Oral History Interview with Suzanne Post

BETSY BRINSON: This is an unrehearsed interview with Suzy Post, conducted at her

Residence in Louisville Kentucky, on January 11, 1998, and I’m Betsy Brinson.

BRINSON: Okay. Suzy, thank you for doing this with me.

SUZY POST: Glad to. I hope it yields you something.

BRINSON: Well, I think it will. I’ll tell you more about this project later, how it’s developing and whatnot. But today, we really kind of want to focus on you and your involvement. Why don’t you start at the very beginning, like where you were born, your family, siblings, parent’s background, your growing up?

POST: Okay, I can do that. I’m a real anomaly, I’m a Louisville native. My father was also a Louisville native. My mother was from Terre Haute Indiana, and they were married in ‘29, and had me in 1933 in the depth of the 1:00Depression. So much of who I am is formed by the Depression experience. I had twin brother and sister who came right behind me, about two and a half years later. The three of us grew up in this town and are all living here now. My mom and dad were very community focused, very, uh, very committed to the goals of particularly the Louisville Jewish community, which is small. It’s under 10,000 people, but very sophisticated in terms of the organizations it maintains. Mom was real involved in a women’s group called Hadassah, and my dad was real involved in the organizations that--the serious, important organizations that--really shaped this community as a Jewish, as a good Jewish place to grow up. And those were the Jewish Community Federation, and he was very involved in the United Jewish Appeal, which is the annual fund-raising 2:00drive in the Jewish community. So, I saw a lot of activity growing up in the house. Activity that was geared toward giving something back to your community. Neither my mom or dad went to school, college. Mother went to Normal College up in Terre Haute Indiana, and got a teaching certificate, a two-year teaching certificate. I think that, uh, she sort of always rested her laurels on that, although her other two sisters had the same degree. Mother never--mother was one of those women who really wanted to be more and do more, but never could break away. Part of that was because she was married to a very German patriarch, so any time she made, any effort she made to break away later, he’d just snap her back one way or another telling her that he couldn’t afford to have her work because it would drive their taxes, income taxes up. I mean, it’s just so transparent to me now, in fact, it was then too. I had a very 3:00average, normal Jewish childhood, girlhood here. I was experienced as a schoolchild--rejection--I was not accepted into the inner sanctum of the popular kids in this eighth graded elementary. So I decided I had to be accepted by them; it was just desperately important to me. And that--I took a survey; I thought this was pretty clever actually--I took a survey of the class. We were all in that class for eight years together in those days so we knew --

BRINSON: Was that a public school?

POST: Yeah, county school. We knew each other pretty well. And I took a survey of the class to see what we had and maybe what role I could play. I looked around and there was no class clown and--nor--so I decided to be the class clown. The way I did it was I became the strongest girl at Melbourne Heights. I had a lot of physical strength then. I moved furniture--oh, the 4:00silly things that I did in order to attract attention to myself and sort of be accepted --

BRINSON: And you’re so small.

POST: Well, I guess we were all small, smaller then. And somehow I finally broke into the inner circle. And I think about that as how awful that must have been for a girl, you know, to have been locked out. I don’t know, I probably--I don’t remember being humiliated, and I don’t remember the pain and the … But I know that I felt I was locked out and I wasn’t accepted, and that I had to develop a strategy to become accepted. I did what all the Jewish girls growing up at that time in the forties did. I started dating when I was twelve and thirteen, and I always dated boys who were much older than me. I mean, like four and five years older than me which is ridiculous. But at the time that the Jewish community--at the time that the women and girls in the 5:00Jewish community were where I was in high school and junior high school, at the end of the second world war--the Jewish boys who came back to Louisville from that war found that the Jewish girls who were their ages had married GIs who were sent to Ft. Knox here. So there’s this big vacuum, so they started reaching lower and lower, deeper and deeper into the community. So probably most of us, very unhealthily, went out with boys who were three and four and five years older than us. I had a couple of proposals when I was sixteen. I mean it’s ridiculous.

BRINSON: Did you entertain any of them?

POST: No. God, no. So I decided that what I wanted to do was go to medical school, and announced that to my mother one night when we were washing dishes, or she was washing, I was drying. And she said, “Oh, you can’t do that.” She said, “They have a Jewish quota and a female quota.” And I guess I didn’t want to do it very badly cause I didn’t, you know, I took her at her word and that was that. So I sort of set my aspirations much lower: went away 6:00to Indiana University as a freshman, became an English literature major, which is what we all did in those days when we didn’t know what we were going to do. Joined the NAACP and that was in 1950, 1951 to ‘52.

BRINSON: What prompted --?

POST: And the reason I did that--I had a marvelous teacher in my senior year at high school. She was a problems teacher.

BRINSON: A what kind?

POST: Problems, they called it. Sort of sociology is what it was. We had assignments and we had to do research and adopt--do a paper on some issue of social significance at the time. I did a--maybe it was my junior year I guess--did a--I decided I wanted to do a study of the American Negro, which is what we called black people back then. First we called them colored, then we called them Negro, then we called them black, and now we’re calling them African American, and God knows what comes next. And I went down to the Louisville Urban League in Louisville to do--get some data and some reports from 7:00them, and did this paper and got sort of fascinated by the situation. I don’t know what turned me on to that. I don’t know why. It certainly wasn’t anything that was in the air in 1951 in Louisville. I mean, it was like nobody talked about race; it just didn’t exist as an issue. But --

BRINSON: Let me stop you there because in Louisville in the forties, uh, Thurgood Marshall was working with the NAACP --

POST: Right.

BRINSON: …around some issues.

POST: Right. But that was--I was not--I didn’t even--I wasn’t even cognizant of it.

BRINSON: You weren’t aware of that in any way. Let me take you back a little bit more. You were aware, I assume, that it was a segregated society?

POST: Umm …I’m not sure.

BRINSON: You went to school …

POST: Oh, yeah, I know. But, as I say, race was not an issue.

BRINSON: Okay.

POST: So I went to a school, segregated sexually--I went to an all girls high 8:00school. In those days the only school that wasn’t segregated sexually was Central High which was the only black school. So we didn’t have to protect--the parents--we didn’t protect white, black girls from black boys. But I don’t remember being terribly aware of it. I guess I knew it on one level but it wasn’t that palpable that it was, you know--and I can’t tell you that any one incident triggered in me a real deep passion to try to set the equation right. I have no idea. I don’t even--I know I joined the NAA-, student NAACP because of this paper that I’d done in high school and my realization that there was gross inequity. But it was--I mean, it wasn’t something I confronted on a daily basis. It was more an intellectual exercise.

BRINSON: And you graduated, again, what year? High school.

POST: Fifty-one.

BRINSON: Fifty-one, okay.

POST: One of the friends I made immediately when I went up to Indiana was a 9:00graduate English….student from New York City who was--her last name was Baumgarten; and she was the niece of Kermit Baumgarten, who was a big theater mover and shaker, a very big name in New York City theater. We liked each other a whole lot and I invited her home with me one weekend, and she readily accepted. In those days Indiana University, which is ninety miles to the north of Louisville, could only be arrived by train. There was a ( ) train that took four hours, if you can believe it, almost four hours to get from Louisville to Bloomington, Indiana, cause none of the students had cars. I mean, it was just a different time. So Sandy and I arranged to come home on one particular weekend. We got home on the ( ) train, pulled in to Union Station, which is down at Tenth and Broadway and is now the TARC bus headquarters. We get off the 10:00train, we’re walking down the platform to go into the, into the, uh --

BRINSON: Terminal?

POST: Well, it’s the station, and I turn around and Sandy is white as a ghost. I mean, she’s stopped in her tracks and she’s white as a ghost. I said, “What’s the matter?” And I followed her eyes, where she was looking, and what she saw was white/colored: white drinking fountain, colored drinking fountain, white waiting room, colored waiting room. And I looked at that and she was horrified. She would never come back to Louisville after that again. And what’s interesting, I think, about that is, that that had been a situation I had been exposed to many, many, many times and not seen. It took this experience with a stranger for me to see it. That had a profound impact on me. I mean that--not only that I saw it, but that I hadn’t seen it.

BRINSON: And you were already a member of the NAACP.

POST: Yeah, right. But I hadn’t seen it because it’s so pervasive. It’s everywhere and you just get used to it.

