A highlight each Spring in the Nation’s Capital is the Bill of Rights Awards Dinner, hosted by the ACLU-NCA. This annual celebration of old friends, new colleagues and the freedoms we hold dear, has informed and inspired both members and non-members for over forty years. Now it takes place amidst the most sustained, broad-based attack on civil liberties in recent memory. Basic rights—to counsel, public trial, attorney-client confidentiality, privacy and free speech are under sustained assault not seen since the Nixon years.

The ACLU has received wide praise for its stalwart defense of civil liberties during this time of struggle, even from frequent critics. For example, one Nat Hentoff article in The Village Voice article was entitled The ACLU on the Ramparts: Who’s Afraid of John Ashcroft? Applying the test of both "safe and free", the ACLU has stood up for fundamental rights many thought firmly established, rallying republicans and democrats, liberals, moderates and conservatives to the defense of what makes America the “land of the free.”

Past years have witnessed many great evenings with Award Winners, Presenters and Speakers such as:

Supreme Court Justices William Brennan, Harry Blackmun and Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Judges Patricia Wald, David Bazelon and Abner Mikva;

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Reverend Charles Bergstrom, Rabbi Eugene Lipman and Father Robert Drinan;

Journalists and Authors Herbert Block, Molly Ivins, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, I.F. Stone, Alan Barth, Art Buchwald, Carl Rowan, Eric Severeid, Tom Wicker, Jules Feiffer, Les Whitten, Daniel Schorr and Salman Rushdie;

Representatives John Lewis, Don Edwards, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Barney Frank, Shirley Chisholm and Ron Dellums;

Senators Lowell Weicker, Charles Mathias, Arlen Specter, Edward Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey;

Lawyers Zona Hostetler, David Carliner, Joseph Rauh, Charlie Horsky, David Isbell, Ramsey Clark, Larry Speiser, Chris Dunn, Bob Kapp, Jim Fitzpatrick, Eugene Fidell, John Vanderstar and Robert Wilkins;

Leaders such as Norman Lear, Deval Patrick, Andrew Young, James Farmer, Benjamin Hooks, Julian Bond, Nadine Strossen, Walter Washington, Julius Hobson, Florence Isbell, Caroline Kennedy, Togo West, David Joseph, John Shattuck, Mistislav Rostoprovich and Galina Vishnevskaya, Marian Wright Edelman, Ellie Smeal, Ira Glasser, Allard Lowenstein, Randall Robinson, Laura Murphy, Frank Kameny, Hilda and Charlie Mason, Dr. Dorothy Height, and the Latino Civil Rights Task Force