrawn in a way that gives Latine communities fair representation. 

 

The fight for human rights and dignity goes on, and so does the ACLU SoCal. 

Founded on the principle of free speech for labor activists, the ACLU SoCal has grown to be a preeminent force in the fights for racial justice, gender equity, immigrant rights, LGBTQ rights, voter rights, education equity, and economic justice, as well as for protections from abuses of law enforcement, and the legal system. 

We look forward to our next 100 years and the future of freedom and equality for all.

 

Photo Credits 
Lady Java: Transas City 
Yetta Stromberg: Courtesy of Judy Branfman
Betty Brooks: Remarks by Deborah Rosenfeldt printed in the Sojourner, Ohio State University, Vol. 11 No. 5, January 1984
Ernest Wakayama: Herald Examiner Collection / Los Angeles Public Library 

Long before I joined the ACLU, I was just a skinny brown kid who grew up in the “Inland Empire” — a region of Southern California that includes 52 cities spread across Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. Even when I’ve moved away at different points of my life, the Inland Empire has always been a place that I’ve called home.

However, my younger self could never have imagined that the same field I played club soccer on at Riverside Poly High School was used for a Ku Klux Klan recruitment and cross-burning event less than a century earlier. I was unaware that I attended my high school homecoming a few streets down from where “The Birth of a Nation” — a horribly racist film that glorified the lynchings of Black Americans — once hosted its world debut at the Loring Opera House. Even as of a few months ago, I didn’t know that Riverside’s Hall of Justice sits fewer than two miles from where Lowell Elementary School — which primarily educated Black and Latinx students — was firebombed and destroyed during desegregation protests in 1965.

These are facts I learned about my home as a legal fellow with the ACLU. I am part of a team of attorneys who are bringing the first challenge to death penalty prosecutions under the landmark law known as the California Racial Justice Act (CRJA). We represent two Black men, Russell Austin and Michael Mosby, each of whom face the death penalty in Riverside County — one of the most prolific death-sentencing counties in the nation. Today, a Riverside Superior Court judge will determine whether our two clients will receive an evidentiary hearing under the CRJA. At an evidentiary hearing, we will introduce evidence to prove that our clients received unequal treatment compared to white people with similar cases and will argue that they should therefore be deemed ineligible for the death penalty.

 

The California Racial Justice Act’s Ambitious Goal

The CRJA has an ambitious goal: rooting out racism from the criminal legal system. This law allows defendants to challenge more surreptitious forms of implicit and institutional racism in their cases.

It’s important to underline just how significant the CRJA is. The Supreme Court decision in McCleskey v. Kemp closed off constitutional challenges that rely on showing the racist application of the death penalty. Instead, the court required a condemned person to prove that “the decisionmakers in his case acted with discriminatory purpose.” Otherwise, the court infamously said, a theory like Mr. McCleskey’s could open the entire criminal legal system to constitutional challenge for its racist operation. In his dissent, Justice William Brennan said such a concern exhibited a “fear of too much justice.” The CRJA takes direct aim at the court’s decision in McCleskey by allowing people to challenge racism in all forms — explicit, implicit, and structural — in the administration of the criminal legal system, without requiring them to take on the added burden of showing intent in their own cases.

Enabled by the CRJA, Mr. Austin and Mr. Mosby have introduced four statistical analyses from three scholars that reach the same conclusion: Riverside’s death penalty system more severely punishes Black people than any other racial group.

At each step of prosecutorial decision-making in Riverside County, Black defendants are on average treated more harshly than any other racial or ethnic group. In fact, one analysis found that Black defendants in Riverside are approximately nine times more likely to have the prosecution seek death and 14 times more likely to have death sentences imposed against them than white defendants whose cases are similar. Just as significant is the way that Riverside prosecutors have avoided seeking death sentences in homicide cases with Black victims. Cases with Black victims are 61 percent less likely to result in a death sentence than cases with white victims.

The Past is Inseparable from the Present

While these statistics are in themselves striking, they tell only a partial story of Riverside’s death penalty system. When the California legislature developed the CRJA, it acknowledged that in order to develop a truly fair and equitable criminal legal system, we have to be willing to understand how and why systems functioned unfairly and inequitably in the first place. In short, the CRJA stands for the notion that our criminal legal system’s past is inseparable from our criminal legal system’s present.

To help the court better understand the development and operation of Riverside’s unjust and racist capital punishment system, Mr. Austin and Mr. Mosby also introduced historical evidence that demonstrates a clear, cross-generational record of state-sponsored maltreatment and vigilante violence exacted against Black people in Riverside County.

Historical accounts show that proud members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and KKK-endorsed candidates once dominated Riverside’s local law enforcement and government offices. In positions of immense local influence, local government officials reinforced institutional segregation and designed an intricate system of oppression that harmed non-white Riverside residents throughout the 20th century. Even once legally sanctioned segregation was in the rearview, segregation continued, and more covert forms of racial and discrimination persisted in Riverside.

From the mid- to late-20th centuries, law enforcement raids brought terror into Black neighborhoods in Riverside. Even over the last few decades, Riverside law enforcement officials have faced several national controversies for killing and assaulting Black and Latinx people. The Riverside County District Attorney’s Office has time and again demonstrated an unwillingness to protect the lives of people of color by failing to seek criminal prosecutions of county officers for shooting unarmed victims.

Today, the Inland Empire’s law enforcement and criminal legal systems — which remain sources of immense distrust for many Black residents — disproportionately impose the death penalty against Black people. California’s death row population — the largest in the country — includes 127 people sentenced to death in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Nearly three quarters of those were people of color, including 43 Black people (roughly 34 percent).

We can’t tell an honest story about the Inland Empire — and we can’t understand how our criminal legal system operates — unless we include the violence and discrimination suffered by Black, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous people here.

If the far-reaching potential impact of the CRJA is to be realized, our courts must acknowledge that no form of racism, overt or covert, is legally acceptable. People in the Inland Empire — Mr. Austin and Mr. Mosby included — deserve an accessible legal system that takes responsibility for our society’s past failures and advances the creative solutions of the CRJA to build a more just, equitable future. Our legal system and its actors cannot be afraid of too much justice.