BRINSON: How did your family feel about you joining the NAACP? That was pretty unusual for that time.

POST: I don’t think they ever knew it. I don’t think I ever told them. I sort of felt that my mom and dad were not, were beneath me intellectually, which is a terrible way to phrase it, but that’s the way--you know, because I was in college and they hadn’t really gone to a real college, although dad went to night law school. They were fairly well read--they were not uneducated--but they were, had had no formal education. They sort of subscribed to the beliefs that were current in the local Jewish community at the time and didn’t really, didn’t really adopt other new attitudes. So I just sort of--I wasn’t close to them that way. Although, interestingly enough, in my later years my father promoted everything I did, supported it, supported me, you know, and I was out there on some really wild issues. He just thought I was wonderful and he, he 12:00sort of agreed with me. He had good instincts and good values that just never got really worked out. At the time that I went away to Indiana University, which was--the fifties were so ho-hum and so--this was the--those were the times of crinoline skirts and white buck shoes, or saddle shoes and bobby socks. I remember everything I wore was one size at least too big so that my body wouldn’t show through it. I wore big--I wore size thirty-eight and forty pullover sweaters so that nobody could tell I had breasts. It was just amazing. Uh --

BRINSON: Did you wear shorts?

POST: Huh?

BRINSON: Bermuda shorts?

POST: That was later, ‘52 or 3. I wore Bermuda shorts with knee socks and a plaid belt. Uh, I think that the absence of any real intellectual ferment or 13:00stimulation in my life at that time is a great loss. I think that I could have--I would have obviously developed differently if I’d had more of that. What I had, I craved. I married a man who I was attracted to, basically, on the strength of his intellect. He was a very smart man. It wasn’t a great emotional marriage. It was, I thought, a meeting of two minds and I thought he was--at that point, I really believed, somehow came to the conclusion that we needed a revolution in this country. And this is beyond race, that the inequities that existed had to be changed. I thought he felt the same way because he knew all the Spanish Civil War songs, and all the good old labor songs. So we got married in ‘53 --

BRINSON: How did you meet?

POST: I knew him from the time I was thirteen. He just hung out--he was four years older. I met him the first time at a dance, through the friend of his sister’s. He cut in on somebody I was dancing with.

BRINSON: He was from here in Louisville?

POST: He was from New York, but moved here when his--his family moved here when he was twelve. He was a real prick. I mean, in those years--I tell you, the first date I had with him, we walked to the movies. I was thirteen or fourteen; he was seventeen or eighteen. We’re walking to the movies in the neighborhood, and he said something about Das Kapital. I said, “What?” and he said, “Well, haven’t you read Das Kapital?” He was a real intellectual snob and he, he was humbled later on in life, but he was just a terrible prick. I have no--I think what happened with him and me was that I had this real sexual awakening, or wanted to have this real sexual activity, when I was eighteen and nineteen and we just didn’t do that. There were no pills and I was terrified of pregnancy. He was available. One night we went to see a movie--I hadn’t 15:00seen him for a couple of years, and one night we went to see a movie. It was very romantic and I just got all juiced up. So, honestly, it was just the silliest reason to get married because--I either married him because of intellect, which it turned out wasn’t really where I thought it was going to be, or because of sex, which is a really stupid reason to get married -- and then have five kids and stay together for thirty-three years.

BRINSON: So you dropped out of Indiana to get married or --?

POST: I moved--I came home; I transferred to the University of Louisville. We were married in my, end of my sophomore year. He went into the navy. It was at the end of the Korean War, people were being drafted, he hadn’t gone to OCS, he’d gone to law school. After law school, he signed up for four years with the Officers Candidate School so he wouldn’t be drafted. We went from--I went from Louisville--he got orders to San Francisco. I mean, really, that was -- and I transferred out to the University of California at Berkeley and graduated, and started graduate work out there.

BRINSON: Okay. Stop there. When you got to California, you had how many children?

POST: None.

BRINSON: You had no children.

POST: I was just newly married.

BRINSON: You were newly married. And you were there for how long?

POST: Almost four years.

BRINSON: Okay. And you actually graduated from Berkeley?

POST: From Berkeley, yeah. And I had hoped than when I transferred out there that I would meet people through the university and I didn’t. It was--it was a very Greek school in the fifties, which--people meet me and they find out I came out of Berkeley and they say, “Oh, well, no wonder.” Berkeley had very little to do with my intellectual development. It really didn’t. In those days, it was really crinolines and white bucks and Alpha Epsilon--I mean, it was so Greek and I was so opposed--I had some very strange opinions and I’m not sure where I got them. I thought the sororities and fraternities were horribly elitist and unreal. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I wanted to be--if the hippies had been around then, I would have, you know, I would have 17:00been one. They weren’t. I wanted to be bohemian, but I came out of too conventional a background to be able to pull that off. But I never really fit into straight, conventional, social--you know, I always was very questioning and I was always very--I looked sort of subversive and irreverent. I was intent and I got out there thinking I was going to make friends and I didn’t, because the community was just generally very transient, and the undergraduate community was very Greek. It was too big. There were 5,000 in my graduating class which in those days, in 1955 when I got my degree, was--5,000 was a huge number of people to graduate from the university.

BRINSON: You were still majoring in English --?

POST: In English literature, and I graduated with honors. And graduated in three and a half years, which I was very pleased with, with all the transferring and had to pick up extra credits and blah, blah, blah. I didn’t go to my graduation. I wasn’t going to sit there through, you know, 5,000 students 18:00full of bullshit from some people you know, some officials I didn’t know. So I didn’t go. About a month later, I went over to the Sprowl Hall, which is the administration building in front of which all these free speech things were held in the sixties. This was before it hit its glory with Mario Savio. I went in to get my diploma, so I go up to the regis--the whatever window, and I said, “I need my diploma. Uh, my name is Suzanne Post and I graduated, you know, last month.” So, she goes and she gets a piece of paper and she gives it to me. I turned around to walk away and she says, “Excuse me. There are honors attached.” So I went back and she gave me another piece of paper. It was that, it was that kind of a thing. And that kind of an attitude was pretty much an attitude that has stayed with me. I really don’t like hollow ceremonies. I had a real hard time psyching myself up to want to go to any of my 19:00children’s graduations. I mean, it’s not an admiral characteristic when it affects people who don’t share my point of view, but -- I have a real hard time with hollowness. I mean, I really do. I don’t know why I do, but I do.

BRINSON: Do you remember when you were at Berkeley, uh, was it a predominantly white student body? Introduced to other cultures and --?

POST: Back then, back then there was already a significant Asian--in fact, the thing that I loved about the Bay area was the diversity of its population. And I’ll tell you an interesting story that I always use. I lived about eight blocks from campus on a little street called McGee. I used to shop in a little grocery store about five blocks away that I could walk to, that wasn’t a mom and pop, teeny, teeny but it wasn’t big. It was a small grocery store. I’d 20:00go in there pretty regularly unless I had access to a car, and then I’d go over to Treasure Island where Ed was stationed and shop in the commissary because it was cheaper. And I walked--after I’d been there five or six months, I’m in this little grocery one day, and I’m bending over the produce counter to reach for a head of lettuce and I banged against the wall of this produce counter. There was a mirror running the whole length which is frequently used to make the thing look roomier, and airier, and bigger. So I’m bending in picking up this head of lettuce and I looked up in the mirror and I noticed in the reflection in the mirror that I was the only white person in this little store. And, gosh, that’s strange. I checked out and walked home, and on the way home I’m thinking, you know, this neighborhood that I live in is like, forty percent white maybe, forty --forty-five percent white, maybe twenty-twenty-five percent Asian, maybe ten percent black, maybe another x 21:00percent Native American. And it had been like that from the day I moved in, obviously, and I never noticed it. It was like the colored waiting room and the black waiting room all over, uh, white waiting room, all over again. I had never noticed that, even though I came from a very, very traditional white Jewish background in Louisville. And I tell people the reason I didn’t notice it is ‘cause that community worked so well. It was just our community, that’s all it is. I think that was, that and the physical beauty of the Bay area, were the two things that really hooked me and when, four years later, I moved back to Louisville, I was very depressed. For about six months, went through a real --

BRINSON: You came back --?

POST: Came back in 1957.

BRINSON: Okay.

