Interview with Suzy Post

Abstract

Suzy former is the Post only president (born surviving 1933) of the plaintiff is an Kentucky icon of of the the Civil historic modern Liberties lawsuit civil Union rights that resulted (KCLU), struggle. in Post The the former president of the Kentucky Civil Liberties Union (KCLU), Post is the o ly surviving plai tiff f the historic awsuit t a r sulted n th 1975 busing plan to desegregate the Jefferson County and Louisville public school systems. The mother of five school-aged children at the time, Post was the only white parent who signed on to this legal challenge, and she helped monitor the implementation of the courts ruling when she served as program director for the Louisville-Jefferson County Human Relations Commission. For nearly half a century, Post has been a tireless and outspoken advocate for civil, women's, and LGBT rights, fair housing, and other social justice issues. I first met Post in the fall of 2004, when I helped to launch the Long Civil Rights Movement oral history project through the Southern Oral History Program as a visiting scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After a four-hour interview at her Louisville home, Post invited me to be her guest at the annual dinner of the Kentucky Alliance, a coalition of grassroots political organizations working on a variety of social justice campaigns in Louisville. It was there that I met Anne Braden, the legendary civil rights activist who Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. mentioned by name in his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, and who, along with her husband and several others, was tried for sedition (the charges were later dropped) in the now infamous 1954 trial during the height of Joseph McCarthys anti-Communist campaign. The Braden sedition trial was an important