Many people traveled far to a new land in search of freedom. But years later, they were still ruled by a foreign power. How did the Declaration of Independence proclaim freedom? And how did it help form the United States?

The impassioned memoirs from one of America's leading civil liberties attorneys of the 20th century. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1956, Temple worked for Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund until he was drafted into the United States Army. A critical formative experience was Temple's August 1964 trip to St. Augustine, Florida with the New York City Lawyers Constitutional Defense Fund, where he worked with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and others to ensure compliance with the newly enacted 1964 Civil Rights Act. He died in 2011 a national hero.

The Declaration of Independance written by Thomas Jefferson is perhaps the most famous document describing the unique character of the American experiment. It suggests a most profound concept of human endeavors and the human rights the founders held to be unalienable. This is a book touching briefly but poignantly on these profound rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, rounded out by an in depth analysis of the rights of Property. All of these are unalienable rights given to man by God not with the intention of being taken away by man. It is a fierce defense of these freedoms and rights and shows how and why they were given to man and why they must be preserved and freely practiced. And finally, there is a connection between God and man related to man's origin and eternal destiny and how these rights (blessings really) are entwined in man's pursuit of happiness and how they involve and include all men no matter where they live.

Despite our constitutional guarantees of such absolute rights as "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," there are always pressures from certain segments of our society to limit personal freedom, to lessen self-government, to deny equality to all citizens. The civil libertarian--a person who believes that the Constitution is worth preserving and is willing to fight for the ideals it expresses--is active on a multitude of fronts today: freedom of speech and press, censorship, religion, police power, civil rights, democracy within unions, the right of privacy, academic freedom. This book deals with some of the major concerns of civil liberties today. It is not an attempt to make headlines or interpret the headlines; its eight chapters provide background information and lend perspective. The essays, written by men and women who have been active in the American Civil Liberties Union, range widely in theme. Elmer Rice, for example, writes about the stranglehold of censorship.; Michael Harrington examines the problems of democracy within unions; Walter Millis discusses the legacy of the cold war. The opinions they express are their own, and if their perspectives happen to coincide with official policy of the ACLU it is because these authors in many cases helped shape those policies.