National Center for Constitutional Studies

The National Center for Constitutional Studies (NCCS) is a conservative, religious-themed organization, founded by Latter-Day Saint political writer W. Cleon Skousen. It was formerly known as The Freemen Institute.

According to the NCCS, the founding of the United States was a divine miracle. As such, the NCCS worldview and program are based on two major pillars: (1) understanding the divine guidance that has allowed the United States to thrive and (2) rejecting what it views as the sometimes tyrannical or sinful deviations of the modern U.S. federal government from that divine mold.

The center had its origins when in 1967 Skousen, a professor at Brigham Young University, organized an off-campus institute for constitutional studies. In 1971, this was formerly christened as The Freemen Institute. It was later given its current name and its headquarters moved to Washington, D.C.

The center ran conferences in the 1980s and 1990s through a non-profit it controlled called "The Making of America Conferences, Inc." Board members of this non-profit included Skousen, William H. Doughty, Donald N. Sills, and Glenn Kimber. Impeached Arizona governor Evan Mecham was also a regular donor to the center.

In the early 1990s, an effort to build a conservative community in Southern Utah to house the center collapsed amid the developer's unfulfilled promises.

The current CEO and chairman of the board is Zeldon Nelson Previous chairmen were:

In 1987, controversy erupted in California over the NCCS-published textbook The Making of America by W. Cleon Skousen. The book quoted a 1934 essay on slavery by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Fred Albert Shannon that described black children as "pickaninnies"; another section stated that life for white Southerners was "a nightmare" due to "the constant fear of slave rebellion", and claimed that white slave owners were "the worst victims of slavery". The state's bicentennial commission had approved the sale of the book as a fundraising device to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the United States Constitution.

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