A principle fundamental to American government and society is that all persons are created equal and are guaranteed individual liberties and civil rights under this country’s laws and Constitution. Individually and collectively, we also are expected to exercise responsibility for the well-being of society. It is this principle, and the continuing need to nurture and safeguard it, that is the core value and life blood of the American Bar Association’s Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities.

When its founders proposed the Section in the 1960s, the nation was struggling to bridge the substantial gap that then existed between the majestic provisions for individual liberty and justice for all in the Constitution and the harsh reality experienced by its minority populations. The early 1960s had witnessed increasing numbers of civil rights demonstrations and the too often violent reactions to them by both local governments and hostile citizenry.
The Section became a reality in 1966, but was conceived three years earlier in a hotel room at the ABA Annual Meeting in Chicago, where Jefferson B. Fordham, who was then Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, had gathered together a dozen or so lawyers to discuss the idea of creating a new section within the ABA specifically to address civil rights and individual liberties.

Across the nation during that summer of l963, the civil rights movement had begun to awaken the nation’s conscience. However, the nation’s organized bar had yet to make a concerted effort to exercise leadership in what President John F. Kennedy called the greatest "moral crisis" facing the nation. The first move by bar leaders to organize nationally for civil rights came not through any institution, but rather from one person, future ABA President Bernard G. Segal of Philadelphia, who felt keenly enough about civil rights to do something about it. In early June 1963, Alabama Governor George Wallace had announced that he would defy a court order to permit African American students to enroll at the University of Alabama. Incensed, Bernard Segal spent two full days and nights telephoning colleagues around the country to urge them into action. As a result of his effort, 44 national bar leaders issued a dramatic joint statement condemning Governor Wallace’s action.

On June 21, 1963, two weeks after Bernard Segal’s round-the-clock telethon, President Kennedy assembled more than 240 lawyers in Washington to discuss the civil rights crisis. At that meeting were past and future presidents of the ABA, officers of state and local bar associations, and leaders from other professional associations. Their discussions led to the formation of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, comprised of leading lawyers anxious to address the critical civil rights problems facing the country. Bernard Segal and Harrison Tweed became the co-chairs of that committee.

Spurred by the Lawyers Committee, the ABA also began to take official note of the civil rights revolution. A Special Committee on Civil Rights and Racial Unrest was appointed to draft a resolution on civil rights for presentation at the annual meeting in Chicago. The ABA House of Delegates adopted the resolution, and that success essentially ended the special committee’s task. At the time, the ABA had no organization to follow up, no entity to bring the influence of the nation’s bar to bear on the continuing civil rights crisis.

Jefferson Fordham wanted the ABA to do more than convene a special committee and adopt a single resolution. He believed strongly that actions addressing civil rights, civil liberties, and individual human rights were not one-time special events, but an ongoing responsibility of the organized bar. He proposed that the ABA establish a new section, "The Section of Individual Rights," to provide a framework for major lawyer involvement, not only to address civil rights concerns, but also to help protect individuals' "personal liberty and freedom of the mind and spirit," as embodied in the promise of the Constitution.

To achieve this end, Fordham formed an organizing committee of the nation’s leading lawyers. Initially there were 18 members, including Erwin N. Griswold, then dean of Harvard Law School and later U. S. Solicitor General; William P. Gray of Los Angeles, a future federal judge who then was president-elect of the California Bar Association; Alvin Rubin of Baton Rouge, a leader among the ABA's young lawyers who later became a U. S. Court of Appeals judge; and Orison S. Marden of New York, who later became ABA president. There were also law school deans John W. Wade of Vanderbilt Law School, Frank Newman of University of California-Berkeley School of Law, and former Dean Eugene V. Rostow of Yale Law School, as well as Nicholas De B. Katzenbach, a future U. S. Attorney General. Veteran civil liberties lawyers Arthur Freund of St. Louis, Joseph Harrison of New York, Rufus King of Washington, D.C., J. Vernon Patrick of Birmingham, and Cecil E. Burney of Texas also were part of the group. Members later added included Grenville Clark of New Hampshire, future ABA President William T. Gossett of Detroit, Dean Louis H. Pollak of Yale Law School, John P. Frank of Phoenix, and Professor Soia Mentschikoff of the University of Chicago Law School.

