Kentucky Alliance Oral History Project: 8 Reasons Why You Should Join the Kentucky Alliance

The Kentucky Alliance has always welcomed everyone in the community to participate in their organizing activities, regardless of their membership status with the organization. This recruitment form from the 1980s highlights 8 reasons why people should join.

Source

University of Louisville Archives & Records Center, Anne Braden Papers 1920s-2006 (bulk 1970s-2006), 2006-050-Box 58, Leaflets/Flyers Similar Folder 5.

Text of Document

8 reasons why you should join the Kentucky Alliance

1. The Kentucky Alliance is part of a national organization that brings people together across racial, ethnic, political and religious lines, division of young from old and men from women to fight for the right of all of us to organize -- for social and economic justice, peace, and everything else human beings need for a good life. Our weapon is unity -- and we have used it effectively to free political prisoners like Rev. Ben Chavis and the Wilmington Ten, George Merritt, Martin Sostre, Joann Little -- and the list goes on!
2. Being part of a national organization gives us the ability to make our voices heard and heeded. We strengthen struggles across the United States by working on the Alliance's priority cases -- and, in turn, we get a great deal of support from Alliance members elsewhere.
3. We are not an alternative to other organizations working on crucial issues in Louisville. Our program is not to organize directly for issues like peace, economic justice, tenants' rights, etc., although our members support many of those issues. We are here to defend the activists in those movements when they come under attack, so that their movements will not be crushed. No organization that affiliates with the Alliance gives up its own identity or independence. No individual gives up work in the many other groups that make our community a better place.
4. As Reagan tries to turn the clock back on all of the gains in civil and human rights of the last 50 years, and as the United States slips deeper into an economic depression, the Alliance will be needed more than ever. Already, the attacks on Eddie Carthan, former mayor of Tchula, Mississippi, and other Black elected officials, show how badly we are needed right now.
5. The issues we work on directly affect the lives of thousands of Louisvillians. As well as struggling to free political prisoners, we defend the rights of all prisoners, fight police crimes, and struggle to end the death penalty. When racism surfaces around a specific issue (as it did around school bussing in 1975), we throw all of our energies into those battles.
6. The Kentucky Alliance is one of the only truly multi-racial organizations in Louisville, where Black and white activists work together on the issues that concern all of us. Within our organization, we are planting the seeds of the kind of society we want to live in, where racism and inequality are only distant memories.
7. We are effective -- and through successful struggles we show that it is possible for ordinary people to take their destinies into their own hands and win a better life.
8. We are a real bargain. Our membership fee of $5 ($2 for unemployed, $25 for organizations to affiliate) hasn't gone up at all since the Alliance was founded. Join us and add your strength to ours -- please fill in this form, and give it to an usher of mail it to us soon.

[blank] I want to join the Kentucky Alliance. My $5 membership is enclosed.
[blank] My organization,
[blank], wishes to affiliate with the Alliance.

Name [blank]
Phone [blank]
Address [blank]

Please return this form to Kentucky [text blurred] 13, Louisville, Ky. 40201.