POST: And I came back pregnant with a second child. Ed was going--we were 22:00going to start a new life. We had all kinds of possibilities and I was really down. I didn’t even quite understand why I was down. It was only later that I could look back on that period. and realize that I was grieving for this community that I’d left, because I had returned to a community that was--you had two choices: you could be black, or white, you could be Baptist, or you could be Catholic. That’s it. Louisville is much different than it was in ‘57. So that was, that was really hard for me after the Bay area experience because I thought the diversity was just wonderful. It was so interesting, and I really loved it. When I came back in ‘57, one of the very first things I did was join the American Civil Liberties Union, which had just been formed in 1955 around the Braden sedition trial. My father had started sending me clippings from the newspaper about that trial, about Ann and Carl. I just 23:00thought it was just the most outrageous thing I’d ever heard of. I also sort of knew that the right to political dissent was really going to be in jeopardy in this state unless there was a strong voice in support of, you know, free speech. I think the ACLU, when I joined it, maybe had one hundred twenty members or something. And, uh, I just--I sort of valued the concept without being terribly familiar with the organization, and wanted to support it. Not too many years later--I think I had maybe three children, so it might have been two years later--the woman who was our executive secretary, she was the wife of a psychology professor at the university who just died, was being paid to keep records of the FKCLU and to get out the newsletter, do simple clerical stuff 24:00like that. She sent out a newsletter and I guess I--it said, “Do you want to volunteer?” And you could check your name and I sent it back. She called me one day and she asked me if I’d help her with the newsletter, and I said, “Yeah.” And the next thing I know, she’d dropped my name in to be membership chair, so I got really active and in between pregnancies really spent--and that stuff--spent a lot of time with them. Uh, it wasn’t the kind of organization that we really needed later. It was just sort of a white, liberal, old men basically, talking session.

BRINSON: This was still late fifties?

POST: And into the sixties, and into the sixties. It just--they talked and they would pass--it used to drive me crazy, Betsy--they would--some horrendous situation was operating in the Commonwealth. They would have a board meeting, pass a resolution condemning it, and never do a damn thing with the resolution. They wouldn’t send it to the paper, they wouldn’t send it to the, you know, body that had--it was just absurd and it drove me crazy. I mean, I didn’t 25:00want to waste my time and energy working with an organization that wasn’t going to develop some kind of an active program. I got more and more deeply involved in the sixties, of course. In terms of my personal life …I guess, a couple of general observations. You’ve asked me to try and remember women who were active in, white women who were active in the civil rights movement, and I’ve been thinking about that a lot. There really weren’t very many of us and the--including me, I wasn’t--and I’ve always thought that I wasn’t real active because I was having five children every other year--not five every other year, one every other year till I got to five. But in thinking about it, I was reminded myself of the fact that, back in those days if you wanted to be effective, you worked through a man. I can remember really clearly two 26:00occasions on which I did that. One was when Barry Goldwater was running against Lyndon Johnson in ‘64. I was just horrified by Goldwater’s conservativism. I wanted, just couldn’t bear--and I wanted somebody--I wanted our democratic governor, who was Ned Breathitt, to do something and he just sat on his butt and he didn’t do a thing. He didn’t do a thing. I just kept--it just kept driving me nuts because I felt at the time, as did a lot of people, that Goldwater was going to, you know, run to victory and then we’re going to have who knows what? Be bombed--bombed back to the stone age. So what I did was so, I think, typical of American women with an activist bent in this part of the country. I programmed Ed. I kept working on Ed, and working on Ed, and working on Ed, until finally he got as concerned as I did. And this is pretty true of 27:00my whole marriage to him. I ‘d be upset about an issue and I’d work and work and work on him till finally he got to where I was. I had to pull him along just kicking and screaming. All he really wanted to do was practice law. And I worked on him enough so that he created--he set out to create a Citizens for Johnson committee. He got nine other men who would put up $1,000 and commit to working on this campaign, and find ten other men--or it wasn’t $1,000 ‘cause we didn’t have $1,000; it must have been $100. But they committed to raise $10,000 to open an office. And the office was opened and these men--they were all men, I mean the idea of something like that happening today is too hilarious for words--but there were ten white men who were the Citizens for Johnson campaign. The governor eventually had to deal with them cause they were, we were doing something. The people who were running it were women. It 28:00was all women running it.

BRINSON: Women did the mailings and the committee organizing?

POST: Oh, yeah, we did everything. We did everything. I mean, we did everything. They had these intellectual talking sessions; we’d program them and stuff. It was absurd. Such a waste of energy when you think about how difficult it was for us to make our voices heard. The same thing happened with the McCarthy campaign. I was one of two state coordinators for the Gene McCarthy campaign four years later, and by then I’d gotten some political savvy, and was really a pretty good organizer. I was spending a lot of time organizing my own legislative district which was highly charged politically, very progressive district. I had Ed front for me on the day of the congressional, the congressional convention. He was the one who got up there in front of people, and later I started to get really angry about it, like why didn’t, you know--and he didn’t do any of the shit work or any of the hard work, and he gets out there in front. I’m thinking, Well, you know, at least 29:00he did it. At least--but that was so typical, and in terms of the civil rights movement, women just didn’t have--and it wasn’t just white women, black women didn’t have that role either. All of us were in the back of the bus.

BRINSON: Yeah, I’m finding that more and more.

POST: So that was really a product of women’s failure to take control of their lives. I think what changed for me was really the radical women who came South to work on the anti-war movement. A lot of them, SDS, you know, University of Chicago. Vassar women who came South to work on the movement, and who were pissed because the way they were treated in the anti-war movement. Some of them had been in the civil rights movement in the South, and they didn’t like that either. They started talking to me and they really 30:00radicalized me as far as women’s--I hate to use the word ‘oppression’ because it’s a little too big a word, but whatever it was, ‘exploitation.’ I certainly think we were exploited. They began to work on me, and I began to listen to them. And I began to see parallels in terms of my marriage and the larger social issues. It was real--it was a really exhilarating experience. They were very sharp and I really felt that I’ve owed younger women a real debt because they took the time with me.

BRINSON: Okay. Let me stop you there a minute. By, uh, 1961 we, Louisville, as I understand it, actually had experienced a series of protests from the black community and boycotts against particular merchants, stores, and whatnot.

POST: Right.

BRINSON: Do you remember any of that?

POST: I have no memory of it.

BRINSON: Okay. Do you recall any sort of violent incidents that got recorded 31:00in the media, or …?

POST: I remember nothing of it. Sort of sad.

BRINSON: Okay. Well, I’m not even sure how much of it was reported in the media. So, okay, uh --

POST: The first time I recall any effort of white people, and it was pretty much spearheaded by white women, to make some inroads on the race issue was the open housing movement.

BRINSON: I want to get to that in a minute.

POST: Okay, you’re not there yet.

BRINSON: No. Did you continue to belong to the NAACP, or did you give that up when you went to Berkeley?

POST: No, I--well, I didn’t--no, it was a student chapter, and even today you’d never get a bill from the NAACP for your membership. I mean, you have to call them up and say, “Would you please --?” It’s so absurd. I didn’t join again until probably the sixties.

BRINSON: Okay. Do you recall what prompted you to do that?

POST: Probably all the stuff that was going on all over in the sixties.

BRINSON: Okay. Do you recall growing up, or up till that period reading any black literature, seeing plays or …?

POST: None. None. Totally bereft. Completely sterile.

BRINSON: Okay. Of the women who came from the North, were there any in particular that you remember, that you can recall?

POST: Joan Goldsmith is her name. She lives in California now. She came out of Antioch, in fact later married the son of a president of Antioch after they’d lived together five years; and then, of course, they did what everybody did: they split up. She wrote a Vietnam curriculum guide--I think she was living in Boston at that time--and her younger brother worked with me on the, in 33:00the anti-war stuff. She was, she was just amazing. I haven’t seen her for a long time but we talk. Joanie is about fifteen years younger than I am, I guess. She’s probably about fifty now. She was one of the most--she was one who had a lot of impact on me. Another one is a woman named Joy Portugal, who is Canadian, who is a member of the Communist Party, and who came to live and work with Ann and Carl Scaff. She came from ( ) and wanted to--actively--as a lot of young people in those days--wanted to work with Ann and Carl because they had this biracial campaign in the South. She had a lot of impact on me. She was also about fifteen years younger than me, and I still stay very in touch, much in touch with Joy. She’s worked for a variety of unions and she worked, she went to New York about ten or twelve years ago to take a job as editor of The Daily World for $8,000 -- and managed. I do not know how anybody lives in 34:00New York City on $8,000, but later my son did it, too. So I guess it can be done if you’re committed. So she had an impact on me.

