SUBVERSIVE SOUTHERNER: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in The Cold War South
By Catherine Fosl (Foreward by Angela Davis): Palgrave, 2002, 320 pp., $35The country was in the grip of a Cold War, and housing and public accommodation were issues in racial ferment around Louisville, Ky., when, on a June night in 1954 a house recently bought by an African- American couple in a white Louisville suburb was shattered by a dynamite blast.
In September, Anne and Carl Braden, a white couple who had helped the owners in their purchase, were charged along with five others with attempting to overthrow the state of Kentucky. In December Carl Braden was found guilty of sedition and sentenced to 15 years in jail. No charges were ever brought up against anyone for setting the explosion.
The case was ultimately thrown out by the Supreme Court but in the pervasive Cold War atmosphere of that era the Bradens were left branded as communists and damned as anti-American, for activities aimed mostly at ending racial injustice through housing desegregation in the Louisville area.
In this first full length biography of Anne Braden, who was born in 1924 but grew up in Anniston, readers will find an intriguing study of a young woman who was ill-at-ease with the easy privilege allotted to economically secure young white women from an early age, took her first newspaper at The Star, and still traces the roots of her lifelong convictions back to her family, this town, and that most establishment of local institutions, Grace Episcopal Church.
Disentangling the strands of Cold War anti-communist paranoia from an iron-bound white southern determination to hold onto a segregated way of life, biographer Catherine Fosl lays out the the searing costs, public and private, to three generations of Anne Braden’s family, of the 1954 sedition case that drew attention around the country. But this is only the beginning of a carefully explored life.
Seen by her mother as intellectually gifted from the start, Anne Gambrell McCarty was a brilliant student at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Virginia. Words on paper were her favorite form of expression, and she soon bypassed her successes in poetry and theater to widen her world view through journalism.
She had moved on to the Birmingham News, when she first came up against the hard racial realities of the post-WWII South while on the courthouse beat. Witness to injustices in the courtroom and the daily failures of young African American veterans trying to register to vote, she became sickened by the hypocrisy of a Thomas Jefferson quote touting “equal and exact justice” over the court house door.
Louisville was a better newspaper town, where she found first a mentor, then husband, in longtime newspaperman Carl Braden, who deepened her perception of the social complexities of labor and other social issues mixed with race, as the two became increasingly involved in political activities. By 1954 their willingness to raise their children in a racially mixed neighborhood was taken as sign of their radical social commitment.
But after Carl’s conviction, the Bradens were seen largely as pariahs by many in Louisville. From 1957 they worked for the little-known Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), mobilizing white Southerners in support of desegregation. It was a heads down, shoulder-to-the-grindstone kind of field work, building connections between like-minded people on the issues of civil rights nationwide. She also wrote SCEF’s newsletter, The Southern Patriot, which became for her a labor of love.
Not until the Cold War of the ’50s gave way to direct civil rights actions of the ’60s did the couple’s red-tinged reputations begin to take on a heroic glow. As SCEF became the nurturing force behind the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), providing it with the funding, mailing lists and access to major northern donors that allowed it to take root and flower, a rising generation of young activists simply refused to give credence to the old claims. The change is marked in the language of Julian Bond, who credited Anne with teaching him to be a “propagandist ... in the good sense of the word, as someone who could get this movement out there in the public eye.”
The couple worked in dynamic and equal partnership until Carl’s death, in 1975. Still based in Louisville, Anne has continued on. ahead of her time by at least half a generation, she has seen her public persona evolve from communist-branded outcast to Sixties activist role model to the revered icon of white Southern liberalism she is known as today.
Edith Alston, an Anniston native and former editor at The Anniston Star, is now a free-lance writer and editor in New York.
