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.

This Fair Housing Month, we honor the work of former KCLU Board of Directors member Hal M. Warheim.  This profile is an excerpt from a reflection Mr. Warheim wrote on the Open Housing movement in Louisville in our 40th anniversary book.

Hal M. Warheim

“These experiences and their consequences were extremely costly to me personally, but their benefits were probably greater. I participated in a period of American history when significant moral progress was achieved, and I was a member of the movement which achieved it.” - Hal M. Warheim


The Open Housing law, passed by the City of Louisville in the fall of 1967, was the product of a three-year struggle by a cluster of agencies and organizations including the Kentucky Civil Liberties Union (KCLU). In the process, a community crisis was created, enormous racial hostility was exposed, activist proponents were persecuted and jailed, Derby Week events were canceled due to fear of violence, thousands of black voters were registered, and the Republican Board of Aldermen, who had refused to pass the civil rights legislation, were replaced by Democrats who had agreed to do so if elected. Also, a series of laws used to deny the civil rights of protesters were struck down on constitutional grounds through litigation in the courts.

I, among others, helped organize nighttime demonstrations, despite a court injunction, in the South End of the city where marchers were jeered, cherry-bombed, and stoned by crowds of white racists and were tear-gassed, roughed-up, and jailed by the police on exaggerated charges which demanded exorbitant bail.

As in any community in crisis, the world cracked open in 1967 and, in that moment, I was able to see the raw realities which exist beneath the puffed and preened public surfaces of human nature, religion, politics and societal affairs. The tuition was high, but I learned lessons about myself, churches and clergy, races and racism, and the necessity of organized power in the pursuit of justice which became the core of my teaching and practice of ministry.