Part 1 of Liberal America’s “Sunday Hero Series’ Strong Women In History” features Louisville, Kentucky activist Anne Braden, a social justice leader who dedicated her life to creating change both in her state and nationally.
Anne Gambrell McCarty was born in 1924 and was raised in the segregated southern state of Alabama. After attending?Randolph-Macon Women’s College in Virginia and beginning a career in journalism, Anne married Carl Braden, a fellow journalist and activist in the labor movement. Both Anne and Carl were fierce activists for racial equality well before the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s.
During Anne’s first arrest as an activist in 1951, she defended publicly a man of color who she felt had been wrongly executed for raping a white woman. Anne described?the experience?this way:
“At the jail, she was threatened by a policeman. ‘He got absolutely furious,’ said Braden. ‘It’s the whole traitor thing. He said, ?And you’re in here, and you’re a southerner, and you’re on this thing!?? And he turned around like he was going to hit me, but he didn’t because this other cop stopped him?All of a sudden that was a very revealing moment to me. All of my life police had been on my side. I didn’t think of it that way, but police didn’t bother you, you know, in the world where I grew up. All of a sudden I realized that I was on the other side. He had said, ?You’re not a real southern woman.? And I said, ?No, I guess I’m not your kind of southern woman.? “
A few years later, Andrew and Charlotte Wade, an African-American couple with a two-year-old daughter,?had been shopping for a house in Louisville but were struggling to find one?because of “white realtors who refused to cross the illegal but still highly observed line of segregation.”?Anne and Carl purchased a home in one of those segregated areas for the Wade family in May of 1954. A month later, the house was dynamited.
Instead of investigating the crime, police arrested Anne and Carl as well as others supporting the Wades on charges of sedition, or “conduct or speech inciting people to rebel against the authority of a state or monarch” because during the McCarthy era 1950s, white allies?of the Wades were “accused of hatching a communist plot to buy the home, blow it up, touch off a race war and overthrow the Commonwealth of Kentucky.” The couple was indicted in October of 1954. The couple was later cleared of the charges when sedition laws were overturned.
Anne continued to be deeply involved?as a Civil Rights activist until her death in 2006. She was mentioned in Martin Luther King’s “Letters from Birmingham Jail” as an ally the movement could trust. She led protests, sit-ins, and brought people together on the issues of racial justice. In addition to her tireless work in social justice activism, she taught courses in social justice at the University of Louisville, published a book, “The Wall Between,” and had her biography, “Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South,” written by Dr. Catherine Fosl, who now directs the Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research.
Learn more about this amazing woman by visiting the website for The Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research, and watch the?beautiful documentary about Anne’s activism, “Southern Patriot” which was?released in 2012. See the trailer below:
