Longest-serving Illinois ACLU director dies

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Obit photo of Jay Miller, the longest serving executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.

Updated: February 6, 2012 9:43AM

As the longest-serving executive director of the Illinois ACLU, Jay Miller was at the center of legal battles that stretched from defending protestors at the 1968 Democratic National Convention to challenging racial profiling at the turn of the century.

In his four decades with the organization, he denounced threats to civil liberties wherever he saw them — whether it was filing suit on behalf of women who were subjected to police strip-searches after traffic stops, or criticizing angry African-American aldermen who ripped a student painting of Mayor Harold Washington in women’s undergarments off a wall of the School of the Art Institute.

Mr. Miller, 83, died Tuesday in Evanston of complications from emphysema, said his son, Joshua.

He boasted of landing on President Nixon’s “enemies” list for opening ACLU offices to some of the defendants in the “Chicago 7” trial — a case that seemed to encapsulate the 1960s in its face-off between anarchy and authority, or free speech vs. repression, depending on your point of view.

But Mr. Miller was known for eloquence and passion, rather than pugnacity. He rebuilt the ACLU after its membership plummeted because of its 1978 defense of neo-Nazis who wanted to march in Skokie, the home of Holocaust survivors who vowed to never again be victims.

“He was a person of tremendous energy and really good spirit,” said Michael Shakman, the lawyer behind Chicago’s landmark legal challenge that banned patronage hiring and firing. “He was a happy warrior.”

“He never screened his calls,” his son said. “You could be anyone and call the ACLU and get him on the phone, and he would discuss the issue. . . .he would debate. He was completely accessible.”

“He traveled to every corner of the state to speak out for basic rights — whether popular or unpopular,” said Colleen K. Connell, current executive director of the state American Civil Liberties Union. “He simply thought we had an obligation to follow the Constitution.”

Twenty years ago, Mr. Miller criticized a court decision to deny a woman custody of her 5-year-old daughter because she was a lesbian. “Lifestyles and relationships of anyone, gay or heterosexual, should not be a determinant of whether a man or woman is fit to be a parent,” he said.

He said the nation was strong enough to withstand flag-burning, because “That’s what the flag really stands for.”

During his tenure, the ACLU filed lawsuits “that began a process of reform at DCFS and for institutions that cared for the mentally ill,” said Ed Yohnka, the group’s director of communications.

The group challenged city anti-loitering laws and HIV discrimination in the workplace. It defended the rights of both anti-abortion and pro-choice protesters, and started a Reproductive Rights Project that resulted in “Illinois [having] fewer governmental restrictions on contraception, abortion and reproductive technology like IVF and tests for genetic abnormalities than any other state in the Midwest region,” Connell said.

Mr. Miller was born in Cleveland, attended Chicago’s Sullivan High School, and served in the Army in World War II. He graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and toiled as a labor organizer and as a copy boy for the Cleveland Press newspaper.

Before joining the Illinois ACLU staff in 1965, Mr. Miller worked for the Quakers’ American Friends Service Committee, where he helped organize a rally at Soldier Field for Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

In the 1970s, he worked for the ACLU in California and Washington, D.C. He returned to the Chicago office in 1978. Mr. Miller retired in 2000.

He once told the Chicago Sun-Times his hero was journalist I.F. Stone, because “He was a clear thinker, totally honest, anti-bureaucratic.’’

In addition to his son, Mr. Miller is also survived by his wife, Lou Kaplan; his daughter, Rebecca; another son, Adam; his sisters, Marcia Aron and Sharon Farber, and two grandchildren.

Services are 11 a.m. Friday at Chicago Jewish Funerals, 8851 Skokie Blvd., Skokie.