BRINSON: Has she come back to Louisville?

POST: Not to live. She comes back to visit. She owns a duplex here, and she’s still very politically tied in.

BRINSON: Okay. I’ve been told about another woman who worked with Ann who --

POST: Jan Phillips?

BRINSON: Umm --

POST: Laurie --

BRINSON: -- who’s actually now doing theater, or art, or something of that sort.

POST: There’s so many. Was it Ilene I wonder?

BRINSON: I don’t know. I could go back --

POST: There’s a range, a full range of women. The women who were here with the greatest permanence--length of time--were Joy and a woman named Jan Phillips, who worked for Ann, who you’ll probably want to talk to, who is just leaving a job as the director of the Louisville Tennis Association. She’s a very close friend of mine. She was the Communist Party organizer for Kentucky 35:00for a number of years. She’s got--she’s great on--she’s leaving the tennis association to run a party, uh -- scholarship fund called the Davis Fund, which is sort of located--its major locus is in New York. She’s going to do development and outreach for that out here in Louisville. You should talk to her. Her telephone number is: 451-1820 is home; then work is 587-0290. She doesn’t have an answering machine at home.

BRINSON: Okay.

POST: She’d be, she’d be really good material. She’s not from Louisville.

BRINSON: Okay.

POST: The women who came and worked with Ann and Carl were not from Louisville. They were transplants.

BRINSON: 1968. Do you recall any of the riots in Louisville?

POST: Oh, God, yes.

BRINSON: Can you talk about that a little bit?

POST: Well, there were--I think the one I remember best was the one at 28th and 36:00Greenwood which was really a mess. We had little mini riots, but for Louisville they were very significant. And I think--I think that was fomented by a guy named James Cortez who was a real crazy black guy who was sort of livid And I’m not even sure that there were any major issues or what they were. Ann would know that far better than I cause I was--my job during that time was just to help raise money to get people out of jail. I know there was an effort at about that time by our commonwealth attorney to prosecute some black leadership for supposedly plotting to throw, to blow up the west--you know about that one. Just ridiculous baby stuff. The police chief was a guy named William Hyde who had a little black book of Louisville’s most dangerous people. And it was 37:00pathetic; I mean, it was just pathetic. Somebody got their hands on it; it was printed and Carl was in there.

BRINSON: So your job you said was to raise money --?

POST: My job--that’s all I did. I raised money for bail.

BRINSON: How did you do that?

POST: Well, we had a certain list that we just worked. We called people and said, you know, and they kicked in, because people were very upset about what was happening. There was a lot of railroading going on, and a lot innocent people being shoved, you know, into jail. I guess our first exposure to that was the open housing campaign, because there was some spillover on the streets on that. An awful lot of people went to jail. I remember one time the ACLU had its new members party at the home of a black physician named Maurice Rabb. He had a big basement room. And somebody had gone down to get people out of jail so they could come to this party, and it was just a really heady--I didn’t know most of the people who had been arrested. I mean, it was sort of really--it was a very heady experience ‘cause you felt like, you know, we were 38:00all sort of working at this together. I did very, very little. Very, very little ‘cause I was really--I had these five children, and there was no way I could, that I had the energy to do both. Moreover, at that time I had a really unsupportive husband who -- it was just too much. So I did very, very little. I mean, my heart was there, and, in fact, that whole civil rights effort coupled with the anti-war campaign sort of merged to become, I think, the precipitating factor in the breakup of my marriage, which didn’t occur until 1986. It took that long, but --

BRINSON: How do you see that?

POST: Well, I was so--I was at the time so convinced of the immorality of what was occurring both racially--and I guess I thought the Vietnam War was a racial 39:00thing, too--and our involvement in that country where I didn’t feel we had any business. I was just so convinced of that and it seemed to be--that was--the civil rights issues and the anti-war issues were the defining issues of my world. And I was married to a man who told me that he had to believe that this government knew what it was doing. And then when it came to race, he’d say, “Yeah, it’s terrible,” and didn’t want, didn’t do anything, you know? Just didn’t do anything. And then I’m hanging out with all these much younger radicals, and I just thought they were so right. And, and --

BRINSON: Were your children old enough, any of them, at that point to have any feelings or reactions to what you were involved in?

POST: Oh, I’m sure they were. I’m not sure that we’ve ever really fully explored it. I went to all the demonstrations, and usually the children, a portion of the children who were able went with me. My son David went to the 40:00first Vietnam moratorium that left here in ‘68, or was it ‘69? It must have been ‘68 because he was thirteen. Two buses left from the seminary to go up to Washington. I went over to take some cookies to my friends who were riding the buses, and they had an extra seat, and he went with them. They had to have been certainly aware of it without maybe fully understanding what the issues were. I’m sure they didn’t--I’m sure that they, as the rest of the Louisville community who knew Ed and me, believed that Ed was really supportive of me and he really wasn’t. He kept trying to hold me back. And I guess I felt that you probably can’t expect a mate to agree with everything you do, but I do think you have a right to expect a mate not to oppose you on things that you consider -- so I just, you know, I just sort of left that marriage 41:00pretty much emotionally, just left. It was just …

BRINSON: How about your parents and your brothers? How did they feel about your involvement?

POST: I didn’t ask them and I’m--my father was on my side. My mother sure didn’t--she did what--she didn’t allow herself to think a lot. My father believed the world was obscene, and the race issue was just horrible. He was by that time supporting a lot of things financially that tried to--my father gave me--up until the time he died--an annual subscription to The Nation magazine, to the Daily New York Times, to, oh, another one. Not the New Reader but another one. When my father died, I said, “Boy, I’ve lost my father and a subscription to three, you know, periodicals. This is terrible.” He was very supportive. I think as he got older he got more into, made some connections and 42:00he got to be very outspoken, wrote letters. And so did my brother, so did my brother. My sister, the twins were a sister and a brother, my sister was just never involved. So, I don’t know. I, uh, you know there are times when I get really, uh, regret--I really regret that I didn’t have a partner who could have supported me. But, you know, that happens. I’m sure that’s the history of women.

BRINSON: So in 1968 you ran for the state legislature?

POST: ‘75.

BRINSON: Oh, ‘75. That was later. Okay. Well, two things --

POST: When David Karem--you know who David Karem is?

BRINSON: Uh --

POST: He’s a state senator, the house majority speaker, whatever they call it. Speaker of the House--no, I don’t know what his title is, but he’s a big muckety-muck in Frankfort. David Karem. From Louisville.

BRINSON: Okay and what about him?

POST: He decided in ‘75 to not run for the General Assembly, for the House, 43:00and run for the Senate. When he decided to leave that, I decided to run for his seat, because I had really had it up to my kazoo in helping people get elected to office, and then you go to them with your issue and they say, “Oh yeah, I agree with you Suzy, but --but -- but-- .”

BRINSON: And what were your campaign issues?

POST: My campaign issues [laughing] were, were probably what got me defeated: pro-choice, anti-death penalty, uh, pro-civil rights. And I had a huge number of people working for me. I mean, I had all the Gene McCarthy people left over from ‘68. I got elected the State Council Committee of the Democratic Party in that campaign. So I had all the people who worked in the McCarthy campaign, I had all the women who, you know believed that choice was crucial. And I had the white civil rights people in that district. It was a fabulous group. I had 44:00more damn fun. I really did have fun, and it was a very close race. It really was. And the woman who beat me was a good, a good person. She had been on the board of aldermen two terms and decided to run when she got in some political trouble down there, even though I had told her I’d help her raise money if she ran for mayor. And I would have gone crazy up there, Betsy. I mean, I like the big--I don’t want to deal with land use stuff and regulations.

BRINSON: So after that campaign did you think about running again?

POST: Never. Never. Never.

BRINSON: Okay. So what was happening -- two things really. I’m going to go way back to the early sixties, uh, Governor Bert Combs and then Ned Breathitt that you talked about. Combs actually was responsible--at least some things happened under his term, like the establishment of the Commission on Human Relations--and then Breathitt takes credit for some civil rights activity at 45:00some point. But do you have any recollection or perspective on that --?

