Aryeh Neier was the national director of the ACLU in 1977 when American Nazis demanded the right to march through Skokie, Illinois—a town with a large population of Holocaust survivors. Neier was himself a Holocaust survivor and found the Nazis’ ideology repugnant, but the ACLU nonetheless took on the group’s case and argued, successfully, that the First Amendment required that they be permitted to march. The intensely controversial case cost the ACLU thousands of members but became emb...
