Bidspirit auction | Roger Nash Baldwin, 1979 :

Roger Nash Baldwin, 1979 : Signed Photo Portrait - B/W photo of Roger Nash Baldwin by P.Rankin- Smith mounted on art paper /board and signed on the margin by Roger Nash Baldwin, Aug '79. The signature is authentic with provenance. Image size : 6.5 x 6.5 inches. Mount size: 11 x 14 inches. Roger Nash Baldwin (January 21, 1884, to August 26, 1981) was one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). He served as executive director of the ACLU until 1950. Many of the ACLU's original landmark cases took place under his direction, including the Scopes Trial, the Sacco and Vanzetti murder trial, and its challenge to the ban on James Joyce's Ulysses. Baldwin was a well-known pacifist and author. In 1940 Baldwin became disenchanted with the communists and removed them from the ACLU s board of directors. In the end, he made civil rights a universal cause—a reversal of conditions in the 1920s and 1930s, when civil liberties were widely regarded suspiciously as a radical or leftist cause.