I have always been a civil libertarian. But I think a lot of people take for granted our civil rights.
I am African American and my husband is Caucasian. In the 1980s, when I first moved to Orange County, I got stopped by police three times in one day. For years, I was regularly pulled over for the color of my skin. Then in 2000, after I got home from shopping one day, I found four police officers surrounding my home. The shopping center I had been at earlier had been robbed by “someone who was black,” so they tracked me down thinking it must be me. When my husband answered the door, the officers apologized. “It must be the wrong house,” they said. I was so offended.
There are few organizations out there shining a light on racial profiling, but the ACLU/SC is. The ACLU/SC has been there for people of color -- not just African Americans, but also Latinos. Our legal team fights to ensure that people aren’t marginalized the way African Americans have been for so long. We fight so that the homeless aren’t subjected to a double system of justice, so that gay or lesbian teens aren’t harassed and ridiculed in schools, and so that immigrants aren’t mistreated by authority.