John de J. Pemberton Jr., ACLU leader during 1960s
NEW YORK - John de J. Pemberton Jr., who as executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union during the turbulent 1960s helped double its size and shift its focus to the criminal courts as an arena for issues like civil rights and Vietnam, died Oct. 21 in Monte Rio, Calif. He was 90.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said his daughter Nancy.
Mr. Pemberton, who said he considered himself a militant on civil liberties issues, sometimes had to balance the views of other militants with those of ACLU members who favored a more moderate approach.
“The infighting gives us our strength,’’ Mr. Pemberton said in an interview with The New York Times in 1970.
The ACLU grew stronger under Mr. Pemberton’s leadership. When he became executive director in 1962, there were 28 ACLU affiliates with a membership of 61,000 people and a total income of $535,000. When he stepped down in 1970, there were 47 affiliates with 144,000 members and $2 million of income.
Mr. Pemberton helped orchestrate a major shift in the ACLU’s legal strategy. The group had historically chosen to pursue appeals of important test cases in higher courts to establish a constitutional principle.
But, under Mr. Pemberton and his board, the ACLU came to serve as criminal counsel for an individual defendant in 95 percent of the cases. He said that this change was necessary to make the lower courts work.
“If the cop knows that the citizen he meets in the street will be able to get a lawyer and go to court, then his behavior will change,’’ he said.
Nowhere was the new focus on defending criminal cases more critical than in the South, where in 1964 the ACLU created a legal unit to ally with other civil rights organizations. One case involved 1,100 people arrested for parading without a permit in Jackson, Miss. Another involved defending a black man accused of raping a white woman.
Under Mr. Pemberton’s leadership, the ACLU pressed ahead on its historic overall mission of advocating for controversial defendants on civil liberties grounds. They included communists, members of the Ku Klux Klan, Black Panthers, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and William A. Calley Jr., who was convicted of ordering the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.
John de Jarnette Pemberton Jr. was born in Rochester, Minn.