The legacy of Anne Braden

The legacy of Anne Braden
by Jennifer Coulter Stapleton
SojoMail 3-15-2006

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On March 6, Anne Braden, long-time social justice activist and journalist, died at 81. Braden, a white Southerner residing Louisville, Kentucky, worked against white supremacy and for racial justice in the segregated South of the 1950s, '60s, and beyond. Spanning nearly six decades, her social activism encompassed, in addition to racial justice, issues of peace and human rights, including women's liberation, police brutality, civil liberties, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights.

Braden and her husband, Carl, made national headlines in 1954 for their work to desegregate a Louisville suburb. They purchased a home in an all-white neighborhood and then deeded it to African Americans Andrew and Charlotte Wade. Segregationists retaliated with violence against both families, ultimately bombing the house. The Bradens were labeled as communists and charged with sedition - speech or conduct inciting a rebellion. Carl was convicted and served seven months of a 15-year sentence before it was overturned. According to the Kentucky Alliance against Racist and Political Repression, which Braden co-founded, "the sedition charges left the Bradens pariahs, branded as radicals and 'reds' in the Cold War South."

In a 1997 interview with The Veterans of Hope Project, Braden discussed how religion impacted her work for social justice. As a child, she took the gospel very seriously. "The gospel I read made sense when I was a little girl," she said. "Nobody had told me that I wasn't supposed to believe all of it. That maybe Jesus didn't really mean it when he said to feed all the hungry people. That maybe he just meant to feed some."

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Finally, Braden described being shunned by many Southern whites because of her social justice work. From the policeman in a Mississippi jail who labeled her a traitor to her own segregationist father, many people's treatment made Braden feel that she was an outsider. Eventually she found her citizenship in what she termed "the other America," the multitude of unnamed people who have struggled against injustice from the time of slavery to the present. She said, "I began to get a sense, and I still have it, and I think it is what keeps me going: that what I'm a part of - this other America - that it's like a long chain of struggle. And it stretches way back, long before I was here and it's going to stretch on into the future after I'm gone."

http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=news.display_article&mode=C&NewsID=5296

Passing of a Southern Civil Rights Pioneer-- Anne Braden

(excerpt)

(March 6, 2006, Louisville, KY) -- Revered white anti-racist southern activist Anne Braden died at the age of 81 on Monday morning, March 6, at Jewish Hospital in Louisville, ending nearly 60 years of unyielding action against segregation, racism, and white supremacy. Braden was hospitalized on Saturday, March 4, and had been treated for pneumonia and dehydration.

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Decades later, Braden was still working against racism and for justice and peace. In the fall of 2005, she joined other Louisville activists on buses bound for the anti-war demonstration in Washington D.C. even though she went in a wheelchair. She was a frequent voice in the Rainbow Coalition nationally and a co-founder of the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, as well as being active in local issues including police brutality, housing-not-bombs, environmental racism, civil liberties, and lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender and other human rights. In the 1990s she became the recipient of many awards, including the first ever Roger Baldwin Medal of Liberty, bestowed on her by the American Civil Liberties Union in 1991. She also became a teacher, offering social justice history courses at the University of Louisville and Northern Kentucky University. Braden was still teaching at the time of her death and was still fired by the passion for justice that had guided her adult life. She had completed a proposal for a local activist summer camp only the day before her hospitalization.

http://www.subversivesoutherner.com/BradenOBNewsRel.html