Anne Braden

Anne McCarty Braden (July 28, 1924 – March 6, 2006) was an American civil rights activist, journalist, and educator dedicated to the cause of racial equality.

She and her husband bought a suburban house for an African American couple during Jim Crow.

White neighbors burned crosses and bombed the house.

During McCarthyism, Anne was charged with sedition.

She wrote and organized for the southern civil rights movement before violations became national news.

Anne was among nation's most outspoken white anti-racist activists, organizing across racial divides in environmental, women's, and anti-nuclear movements.

Born in Louisville, Kentucky, on July 28, 1924, to Gambrell N. McCarty & Anita D. (Crabbe) McCarty and raised in rigidly segregated Anniston, Alabama, Braden grew up in a white, middle-class family that accepted southern racial mores wholeheartedly.

A devout Episcopalian, Braden was bothered by racial segregation, but never questioned it until her college years at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia.

As she grew older she experienced what has been framed as a "racial conversion narrative", "a conversion of almost religious intensity" "turning myself inside out and upside down".

The experience that so affected her, in 1946, was witnessing a march of black veterans to the Birmingham courthouse, led by Louis Burnham of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, demanding the right to vote; with Braden covering the story as a reporter for the Birmingham News.

After working on newspapers in Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama, Anne Braden returned to Kentucky as a young adult to write for The Louisville Times.

She became a supporter of the Civil Rights Movement at a time when it was unpopular among southern whites.

"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 winds itself around your soul like the arms of an octopus... If I did not oppose it, I was... responsible for its sins."

- Anne Braden

While working at The Louisville Times, Anne met fellow newspaperman Carl Braden, a left-wing trade unionist.

The couple married in 1948.

In 1948, Anne and Carl Braden immersed themselves in Henry Wallace's run on the Progressive Party for the presidency.

Soon after Wallace's defeat, they left mainstream journalism to apply their writing talents to the interracial left wing of the labor movement through the FE (Farm and Equipment Workers) Union, representing Louisville's International Harvester employees.

Even as the postwar labor movement splintered and grew less militant, civil rights causes heated up.

In 1950, Anne Braden spearheaded a hospital desegregation drive in Kentucky.

She endured her first arrest in 1951 when she led a delegation of southern white women organized by the Civil Rights Congress to Mississippi to protest the execution of Willie McGee, an African American man convicted of the rape of a white woman, Willette Hawkins.

In 1954, Andrew and Charlotte Wade, an African American couple who knew the Bradens through association, approached them with a proposal that would drastically alter all lives involved.

Like many other Americans after World War II, the Wades wanted to buy a house in a suburban neighborhood.

Because of Jim Crow housing practices, the Wades had been unsuccessful for months in their quest to purchase a home on their own.

The Bradens, who never wavered in their support for African American civil rights, agreed to purchase the home for the Wades.

On May 15, 1954, Wade and his wife spent their first night in their new home in the Louisville suburb of Shively, Kentucky.

Upon discovering that black people had moved in, white neighbors burned a cross in front of the house, shot out windows, and condemned the Bradens for buying it on the Wades' behalf.

The Wades moved in two days before the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark condemnation of public schools' racial segregation policy in Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas.

Six weeks later, amid constant community tensions, the Wades' new house was dynamited one evening while they were out.

While Vernon Bown (an associate of the Wades and the Bradens) was indicted for the bombing, the actual bombers were never sought nor brought to trial.

McCarthyism affected the ordeal.

Instead of addressing the segregationists' violence, the investigators alleged that the Bradens and others helping the Wades were affiliated with the Communist Party, and made that the main subject of concern.

White supremacists who were pro-segregation at the time charged that these alleged Communists had engineered the bombing to provide a cause célèbre and fund-raising opportunity, but this was never proven.

Nonetheless, in October 1954, Anne and Carl Braden and five other whites were charged with sedition.

After a sensationalized trial, Carl Braden—the perceived ringleader—was convicted of sedition and sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment.

As Anne and the other defendants awaited a similar fate, Carl served eight months, but got out on $40,000 bond after a U.S. Supreme Court decision (Pennsylvania v. Nelson in 1956) invalidated state sedition laws (Steven Nelson had been arrested under the Pennsylvania Sedition Law but the federal Smith Act superseded it).

All charges were dropped against Braden, but the Wades moved to the traditionally black west Louisville.

Blacklisted from local employment, the Bradens took jobs as field organizers for the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), a small, New Orleans-based civil rights organization whose mission was to solicit white southern support for the beleaguered southern civil rights movement.

In the years before southern civil rights violations made national news, the Bradens developed their own media, both through SCEF's monthly newspaper, The Southern Patriot, and through numerous pamphlets and press releases publicizing major civil rights campaigns.

Both were deeply involved in the civil rights cause and the subsequent social movements it prompted from the 1960s to the 1970s.