News & Commentary

Read about some of the books that have most recently been banned or challenged for removal across public schools and libraries in our ‘ACLU Banned Book Club Reading List’.

What you need to know about the new string of classroom censorship and book ban attacks impacting students and teachers across the country.

COVID-19 has illuminated our failures as a society. To urge decision makers to minimize the harms made worse by this pandemic, today we released a blueprint for COVID-19 relief in South Carolina. The blueprint calls on our leaders to ensure the burdens of the pandemic do not unfairly fall on South Carolina’s most vulnerable communities and that all responses are rooted in science and public health and are no more intrusive on civil liberties than necessary. To ensure a COVID-19 response that protects all people, South Carolina must: 

While the challenges facing our state and nation during the COVID-19 crisis are significant, they do not relieve South Carolina of its legal obligations. In the education context, those obligations are clear: As the United States Supreme Court wrote in Brown v. Board of Education, “[I]t is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.”

Judge Robin Stilwell granted a temporary injunction for ACLU clients Sulaiman Ahman, Katherine West and Ben Longnecker, allowing them to register to vote using university residence halls as their address.

Because of overly-broad and vague wording of the statute, it's impossible for police to enforce it with any kind of consistency and fairness.

The line between school discipline and police arrest has broken down, and thousands of young people — many of them good kids who simply made a mistake — are ending up in jail, their futures tarnished.

Our Department of Juvenile Justice is in crisis. And there is an urgent need to take immediate action to ensure that the youth and staff in our juvenile facilities are safe.

We have called on schools and elected leaders to end arrests for minor misbehavior and fix South Carolina’s outdated and unfair “disturbing schools” law, which can lead to children arrested for being “obnoxious.”