More on Anne Braden

Published by rachels | Filed under Ourstory

The follow is an excerpt from an email I received from the Race Wire news service. I would also like to note that it is very important to highlight the contributions of women to anti-racism and Civil Rights work. You would think judging from textbooks and popular culture that we had nothing to do with these issues; in particular, very little is known about White women’s contributions to this area. Braden has been one of those invisible women.

Inside-Out and Upside-Down
An Interview with Anne BradenBy June Rostan, ColorLines RaceWire

Anne Braden, long-time activist and civil rights leader, died on March 6 at a hospital in Louisville, Ky. She was taken there over the weekend suffering from pneumonia. She was 81. Anne entered the civil rights struggle in 1954. At the time, black couples couldn’t buy homes in segregated neighborhoods so Andrew and Charlotte Wade asked a white couple, Anne and Carl Braden, to buy a house on their behalf in an all-white area of Louisville, Kentucky. The Bradens bought the house, and the uproar that followed changed all their lives. The house was bombed. No one was hurt, but the perpetrators were never caught. Instead, the state charged Anne and Carl with sedition–Carl was sentenced to 15 years in prison and served eight months. Anne wrote a book about this incident, The Wall Between, in 1958 that was reissued by the University of Tennessee last year with a must-read 40-page epilogue. The bombing catapulted Anne into the freedom movement, and since that time she has been at the heart of anything that has to do with race and justice in the South.
Anne and Carl formed a lifetime partnership of social activism and were so committed to self-determination and leadership for people of color that for years they were regarded as pariahs by white liberals and castigated as Communists. In the late ’40s and early ’50s, they worked with civil rights and labor groups in Louisville. In the 1960s, they staffed the extraordinary Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), and were central to the civil rights movement. After SCEF broke up in the early 1970s, Anne helped found the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice (SOC) and continued working with them into her 70s. Anne set the benchmark for white, anti-racist organizing in the South for more than 50 years.