Anne McCarty Braden was born on July 28, 1924, and passed away on March 6, 2006. She was an American civil rights activist, journalist, and teacher who worked to end racial discrimination. During the Jim Crow era, she and her husband purchased a house in a neighborhood for an African American couple. White neighbors responded by burning crosses and bombing the home. During the McCarthyism period, Anne was accused of sedition. She wrote articles and helped organize efforts for the southern civil rights movement before these issues became widely known nationally. Anne was one of the nation's most vocal white activists against racism. She worked to bring people together across racial lines in movements focused on environmental protection, women's rights, and opposition to nuclear weapons.
Background
Anne Braden was born on July 28, 1924, in Louisville, Kentucky, to Gambrell N. McCarty and Anita D. (Crabbe) McCarty. She was raised in Anniston, Alabama, where African Americans and white people were strictly separated. Braden grew up in a white, middle-class family that followed southern racial customs. She was a devout Episcopalian and was troubled by racial segregation, but she never questioned it until she went to college at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia. As she grew older, she had a major change in her beliefs, described as a "racial conversion narrative," which was a change of almost religious intensity. In 1946, she saw a group of Black veterans march to the Birmingham courthouse, led by Louis Burnham of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, to demand the right to vote. At the time, Braden was a reporter for the Birmingham News and covered the event.
After working on newspapers in Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama, Anne Braden returned to Kentucky as an adult. She worked for The Louisville Times and became a supporter of the Civil Rights Movement, even though many white people in the South did not support it at that time.
She once said, "Either you find a way to oppose the evil, or the evil becomes part of you and you are a part of it, and it wraps around your soul like the arms of an octopus. If I did not oppose it, I was… responsible for its sins."
While working at The Louisville Times, Anne met Carl Braden, a left-wing trade unionist. They married in 1948. Both were deeply involved in the civil rights cause and the social movements that followed from the 1960s to the 1970s.
Career
In 1948, Anne and Carl Braden supported Henry Wallace’s campaign for president as part of the Progressive Party. After Wallace lost the election, they left their jobs in journalism to use their writing skills to help the interracial left wing of the labor movement through the FE (Farm and Equipment Workers) Union, which represented workers at Louisville’s International Harvester company.
As the postwar labor movement began to split and become less active, civil rights efforts grew stronger. In 1950, Anne Braden led a campaign to desegregate a hospital in Kentucky. In 1951, she was arrested when she led a group of white women from the South to Mississippi to protest the execution of Willie McGee, an African American man who was controversially convicted of raping a white woman, Willette Hawkins.
In 1954, Andrew and Charlotte Wade, an African American couple who knew the Bradens, asked for help buying a house in a suburban neighborhood. Because of unfair housing practices from the Jim Crow era, the Wades had been unable to find a home for months. The Bradens, who strongly supported civil rights, agreed to buy the house for the Wades.
On May 15, 1954, the Wades moved into their new home in Shively, Kentucky. When white neighbors learned that Black people had moved in, they burned a cross in front of the house, broke windows, and accused the Bradens of helping the Wades. The Wades moved in two days before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional. Six weeks later, while the Wades were out, their home was destroyed by a bomb.
Although a man named Vernon Bown was charged with the bombing, the real bombers were never found or tried. During the McCarthy era, investigators focused on accusing the Bradens and others who helped the Wades of being connected to the Communist Party, rather than addressing the violence by segregationists. Some white supremacists claimed the bombing was planned by Communists to gain attention, but this was never proven.
In October 1954, Anne and Carl Braden, along with five other white people, were charged with sedition. After a highly publicized trial, Carl Braden was found guilty and sentenced to 15 years in prison. He served eight months before being released on a $40,000 bond after a Supreme Court decision in 1956 canceled state sedition laws. All charges were dropped, but the Wades moved to a traditionally Black neighborhood in west Louisville.
Because of their activism, the Bradens were unable to find jobs in their area. They later worked as organizers for the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), a civil rights group based in New Orleans that aimed to gain support from white Southerners for the civil rights movement. Before civil rights issues became widely known, the Bradens created their own media, including a newspaper called The Southern Patriot and many pamphlets and press releases about civil rights campaigns.
Her 1958 book The Wall Between helped make the Bradens well-known as white supporters of the civil rights movement.
Anne and Carl Braden were among the most disliked people in the American South during the 1950s and 1960s by those who opposed civil rights. As white Southerners with strong ties to the region, they challenged the idea that all white Southerners supported segregation, which angered racists. — David Nolan
Carl Braden died suddenly from a heart attack on February 18, 1975. After his death, Anne Braden continued to be a strong voice for racial equality. She helped create a new organization called the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice (SOC), which fought against environmental racism. She also worked with the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition during the 1980s and supported Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns. She organized across racial lines in the environmental, women’s, and anti-nuclear movements of the 1980s.
In 1977, Braden became an associate of the Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press (WIFP), a nonprofit group that helps women communicate and share their stories through media.
In 2005, she joined protests in Louisville against war while using a wheelchair. She helped start the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and continued to work on local issues like police violence, environmental racism, and LGBT rights.
Personal life and death
In 1948, she married Carl Braden, a journalist and member of a labor organization who supported progressive causes.
The Bradens had three children: James, who became a Rhodes Scholar and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1980, where he was editor of the Harvard Law Review; Anita, born in 1953, who passed away at age 11 from a lung disease; and Elizabeth, born in 1960, who worked as a teacher in many countries around the world, including in rural Ethiopia as of 2006.
Anne Braden died on March 6, 2006, at Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky, and was buried at Eminence Cemetery in Eminence, Kentucky. Three days before her death, she completed a proposal for a local activist summer camp. She was remembered by many in the civil rights movement, including Ira Grupper, Dorie Ladner, David Nolan, Efia Nwangaza, and Gwendolyn Patton.
Awards
Braden received the American Civil Liberties Union's first Roger Baldwin Medal of Liberty in 1990 for her work to protect people's rights. As she got older, her efforts focused on Louisville, where she continued to lead anti-racist efforts and taught classes about social justice history at the University of Louisville and Northern Kentucky University.
Legacy
After Anne Braden passed away, the Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research was created at the University of Louisville in November 2006. It officially opened on April 4, 2007. The institute works to promote fairness and equality around the world, with a special focus on the southern United States and the Louisville area.
The alternative hip hop group Flobots honored Anne Braden by including a song titled "Anne Braden" on their 2007 album Fight With Tools. The song features audio clips of Anne Braden speaking about her life and her views on race.
Works
In 1958, Anne wrote The Wall Between, a book about their experience with a sedition case. This book was one of the few from that time to explain the thoughts and feelings behind white southern racism from someone who lived it. It was praised by important human rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Eleanor Roosevelt, and was nominated for the National Book Award.
From the 1980s through the 2000s, Braden wrote articles for Southern Exposure, Southern Changes, the National Guardian, and Fellowship.