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Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) is America's most experienced independent liberal lobbying organization. In the spirit of the New Deal and ADA founders Eleanor Roosevelt, renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith, and former Senator and Vice President Hubert Humphrey we lobby through coalition partnerships, through direct advocacy, and through the media. Our lobbying philosophy is based on democratic action - motivating our grassroots members to lobby their senators and representatives as constituent-advocates. With 65,000 members nationwide, numerous state and local chapters, and its headquarters in the District of Columbia actively engaging in the political process, ADA continually strives to push for democratic and progressive values and ideals in American policy. Our founders included Eleanor Roosevelt, labor leader Walter Reuther, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and former Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

ADA continues to lead in Washington and around the country by pushing the agenda of social and economic justice. Our Working Families Win project is a model for citizen empowerment and policy education that is helping to get our country back on the right course.

When you think of the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement many different people, events, and organizations come to mind. Hubert Humphrey, the 1948 Democratic National Convention, and Americans for Democratic Action are all probably not among them. Yet one of the precedents on which the Movement built was ADA founder Hubert Humphrey's successful campaign to place a strong civil rights plank on the Democratic platform - an act that dramatically and fundamentally altered both the Democratic Party and American politics from that point forward. As part of that historic charge, Humphrey had this to say: "To those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights - I say to them, we are one hundred and seventy-two years late. To those who say this is an infringement on states' rights, I say this - the time has arrived in America. The time has arrived for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and walk forth rightly into the bright sunshine of human rights. In these times of world economic, political and spiritual - above all, spiritual - crisis, we cannot and we must not turn back from the path so plainly before us. That path has already led us through many valleys of the shadows of death. Now is the time to recall those who were left on the path of American freedom. Our land is now, more than ever before, the last best hope on earth. I know that we can - know that we shall - begin here the fuller and richer realization of that hope - that promise - of a land where all men are truly free and equal."

With this success, Americans for Democratic Action established itself at the forefront of American politics and as the premier liberal lobbying organization. As the years have passed and presidents, senators, representatives, and lobbyists have come and gone, ADA has remained persistent and strong.