POST: No, I don’t think they did anything other than what they were forced to do. I don’t think either of those men had any vision whatsoever. Bert was a really smart guy who was a much better federal judge than he was governor of Kentucky. I think he was an honest governor, but I don’t think those were, those were issues that they were forced--I mean, they were foisted upon them. The Kentucky Commission on Human Rights, like most of those agencies, was created to work some, to take off a lot of heat and work minimum change, you know. The present director, who you and I both know, is a close friend of mine. I just agonize with her over some of the stuff they have to deal with. It’s just, you, know, but that’s the way--that’s what they were created to be. They weren’t created to do anything really major.

BRINSON: Didn’t you serve on a -- yes, you did.

POST: On the local one.

BRINSON: Right, from ‘75 to ‘82 as the women’s --

POST: As a staff person and then from ‘82 till about ‘90-something I was a commissioner there. It was very demoralizing. I’m lobbying right now to try, as a member of this transition team, to get that agency’s charter changed because it’s dysfunctional as hell. They have twenty-one members so they can never get a quorum. I mean, this goes back forever. The mayor and county judge stick people on there who haven’t a clue what civil --

END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A

START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B

BRINSON: Go back to the McCarthy campaign, I wonder if you recall any African Americans working in that campaign?

POST: Not a one.

BRINSON: Okay. Okay. Um, Louisville, I believe--of course, the Brown decision in ‘54--but Louisville didn’t actually begin to desegregate schools until ‘56.

POST: And then it was, it was flawed, because Homer Carmichael, the Louisville 47:00School Superintendent, said that anybody could go to any school that they wanted to go to. What he didn’t say was ‘as long as there’s a space.’ So, black kids who might want to go to a white school had no chance of getting in there unless--you know, you might have a smattering of one here, two there but it was really, it was, let’s just take the restrictions down and see what happens. Given the housing patterns and--I mean, nothing much occurred. And he got this big deal from President Eisenhower at that time because we were supposed to have done such a good job of peaceful desegregation and nothing really changed.

BRINSON: And then I think in ‘72 you were a plaintiff in a lawsuit, school desegregation again.

POST: Right. Right.

BRINSON: Talk about that a little bit.

POST: Well, in 1969 I became the president of what was then KCLU. And in 48:00nineteen --

BRINSON: Kentucky Civil Liberties Union?

POST: Right. And in 1970, in 1970 we were approached by some black people, most notably I guess, Lyman Johnson, who had desegregated the University of Kentucky graduate school. We were approached by Lyman and some other people about suing the Board of Education of Louisville. So we studied it, and we debated it, and we had endless meetings as to whether or not we wanted to undertake that. It was a big, ambitious proposal. We even had hearings in the black community to find out what black people wanted. And it went on and on. Finally, in 1972 Bob Settler, who was our general counsel, volunteer general counsel and a tenured law professor at U of K, filed suit. And in the course of 49:00putting that suit together--he needed--he thought he would like to have a white plaintiff who had children, white children in the public schools, so I said, “Sure.”

BRINSON: How old were your children at that time?

POST In 1972--David was born in ‘55. He’s my oldest one and the youngest one was ten years younger. So …

BRINSON: So he would have been in high school.

POST: Yeah. So they were all in public schools, so it gave me some legitimacy to go out there and try and promote peaceful school desegregation. And I got real immersed in it. I mean, the thing dragged on from ‘72 to ‘75 when it was really, finally implemented. And there was enormous opposition in the county, just enormous opposition. I mean, it was an organizing vehicle for the Klan and for every little Save Our Community school group that you could--the county was just ringed with opponents and organizing against school 50:00desegregation, because it meant busing their kids. And, ah, it was very tempestuous. It was the most tempestuous period I’ve lived through in this town.

BRINSON: I want to talk about this a little bit in greater detail here if we can. You filed in federal court?

POST: Right.

BRINSON: Do you remember who the judge was or what you --?

POST: That was Gordon.

BRINSON: Talk about him.

POST: Well, he was Republican. He was very conservative. The most interesting thing about--he got, he got overruled twice by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals and finally on third, third time he just said, “Desegregate.” And he said, “You’ve got to have a plan in six weeks and that’s it.” So the Board of Education of Louisville had a demographer who whips out this plan, literally, in six weeks that the city was stuck with. It’s a pretty good plan, amazingly. His--Judge Gordon went through a major transformation having 51:00been overturned twice on this thing. He began to come around and he began to, he and Bob Settler began to develop a very collegial relationship. Tim Hogan, Tom Hogan, who took over the case when Bob Settler left Louisville, and he had a very, you know, a very close relationship. Tom was --

BRINSON: Who was Tom?

POST: Tom Hogan, who was the young attorney, who is a very dear, dear friend of mine, who had worked in Frankfort in the General Assembly as an aide, who was a feisty little Irishman, who was just--I just adored him. He was about fifteen years younger than me, too. He signed--he was an ACLU member and been a president, but he was hired by Galen Martin at the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights to take a suit that was broader than the ACLU suit originally. The ACLU 52:00suit was a lawsuit challenging the legal Board of Education. Galen wanted a merger suit. We didn’t file a merger suit after these hearings in the black community, because the black community didn’t want it for the same reasons they don’t want merger of city/county government today: they’re afraid they’d lose their power base. At the time the original suit was filed, there were five Louisville school board members, three of whom were black. They knew that if they merged with the county, they were going to lose that.

BRINSON: And this would just be a merger of the school system, not all --?

POST: Right. Right. So, so Galen got Tom Hogan, who had once worked for the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights, to file a suit that was a separate suit, merging. The judge ordered--eventually ordered that the two suits--the ACLU suit and the Kentucky Commission suit, be merged. Tom Hogan, who is younger and less experienced than Bob Settler, worked alongside Bob. They worked beautifully together. Bob eventually left and went to Cornell. When he left, 53:00he turned everything over to Hogan to carry out the terms of the lawsuit. Uh, where was I going with this?

BRINSON: Who was the other plaintiff?

POST: Oh, there were a lot of them. There was a guy named Earl Alliuisi who was a vice president at the University of Louisville; there was a woman named Penny Lane who had been a CETA worker in our office; uh, gosh who else was there? I can’t remember. There were about six or seven of them. I mean, they just tried to cover all their bases in terms of having standing.

BRINSON: Right. Was there a lot of news publicity about filing the suit?

POST: Oh, oh, it was front-page headlines. Yes. From that time on--from the day that lawsuit was filed until just about -- till I left the ACLU in 1982. So from 1970 when we started talking about it, till 1972 when it was filed, till 54:001982 when I left the ACLU--took this other job--was I able to divorce myself from that lawsuit. I felt very responsible for all the negative things that were happening as a consequence of that. I worked in one coalition after another to try and force some changes in procedures that the, that the board of education--that resulted in the disproportionate suspensions of black kids and the tracking of them, you know, channeling of them into EMH classes and BD classes. It was just --

BRINSON: BD? What’s BD?

POST: Behavioral disorder. It’s behavioral, I think that’s what it is -- behavioral disability. I may have lost an acronym in there. But for all those years, I really felt so personally responsible that I couldn’t back off. It was just so--and now I’m just like--it’s not anywhere on my--I just can’t deal with that. I’m burnt out. So I spent--at the same time I was monitoring 55:00compliance with the court order as a member of the human relations commission staff, I was doing Title IX monitoring at the human relations commission on the board of education. So I was at the board of education every damn meeting they had. I spent wedding anniversaries, birthdays out there constantly. They were horrible meetings. They were horrible meetings. Just so much bureaucracy. I mean, I just, and I was trying to organize--it was just like this massive expenditure of energy to try and remedy what, you know, the lawsuit had not changed. And to this day, those problems prevail. The problem of, you know, too many suspensions of black kids, disproportionate suspensions, not enough kids in, not enough black kids in advance programs, too many black kids in educable, mentally handicapped classes, when teachers just can’t figure out how to relate to them. I mean, just--not enough black administrators, not enough black teachers, although that figure has come up a little bit. But it 56:00was really probably one of the most expensive things I’ve ever done in my life.

BRINSON: I want to talk a little bit about that. And this was before--you were involved with the ACLU, but you had not yet become the Director of the ACLU?