By November 1963, Dean Fordham had drafted Statements of Need and Objectives for the Section and had asked Fred Ballard, Joseph Harrison, William Fuchs, and Eugene Rostow to act as an informal steering committee for the organization. Soon Professor Mentschikoff joined that group, as did future Section Chair and ABA President Jerome J. Shestack. The organizers solicited support for the new section at the ABA Annual Meetings in New York in l964 and in Miami in l965 and at other gatherings throughout the country. A total of some 600 prospective members were identified, including charter members such as U. S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Chief Judge William H. Hastie of the Third Circuit, future federal circuit court judges Gerhard A. Gessell, Harold P. Green, and Robert Carter, future Congressman, judge, and White House Counsel Abner J. Mikva; and, in addition to Mikva, future Section Chairs Peter F. Langrock of Vermont, J. McNeill Smith of North Carolina, and Boston College Law School Dean and future U. S. Congressman Robert F. Drinan.

There was formidable opposition to the proposed section among those who believed that its suggested mission was not consistent with the ABA's and that its proposed focus on individual rights neglected the importance and obligations of individual responsibility. There were debates over the Section's jurisdiction, its purpose, and even its name; the organizing committee ultimately acceded to the suggestion that the name should incorporate the word, "responsibilities," along with "rights." Finally, on Aug. 10, 1966, the resolution proposing the new section came before the House of Delegates at the ABA Annual Meeting in Montreal, Canada. In the end, the years of preparation and persuasion paid off; the resolution to establish the Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities passed easily and unanimously. "Isn’t it odd that a section focusing on individual rights in the states was born in Canada?" someone reportedly observed during the post-vote celebrations. "Rights have no borders," someone else is said to have replied, thus supplying the Section's first aphorism.

The new Section's task was daunting from the outset. The nation as a whole only recently had begun to address issues of racism, de facto segregation, and equal voting rights. Martin Luther King, Jr., had led the 1963 March on Washington and other demonstrations and was continuing to speak out vehemently on the moral imperative of civil rights for all Americans, particularly those of African American descent.

But a decade of landmark decisions by the Supreme Court and a small group of courageous Southern judges, including Richard T. Rives, Elbert T. Tuttle, John Minor Wisdom, John R. Brown, Frank Johnson, J. Skelly Wright, and Bryan Simpson, also had provided leadership concerning the nation's future course, and the political branches of the federal government later followed suit. The 24th Amendment to the Constitution, forbidding the use of poll or other taxes as a voting requirement in federal elections, was ratified in 1964. The same year, despite a 75-day filibuster to prevent a Senate vote, the Congress finally approved the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law. One year later, the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 led to a significant increase in the numbers of registered African American voters in the country. In 1966, Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts became the first African American to be elected to the U. S. Senate since Reconstruction, and in 1967, Thurgood Marshall became the first African American to become a U. S. Supreme Court Justice.

Despite these positive developments, events in the years immediately following the creation of the Section continued to demonstrate that the civil rights issues facing the nation required the dedicated and intense attention of the nation’s lawyers and the organized bar. Most dramatic and appalling were the assassinations in 1968 of both Dr. King and Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the ensuing riots that erupted in cities large and small around the country.
Through the efforts of the Section's founders and early leaders, a Section membership was built, bylaws were adopted, and a committee structure was established. One of the first efforts of the Section leadership was to encourage state and local bars to establish within their own organizations entities similar to the IRR Section. The Section's leaders also began working with those state and local bars that already had begun addressing issues similar to those of concern to the IRR Section.

Substantively, the Section initially focused its attention on the urgent need for the country to give life to the words of the civil rights guarantees contained in the Constitution, the civil rights acts adopted during Reconstruction, and the new civil rights laws of the 1950s and 1960s. At the 1968 ABA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, the Section introduced its first policy recommendation and report. Honoring the 100th anniversary of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, the proposed resolution called upon the ABA to reaffirm the fundamental principle that lawyers as individuals, and as members of an organized legal profession, have a responsibility to ensure the equal rights of all citizens as contemplated by the Constitution, and to provide the leadership for law reforms that would accomplish that goal. The resolution was approved. The Section had set its course and begun defining its unique role within the ABA.