Lucille Bernheimer was born in St. Louis on June 9, 1888, the daughter of Marcus Bernheimer and Ella Hayman. Her grandfather Samuel Bernheimer had emigrated from Hohenems to the US around 1840 and had settled in Port Gibson in Mississippi, where he established a trading business with his brothers. Lucille’s father Marcus, who visited Hohenems in 1872 and was called to the Torah, as he noted with great emotion in his diary, ran a wholesale grocery business in St. Louis. He unsuccessfully ran for the Democrats for mayor and was engaged in charity work for Jewish immigrants from Russia. Lucille studied in New York and became an active social reformer and children’s rights activist, working to enforce the Child Welfare Bill. In 1920, she married Joseph Milner in a second marriage and in the same year was one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is still active today in promoting civil rights and social reform in the USA. For 25 years she remained active for this organization as its executive director. At the age of 66 she published her memoirs entitled Education of an American Liberal. She died in New York City in 1975.