News & Commentary

Public schools can have dress codes, but they can't be discriminatory or censor student expression.

By Julie Ebenstein, Staff Attorney, Voting Rights Project, ACLU

May 26, 2017 – Jackson, MS –Don’t miss the last stop of the R.O.O.T.S. of Sunflower County museum exhibit tour at the Margaret Walker Center on the campus of Jackson State University.The exhibit kicks-off with a reception, free and open to the public, on Friday, June 2, 2017 at 5:30 p.m.It will remain on display through July 30. 

Americans deserve a champion who will protect and expand voting rights, not suppress them.

There's no confusion about what President Trump meant when he said he wanted to ban Muslims.

Today, the ACLU of Mississippi, the ACLU, and the law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP filed a federal lawsuit against the Madison County Sheriff’s Department to challenge its decades-old policing practices that employ unconstitutional, racially-motivated tactics that target the Black community. 

The ruling rejects the claims of banks that discriminatory lending has no impact on cities as a whole.

The Smart Justice Campaign't 50-state plan will be a driving force in ending mass incarceration in the U.S.

Over the past 50 years, our schools have become sites of increased criminalization of young people—a disturbing fact that is even truer for poor Black and Latino communities. Today, police officers assigned to patrol schools can legally use physical force on students, arrest and handcuff them, and bring the full weight of the criminal justice system to bear on kids who are simply misbehaving. The primary role of police in schools is to enforce criminal laws, and virtually every violation of a school rule can be considered a criminal act if viewed through this police-first lens.