POST: No, I was President of the Board.

BRINSON: Of the Board, okay.

POST: And there were very few--I should tell you--at the time I became president in ‘69, I think there was maybe one other president, woman president, of an ACLU affiliate. Then in ‘70 I got myself elected to the national board, which is when you met me. That was my, that was my mission. That was my agenda when I went up there. I purposely got myself elected.

BRINSON: What was your agenda?

POST: Women’s issues. Trying to get more women into leadership positions, and trying to get the organization to be responsive to women’s program needs.

BRINSON: All right. All right, go back to the lawsuit. How did the community relate to you as an individual in doing that?

POST: Badly. Well, it depends on which community you’re talking about. The Jewish community couldn’t stand me. I’ll give you a newspaper article. Have you looked in the Courier Journal for-- . I had some stuff poly--what do they call it when you take stuff to Kinko’s and they put that plastic over it?

BRINSON: Laminated.

POST: Thank you. I never remember that word. I was going through some stuff the other day, and I had some things laminated for the children--had copies made for the children--of newspaper articles and stuff that appeared. I’ll give you--don’t let me not give you one which you can give me back--because I only had five copies made; that the Courier Journal did about a year ago last July which tells the story--my daughter was coming, when she was eight, was walking home from school--when she was eight, that would have been ‘73.

BRINSON: So the case was about a year --?

POST: No, it wasn’t ‘73. It was--wait a minute--’65, ‘72. She must have been older, because she was walking home alone with this kid from school--she must have been ten or eleven--and they came, and the school is in an easy walking distance of my house, and they came to the end of the street--we lived off a dead end street--and Rachel turned off to go down that street. This little girl who was walking with her said, “Oh, that’s where that awful Suzy Post lives.” Rachel said, “That’s my mom.” And my son Stephen tells the story, and you’ll see it in this newspaper clipping I’m going to give you; he wrote a column about me. He writes for a Madison newspaper from time to time. He wrote a column about me for Mother’s Day, didn’t tell me about it. He told the story of how when he was in junior high school, or high school, he and another friend went to a women’s club to give some kind of presentation--I 59:00probably haven’t got any of these facts right. Anyway, after they gave their presentation, one of the women said to the other student who was with him, whose last name was also Post--she was the daughter of a doctor who lived a couple of blocks away. The woman said to Martha, “Oh, are you that terrible, that awful Suzy Post’s daughter?” And Stephen said, “No, that’s me. No, that’s my mother.” “Is that awful Suzy Post your mother?” and Stephen said, “No, she’s my mother.” So, I’ve often said to other friends of mine that, you know, it doesn’t make me feel good to know that I did what I did without really considering what the consequences might be to my children, because I was so convinced of the moral rightness of what I was doing, and had such an urgent need to do it. You could rationalize now and say, “Well, I was 60:00trying to make the world a better place for them, too.” But, no, I was just trying to do the right thing, and I never even thought about what that might do in terms of my children.

BRINSON: Did they come home and tell you these stories? Were they --?

POST: No, they didn’t. They really didn’t. And I said something to Stephen, who is now a college professor, not too long ago. I said, “God.” I said, “Didn’t you--wasn’t it awful? I mean I was out there all the time. I was in the newspaper all the time.” He said, “No, I thought it was pretty cool. The other kids’ mothers made cookies.” He said, “I thought it was pretty cool.” I don’t know if he really thought it was cool at the time. Maybe he did. But …

BRINSON: And how about Ed?

POST: Ed was really afraid that it was going to reflect badly on him and his law practice. In fairness to Ed, it could be that his, his not wanting to get out there was concern that it, he might not be able to provide for his family. 61:00It might have deleterious effect on his income producing. I don’t know; we never talked about it. I didn’t ask him either. I mean, I’d gotten to the point where I didn’t ask. I just did. When I went up to--I guess one of the most painful memories I have is when I went to New York the first time in 1969 for a development conference up at Lake Mohawk --

BRINSON: The ACLU?

POST: Yeah, the first time. In 1969 I was thirty-six years old. Thirty-six years old. He didn’t want me to go. He did not want me to go. He said, “You’re not going to go.” And you know what I did? I cried. I mean, can you believe it? I look back and think, I cried? Why didn’t I say, “Screw you. I’m going to go.” I didn’t. I cried and cried. I went. I was determined to go and I went. I got elected. I was the first woman on what they used to call the steering committee. It was a really boring group of three, 62:00three E. D’s, three elected at-large and--there were nine of us. I can’t remember who the other three were.

BRINSON: So this is a steering committee of, for development --?

POST: That allocated money. That used to make grants. Before the sharing --

BRINSON: I don’t remember --

POST: No, you wouldn’t. It’s the dark ages. But they’d sit around--they’d take grants from--applications from affiliates and decide which affiliate was going to get some money. It was a pretty powerful position, and they’d never had a woman. I’m like one woman and eight men. And I’ll tell you who helped me get elected, in fact, asked me to run, was Jay Miller from Illinois. So the day I got elected--that night--well, the day I got elected I called home to tell Edward, and I said, “Guess what?” And I knew he wasn’t happy about my being up here all by myself. I think it was sexual jealousy really. I said, “I got elected to the steering committee.” And there was this deep silence, and he said, “Does that mean you’re going to go, you’ve got to go away again?” I said, “Well, three times a year.” 63:00And he--you could, you know, the silence was deafening. And I was so hurt. I mean, you know, I was so excited; I was really proud of myself. So, like I said, my marriage started to unfold, dissolve in ‘68, and this didn’t help that he was just--but, I never, we never discussed anything. I just did whatever I wanted to do and whether or not that’s a great way to run a marriage or a family, I don’t know, but --

BRINSON: Did you meet anybody out of the whole school deseg litigation that you became good friends with, who supported you?

POST: No, I can’t, I can’t remember that I did. Ann and I had had a relationship prior to that time, Ann Braden. A woman that I--no, I didn’t even meet her at that time. The current school board member. She didn’t 64:00really--no, I don’t think. I don’t think so. I don’t--I just didn’t have much--Bob Settler, the lawyer, was very supportive and Tim, Tom Hogan, the other lawyer, was very supportive. But, no, I would go into things in the Jewish community, and it was [laughing] like smallpox had been introduced into the room. One time I had Dr. Spock down here, in ‘70, I think. This is prior to school deseg, and I brought him here to talk about anti-war stuff. We had this huge meeting, and there were seven hundred people there at that time, because he was real involved in draft counseling, and we were doing a lot of it. And when he got up to speak he mentioned Fred Hampton and the Black Panther murders in Chicago. I thought, “Wow.” I go to a party somewhere like a week later and this woman who’s the wife of my pediatrician says, “What 65:00about the Black Panthers?” I mean, real hostile. So, I was, I was --

BRINSON: She was associating them with you as a result of -- brought Dr. Spock in?

POST: Yeah. So, I was too far ahead of the community really. Ironically, that community just voted, just gave me this last May its most prestigious award, which is very funny. But, you know, things change. The Jewish community. It’s just sort of so--I think I was ahead of my time as far as the Jewish community was concerned. Now they’re where they should be, but not right. So, no, I don’t think I had--it was pretty lonely, I’ve got to say. It was kind of, you know, I had a relationship with the ACLU board --

BRINSON: Right.

POST: --but they weren’t really intimate friends.

BRINSON: And where was the NAACP with --?

POST: It had a cooperating attorney who was there titularly, if there is such a 66:00word, but who didn’t do anything. He

is now a county commissioner; his name is Daryl Owens.

BRINSON: And they filed --?

POST: They were part of it. They were attorneys of record, too, but they didn’t do anything. They were just there for window dressing.

BRINSON: Okay. Did you ever have any interaction with Georgia Power?

POST: Not really although Tom Hogan had worked with her a lot in the legislature. She was not involved in that school deseg suit.

BRINSON: Okay. How about a woman named Lukie Ward?

POST: No, she wasn’t either. My first involvement with Lukie was when I ran for the General Assembly in ‘75. She sort of insinuated herself into my good offices, and I use this language quite deliberately, because she had had--she had an ax to grind with my opponent. And she wanted to get the other woman, and the way she was going to get her was to have me beat her. I mean, it took me a 67:00long time to realize that, but, but, no, I didn’t--one of the people who wasn’t--when she was marching much earlier, and she was about the only white woman around, I was somewhere else. I’m sure that what she did was admirable. I’ve never had any really great experiences with her, but I’m sure that, you know, she did some really great things because people say so.

