During her career, Dunn worked to protect voting rights, LGBTQ equality, and reproductive rights, as well as end the criminalization of poverty.
Written By Stephanie Hunt
Portrait By Sarah Martin
“Intimidation is not really my style,” says Susan Dunn. “But when I’d pick up the phone and say, ‘This is Susan Dunn with the ACLU,’ I got people’s attention.” As legal director for the South Carolina office of the American Civil Liberties Union from 2009 until the pandemic in 2021, Dunn not only got people’s attention, time and again she got people out of jail, out of trouble, and out of situations involving illegal discrimination and injustice. Though her moral compass is as dialed-in as her heart is wide-open, “integrity is not my favorite word,” Dunn admits. “It sounds too pious. To me, integrity means doing the right thing when no one is watching—which, of course, means no one sees it,” she laughs.
But Charleston has seen and benefited from Dunn’s talent, insight, commitment to equal rights and fairness, and her gift for creating community for decades. She gained national attention in the 1990s for litigating a groundbreaking constitutional case challenging MUSC’s testing of pregnant and postpartum women for cocaine use, then handing over results to law enforcement, ultimately winning a favorable ruling for her clients before the US Supreme Court.
When not championing the little guys (and gals), she’s organizing Jazz Vespers and handling numerous behind-the-scenes responsibilities at Circular Congregational Church, where Dunn, the daughter of a United Methodist minister, has served twice as interim and once as part-time lay minister over the years. Her father’s example remains a lodestar. “He’d take me along to protests as a little girl in Ohio,” says Dunn, who remembers marching against the death penalty at the statehouse. “He wrote a statement supporting LGBTQ inclusion in the church, way back in the 1970s.”
Though now retired, Dunn carries forth that activism through her continued involvement at Circular Church, Charleston Area Justice Ministry, and numerous other organizations. “Retirement is hard,” admits the mother of two and grandmother of three. “I’m realizing how much I was defined by my work.” But when that work was all about creating a more equitable South Carolina, that’s not such a bad thing.
