Remembering Anne Braden

Anne Braden

Staunch anti-racist activist and white Southerner Anne Braden died in her home town of Louisville, Ky., on March 6. She was 81, and had spent her adult life in an unrelenting struggle against racism.

Anne Braden was born in 1924 in Louisville, a descendant of a white settler family, and raised in Anniston, Ala., in a middle-class, pro-segregation family. She began her working life as a journalist. She later said her radicalization came from covering the Birmingham courthouse as a reporter, seeing first-hand the brutal injustices done to African-American people under a segregated and racist legal system.

Along with her husband Carl Braden, she was the central figure in one of the key battles to end segregation. In 1954 they bought a house in an all-white Louisville suburb on behalf of African-Americans Andrew and Charlotte Wade. The house was dynamited and the Bradens were arrested under Kentucky state sedition laws passed in 1920 to support the anti-communist Palmer raids of that era that were being used in the 1950s to support local versions of the national McCarthy witch-hunts. A storm of red-baiting ostracized both Bradens. Carl Braden was convicted and ultimately jailed for a year in federal prison. Anne Braden expanded her work against segregation into a fight against what she described as “the Southern police state.”

After the struggle for desegregated housing in Louisville—where she was living with Carl and their three young children—resulted in the sedition arrests, Anne Braden entered into a wider campaign that she called the “l950s resistance movement against the Red Scare.” Fighters against racism in the South were typically smeared as communists, and threatened with arrest and job loss. Many, like the Bradens, actually experienced those losses. (Cate Fosl, “Southern Subversive: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South.”)

Anne Braden saw that strength and unity in the movement for social justice could only come with resistance to red-baiting, and joined with others on the Left to resist this “divide-and-conquer” tactic based on anti-communism. She refused then, as well as throughout the rest of her long life, to either claim or disavow an affiliation with a communist party because she felt to do so would accept the ideology of the 1950s anti-communist witch-hunts. The integrity of her position is noteworthy because, despite her commitment to economic justice issues, she did not endorse a specifically Marxist approach to the analysis of history or to political change in her public speeches or writings.

During the struggle against the sedition arrests in the 1950s, Braden went on to join the staff of a civil rights organization, the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), resumed her work as a journalist to edit its newspaper, and traveled throughout the region to recruit greater support among white people for African-American civil rights. “The Wall Between,” her 1958 book on the fight to desegregate Louisville housing, was a runner-up for a National Book Award. A mentor to a younger generation of activists, she was organized in the 1960s Louisville Open Housing movement and the 1970s school desegregation movement, Throughout this time she still suffered from extreme social and political ostracism as the result of red-baiting. In 1967, she and Carl were again charged with sedition for their role in protests against strip-mining; they were able to use their case to have the Kentucky law ruled unconstitutional.

Starting in the 1970s, Anne Braden was active in the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice and was a founder of the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression—which formed along with other local branches as the result of the national campaign to free Angela Davis, then a Communist Party member charged with helping three imprisoned members of the Black Panther Party to escape.

Anne Braden was a constant voice for social justice in her local and regional community, speaking out against police brutality and environmental racism, and in support of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights. Her two “Open Letters to White Southern Women” embody her principled determination to forge bonds between oppressed peoples. Speaking of the false accusations of rape of white women that have been leveled against African American men, she rallied white women to struggle against racism as part of fighting for women’s liberation, saying, “All issues are ‘women’s issues,’ including war and peace, economics, and racism.”