BRINSON: It sounds like she knew the Democratic Party structure and worked in campaigns much earlier.

POST: She’s from the East.

BRINSON: She worked on Georgia’s campaign.

POST: Yeah, they were really good friends.

BRINSON: And she’s dead now, right?

POST: Yeah, she died about three years ago, not quite. Her son was elected to Congress and then when she died, he blew the next election, and we’ve got a conservative Republican over here named Ann Northup.

BRINSON: How about Eleanor Love, Whitney Young’s sister?

POST: I never knew her. I never knew her. Oh, I do! Dr. Love.

BRINSON: Right, she’s still living.

POST: Yeah, she was the commission president when I was on the commission. I never really saw her in an activist position, and, in fact, Eleanor Love was 68:00president of the commission when uh -- uh, the nomination of--Oh, God, having brain trouble today--the black supreme court justice-- .

BRINSON: Thurgood Marshall?

POST: No, the --

BRINSON: Clarence Thomas?

POST: When Clarence Thomas was nominated, the commission was going to pass a resolution endorsing his nomination, and I spoke passionately against it. But Eleanor Love was the chair of the commission and she supported it. They came within a hair’s breath of doing that.

BRINSON: What happened that they didn’t?

POST: Well, I stopped them, basically. I was so vociferous, and none of them had enough of a feel for him.

BRINSON: Okay. At that point, you were a commission member?

POST: I was a commissioner.

BRINSON: Okay. Good for you.

POST: Yeah, well, good for me.

BRINSON: Right. I’m actually listening to Anita Hill’s book about the whole experience on tape now as I’m driving around the state.

POST: Oh, God, it just killed me to have to go to work in those days, that I couldn’t hear those things. Just killed me.

BRINSON: Right. Right. I want to talk a little bit--how are we doing? [Interruption]

POST: That will give me a little time to take a shower and get dressed.

BRINSON: I want to talk about the whole housing movement because my recollection is that that was early on a big piece of the program, the civil rights program in this community, was an issue.

POST: Oh, yeah, it was--the open housing movement. I’m not exactly sure--and Ann is a much better resource on this than me--as you know, I don’t keep notes; I don’t keep a journal. I’m so sorry now. I keep dumping on myself for having not done those things. I mean, I do it with great regularity. Oh, why didn’t you keep a record of that? That was a really interesting time. My involvement in the open housing movement was to, you know, support it, to help --

BRINSON: And goes back to when?

POST: I’m not even sure, Betsy, what year that was. I really don’t know. 70:00The Council of--National Council of Jewish Women had a group, study group that surfaced the issue. They had a little pin that people wore. It was black with a white equal sign on it. At my other house I had this sticker on my front window forever that said, ‘Open housing is morally right.’ One of these really grab you sayings. [laughter-Brinson] I don’t know when in the sixties that was. I’m just not good at the dates. But that campaign--I’m not even sure where the impetus started for that, whether it was the black community or the white community. I’m just not sure. But that heated up big, and it was a question of--some interesting things happened as a consequence of it. First, we had these demonstrations all around town, uh, supporting open housing and being, you know, people being attacked by the opposition. The demonstrations, I think, were to propose, to pass an anti-discrimination ordinance by the Board of 71:00Alderman. It took a while. One of the interesting byproducts of that whole thing was that the Human Relations Commission’s first director was a Quaker named Mansard Tidings. And he supported passage of an open housing ordinance, and came out publicly so stating, and his commissioners fired him. When they fired him, the National Association of Human Rights organization, which is an affiliation of all these state and local agencies nationally, blackballed the Human Relations Commission and got the word out nobody should apply for the vacant job now. And the place was absolutely leaderless for, I think, a couple of years. In the interim, my rabbi, who married me, had gotten deeply involved 72:00in Negotiation Now, which was an anti-war group that wanted to negotiate a peace settlement, he and another minister. His congregation became very impatient with him, and angry with him, because he was spending a lot of time and energy doing anti-war stuff, and they thought he wasn’t making enough hospital visits and tending, you know, da, da, da, da, da. So when he went to them for a raise when his contract was up in 19- whatever year it was, ‘69 or ‘70, they didn’t--they said no they weren’t going to do it and he resigned from my synagogue as rabbi. His wife, who is a real ( ) and a real intellectual, talked him into going and applying for the job that Mansard had been fired from. He was out of work for a while, and then he went and applied and they hired him. They were delighted to have somebody fill that position.

BRINSON: And this was all before Galen Martin?

POST: No, this was the local agency. Galen was the state.

BRINSON: Oh, I got you. Okay. Right.

POST: He hired me in 1975 when I’m, you know, trying to figure out what kind 73:00of marketable skills have I got. I mean, I didn’t have many really, or at least I didn’t know how to sell them. So he had gotten some money from the democratic mayor to do some women’s programming. We had been pushing Harvey Sloane, the mayor, to put some resources into programming for women. So good old Harvey gives Martin Purley, the director, eight thou, $8,000 to hire a staff to do it. So Martin hired me. And I started work--this was chilling--I started work at the Human Relations Commission in August of 19-, maybe it was even September, -75 on the day that school started. The day that school started. The year we desegregated. And my office building was directly across the street from the city police department, and when I turned down around the corner to go into this building, and looked across the street at the city police department, 74:00and their parking lot is wall-to-wall police in black riot gear with the helmets and things down and black everywhere and rifles. It was chilling; it was just scary as hell. I mean, to see these people all prepared for God knows what.

BRINSON: They thought that there was going to be a lot of violence.

POST: Everybody did. Everybody thought so. So that was the day I began work, and I was the only one in that whole agency who knew anything about the schools or school desegregation or integration or any of it. So there was this huge vacuum which I then proceeded to fill, and the same was true of the women’s stuff. And for a long time, I was really the presence of that agency. The directors were kind of just--although Martin I got to say was very good about getting out publicly and taking the moral high road. Nobody else has done that since in all the years that he’s been gone. It’s a real loss to the community that they don’t have somebody, a vocal spokesperson.

BRINSON: When the schools desegregated, were your children concerned about 75:00potential violence?

POST: I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I mean we never talked about--I mean, we just, we didn’t do that at home. Only one of my children, the year we desegregated, was being bused out of the neighborhood to a school in the downtown area. It was a really good experience for him. It was interesting, you know? He was in middle school--I guess he was in seventh grade by then--and he could handle that kind of stuff. Rachel, I guess, was -- Rachel was ten that year and he was thirteen. So, I mean, you know, they were not little, wee things. And I don’t think the question of violence came up in terms of the East End. That’s not where the violence was being focused. It was out in the county, in the schools that were ringing the county. The East End was too well behaved, too polite to support that.

BRINSON: Well, were they busing black children into the counties? That was--was that the basis for the concern?

POST: The basis of the concern was that some county students were even bused into the inner city. And they didn’t want their kids to leave the neighborhoods and go into that terrible inner city. Then I heard--amazingly enough, people actually admit to these things, that they didn’t think it was a good idea to bring black children into their, ( ) white neighborhoods because then the black--this is really sad--then the black kids would see what white kids have and they’d want it, too. Don’t you wonder about people’s willingness to say such terribly crass things?

BRINSON: Uh, hmm.

POST: So, there was that kind of resistance and there were, of course, the normal real apprehension about change, which wouldn’t have made any difference much what it was. But then it was confused and, uh, exacerbated by adding race to the whole thing when people were so--they weren’t even ambivalent about race. I mean, in 1975 when that thing happened blacks were clearly inferior and that’s all there was to it. They were criminal element and they were violent 77:00and they were going to rape their daughters.

BRINSON: Was Lyman Johnson active with you --?

POST: Lyman, yes. Lyman got himself elected to the board of education after that and he was, he and a friend of mine named Carolyn Hudow--and she would be very good to talk to, although she was never active in the civil rights movement. She just had good instincts and got herself elected--well, actually, she was appointed to the board by the previous Louisville superintendent. Carolyn Hudow. Mrs. Jim on Hill Road. Lyman was elected--he was president of the NAACP. I was on his board at the time he got elected. He and Carolyn for a long time were the only voices there, you know, in terms of advocating for black students. Lyman was very active. Very active. He was very important.

