This is one in a series of profiles marking the 60th anniversary of the ACLU of Kentucky’s founding. Each week through December 2015 we will highlight the story of one member, client, case, board or staff member that has been an integral part of our organization’s rich history.
Jane Hope
"People wonder how it is that our Constitution is still good more than 200 years later, and it’s because people like us keep it going.” -Jane Hope 1938-2015
“I knew about it, and I knew that I believed in it,” Jane Hope said, describing in simple terms her early relationship with the ACLU-KY. Hope recalled being interested in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, commenting, “After Martin Luther King died, I thought, ‘We all better take up the slack and work to deal with the situation at hand.’”
In the 1960s, Hope was too busy with her very young children to get involved with marches or other demonstrations, but she still believed strongly in civil rights. “I watched the speeches and the marches and all that on TV, and I kept getting more and more radicalized,” she laughed. “I hate to use that word because the ACLU is not a radical organization. I just felt like the ACLU stood for all people, and it was inclusive on every line, and I wanted to be a part of it.”
Hope joined the ACLU-KY in 1975, when school busing was a big issue. She recalled that for a time, armed members of the National Guard rode the bus with her oldest child. “There was a lot of turmoil in town about the merger [of the Jefferson County and Louisville school districts], as well as about desegregation,” Hope said. “The white people were the ones all freaked out about busing, they didn’t want the race mixture. . . . It was in that milieu that I became a member of the ACLU.”
Since then, Hope said that she has become interested in other issues, such as reproductive freedom and, after one of her sons came out, LGBT fairness. She explained that she appreciates the ACLU-KY’s inclusiveness. “I like the ACLU because it covers everybody,” Hope said. “The Constitution was made a long time ago, and now there’s modern issues that come up. There’s still people who want to keep the old ways, but there’s others of us who believe democracy needs to change with the times. So we support the ACLU and all of its efforts.”