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.
Suzy Post
“My advice would be to the people, the individuals who are being f***ed over: Get together and create a power base. . . . You have to have a base. You can’t do it alone. You can start it, but you can’t be effective without a base.” -Suzy Post
“I got started because in the 1950s there was a US Senator named Joe McCarthy...”
Suzy Post, in her decades-long career with the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky, served as a board member, board chair, and executive director. She started the Reproductive Freedom Project (RFP), and brought life back to the ACLU-KY organization after a period of it being nearly inactive.
Post said she joined the ACLU-KY “right away” when she moved back home to Kentucky from California. “I was there because I thought then that the ACLU was a critical organization,” she said. “I think it’s even more critical now in this country.” She also immediately joined the League of Women Voters, and much of her work in the coming years would be to get the national ACLU and ACLU-KY more closely involved in women’s rights issues.
Along with opposing the Vietnam War, women’s issues and RFP were Post’s biggest passions during her career. She worked with Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the national level to make women’s issues a priority for the ACLU, then continued to do so at the local level when she became executive director of the ACLU-KY. “On the issues of war and women, I had a major influence,” Post said. “Everything in my life came to a head in the 1970s: the Vietnam War, the women’s movement, and getting elected.”
As she explained it, Post’s passion for social justice work was consistent in her life from the beginning. She described how she listened, “just outraged,” to radio broadcasts of the McCarthy trials in the ’50s. From that point to when she was elected president of the local board, her time as executive director, and her many roles in the greater activist community, Post poured passion into her life’s work.
“I loved it. It’s a wonderful feeling to know that your life has mattered,” she said. “I wish I’d been the kind of person who’d had three or four or five kids and been able to say, ‘My life has mattered,’ but I wasn’t that kind of person. Social injustice just ticked me off.”