BRINSON: And what was the NAACP doing at this point? They were part of the lawsuit, but they didn’t really do a lot. Were they doing educational forums?

POST: They were making -- Yeah, they had a--well, no, they had an education 78:00committee chair, cause I was on his committee. They weren’t doing much. They have never--they haven’t been really viable here in my lifetime. I mean, in my public lifetime.

BRINSON: Right. Was --?

POST: And now you can’t even find them. I mean, I’ve been trying to get them involved, and there is no ‘them’ right now. They’re just totally gone.

BRINSON: Right. Was there ever --?

POST: There is an SCLC.

BRINSON: Okay. Let me finish. The NAACP, was there ever any educational literature that was designed, distributed, door-to-door canvases --?

POST: Not that I’m aware of. There may have been. I’m not aware of it.

BRINSON: Okay. Go ahead and talk about SCLC.

POST: Well, SCLC was probably at the time, because of Dr. King, more viable than the NAACP, but it’s gone, it’s sort of dissolved, too. Had a preacher named Reverend, uh -- oh, what was his name?

BRINSON: Not A.D. Willliams? That was Martin’s brother.

POST: That was his brother; he drowned. No, it’ll come to me. There really--I don’t know why there weren’t any vital black groups. There just weren’t. Now the black community is pretty well organized around economic issues and economic development issues and those kinds of things. It’s just not real, still not pressing much on the civil rights stuff. I guess most of the battles have been won to some degree.

BRINSON: Okay. So, in 1990 you became the executive director of the Metropolitan Housing Coalition. Is that--tell me about the history of the Coalition, and is, are they there, in part, because of some of the earlier interest in housing issues?

POST: Uh-uh

BRINSON: No? Okay.

POST: No, they’re an outgrowth of the Reagan budget cuts and real concern by 80:00social service people and city and county housing officials in around 1989 that those budget cuts were going to produce horrendous effects on poor people in the community, and we better start strategizing about how we’re going to try to staunch that wound. And so, about ten or fifteen of them started meeting and they drafted some bylaws and they got incorporated and limped along--well, they did probably better than that--and in about a year hit up the Bingham fund for money to professionalize. And so, so they got that money right before I walked off the ACLU job. And a friend of mine, who had been in on the ground floor of that, came and talked to me. She said, “You know, that’d be a great job for you.” I didn’t know a damn thing about housing, nothing. But, I also didn’t know what I was going to do for myself in the future. I had no--I was 81:00not independently wealthy. And …

BRINSON: Had you divorced by that time?

POST: Oh, yeah, he had died.

BRINSON: Oh, okay.

POST: He had died. He died in 1986. And we--he died about twelve days after the divorce was final.

BRINSON: Okay.

POST: So I was living, had been living here alone for four years. And, uh, so I decided, Okay, I’ll apply for the job. So I sent my resume off, and I got a call to come for an interview. But they wanted to hire somebody on a contract basis, so I proceeded to go in there--and they’re nice people, some of them I had known--and I proceeded to tell them why that won’t work. And you know, it was great that they got this funding, but I’m not the right person for the job and da, da, da, da, da, da, da. And then, I’m sure you’ll find somebody who will do it on contract and I left. And the president called me up later in the afternoon. He said, “What would it take to get you?” I said, “Twenty-five thousand dollars, health insurance, pay my taxes and a commitment 82:00that some of the executive committee members will meet with me once a week, and I don’t mean for six weeks, but ad infinitum because I don’t know a damn thing.” And he said, “Okay, it’s done.” So, I tease him all the time--it’s probably one of the smartest things he’s ever done in his life [laughter-Brinson]--and I think he thinks so, too. And it’s just been great. I’ve loved it. My executive committee met with me every single Wednesday morning for two years at breakfast, 7:30 downtown. And it was only ended after two years because I had a new president who didn’t want to get up that early. She just ( ) called it off. I was so angry with her. I’m still angry about it because it was great. They got a lot of information. They just showed up. Not the same ones every single week but, you know, a critical mass. Three or four people, sometimes eight or nine. And it--to me--you know--was just great. I thought, well, the honeymoon period has got to end sometime. It never did. I mean, Dolores interrupted it and I had a couple of bad years with her. When I 83:00took the job as director of MHC, the board had twenty-one members, two black people, very low profile on the equity stuff. It took me about six years to reshape the board but I did. Now 25 percent of my board is African American. It is geographically, age, economically and occupationally diverse. I also created a fair housing coalition within my Coalition, and pulled together for monthly meetings those organizations and agencies that have a vested interest in ending discrimination in housing. And that’s been the Urban League and the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights, the Human Relations Commission and NOW and the Fairness Campaign which is trying to get civil rights protection for gays and lesbians. It’s about fifteen different groups. And, I sort of pumped up the fair housing/anti-discrimination part of MHC’s mission to be really out 84:00there. And we’ve become the primary advocate, not either of the commissions, but MHC has become the primary advocate for ending racial segregation in housing and racial economics in Jefferson County. So, it’s been a really good vehicle for that. I’m convinced that I’m on the mayor’s transition team--well, he likes me and I like him--but I pulled together two really effective candidates for him. One in April on fair housing; April is Fair Housing Month, da, da, da, da, da, da. And one in October on the portable housing issues, and we had--they both were at the Urban League at 5:30 in the evening, and each of them had a hundred people. Intermedia, which is our cable company, televised the last one and it’s been on and on and on and on. So, I’ve been able to pump up their persona, you know, in the community, and I’ve been able to pump up the civil rights piece of it. And it’s good, because I’m old enough now--I know I 85:00have to bring my board along. So I’ve been just sort of feeding them.

BRINSON: Do you have to raise money, too?

POST: Oh, yeah. I have to do everything. I have to raise the budget; I have to dream up the meetings; I have to find new board members. I can’t think of a function I don’t do.

BRINSON: Is the Bingham fund still supporting --?

POST: No, because it folded when she died. That was the end of the fund when--Mary Bingham died three or four years ago. But I did cultivate a relationship with the director of the foundation, and got him to give me $25,000 more. I asked for $50,000 and he was being chintzy, but he gave me $25,000 more so it was $125,000 really.

BRINSON: So where do you raise your money?

POST: My money comes from membership fees from my members.

BRINSON: Which are organizations?

POST: Let me see what I’ve got here. Yeah.

BRINSON: Don’t walk too far away.

POST: You should read this because this is sort of our present platform.

BRINSON: That would be good.

POST Oh, let’s see if I have it. Oh, here it is.

BRINSON: You have how many organizations?

POST: Hundred and two.

BRINSON: That are members --

POST: Members. They pay dues. The city and the county give me a very, very little bit. Here it is.

BRINSON: What are the leading civil rights groups in Louisville?

POST: In Louisville?

BRINSON: Today.

POST: Probably the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Oppression, which is bringing Angela Davis here this weekend, and the ACLU. That’s probably--those are--that’s probably it.

BRINSON: Okay. I’m going to stop and suggest we come back another time --

POST: Okay.

BRINSON: -- and talk about Kentucky Civil Liberties Union and some of the women’s issues a little bit more, but I just wonder, based on what all we 87:00talked about today, is there anything you think you’d do differently --?

POST: That I would do differently?

BRINSON: Yeah.

POST: Oh, my God, everything. I would do everything differently. [laughing] Sure. I never understood people who say, “I wouldn’t change a thing.” I think--I would not have five children. I would not marry so young. I would prepare myself for some kind of a real, real job. I wouldn’t waste so much time and energy--well, no that’s not true. I mean, I guess those are all personal things. Occupationally, I don’t think I would do anything differently. I mean, I’m proud of the work I did in each of the three jobs 88:00I’ve had. I’ve been--it’s amazing to me with as little training as I’ve had, formal training as I’ve had, that I’ve been as effective as I have been. And huh, I love to work with people, and each of these jobs has allowed me to work with them, you know. And I’ve been very fortunate in people I’ve been able to work with. I get a lot of my power and strength from having a base behind me, so I don’t have any real regrets professionally. I have a lot--any woman who juggles all this stuff, I mean, something’s got to give, and so I have some regrets about those issues.

BRINSON: Okay, let’s stop.

END OF INTERVIEW