Babette Joseph was volunteer and employee at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Illinois office whose empathy for those whose rights had allegedly been violated was always palpable.
“I can’t count the number of times she came out of the (ACLU’s) intake office, and she said, ‘This is the most outrageous thing — we have to do something to help these people,’” said Marcia Liss, a colleague and friend.
Joseph, 93, died after a short illness Sept. 20 at her home in San Francisco, said her daughter, Amy. She previously had a home in Evanston.
Born Babette Weinfield on Chicago’s West Side, Joseph grew up in the Austin neighborhood and graduated from Austin High School in 1948. She attended the University of Wisconsin for several years before transferring to Northwestern University, where she received a degree in education in June 1952.
Joseph taught home economics at Barat College in Lake Forest while also developing recipes that food companies would place in magazines or on boxes for products including dried dates and grits.
A September 1975 Tribune article described how Joseph began her career dozen years earlier when her children were young. From her kitchen in Evanston, she worked through public relations firms to create recipes for food corporations that then were photographed and distributed nationally to newspapers and magazines.
In the late 1960s or early 1970s, Joseph began volunteering for the ACLU of Illinois. She soon began overseeing its intake office. Joseph was inspired at least in part by her husband, Burton, a longtime civil liberties advocate who died in 2010. Burton Joseph wrote and lectured extensively in the area of First Amendment law.
“I think Mom just also instinctually had a sense of what was right and wrong, and those were the battles she chose to fight,” Amy Joseph said. “My father was a cooperating attorney at the ACLU, and so she had a long history with them even before she started volunteering there.”
One of Joseph’s primary battles started in the late 1970s, when the ACLU of Illinois’ intake office began receiving calls from women who had been strip searched by Chicago police officers.
“Babette saw that for the civil liberties violation that it was, and she hounded the (ACLU’s) attorneys until we filed a lawsuit,” said Colleen Connell, executive director of the ACLU’s Illinois office.
In 1979, the ACLU filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court on behalf of 50 women who claimed to have been improperly stripped and searched by Chicago police, and ACLU officials alleged that at least 10,000 women may have been subject to the nude body searches in police stations while being arrested on relatively minor charges. The case expanded to encompass more than 190 women, and although federal prosecutors declined to file any criminal charges, the city of Chicago in 1980 agreed to pay a total of $69,500 to the women.
However, some of the women chose to sue the city in federal court, with juries awarding some of them five-figure sums in damages. In response to the ACLU’s lawsuit, Illinois legislators in 1979 passed a law barring police from strip searching people arrested for misdemeanors or traffic violations unless weapons or controlled substances were involved, and making it a crime for police to strip search a suspect without following carefully spelled-out procedures to protect constitutional rights. The Police Department signed an even more restrictive federal consent decree as well.
“She was so passionate about civil liberties, and she was always challenging people,” Liss said. “And she was smart as a whip.”
Connell said that what stood out to her was Joseph’s “unerring sense of right and wrong, and that the Constitution is there to protect all of us.”
“She was just committed because of the righteousness of the causes she cared about,” Connell said. ‘“She always pushed us to correct a wrong, to right a wrong. That just really carried her through many years at the ACLU.”
Joseph continued working for the ACLU — including eventually becoming part of its paid staff — until the mid-2000s, Connell said. In her later years, she was known for her fundraising prowess for the organization, Connell said.
After Burton Joseph’s death in 2010, Joseph began spending more time in San Francisco, and she made it her permanent residence after she sold her Evanston home in 2014.
In addition to her daughter, Joseph is survived by two other daughters, Jody and Kathy; and four grandchildren.
A celebration of life will take place in the coming year.
Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.