Anne Braden

Staunch anti-racist activist and white Southerner Anne Braden (1924 –2006) was born in Louisville, a descendant of a white settler family, and raised in Anniston, Ala., in a middle-class, pro-segregation family. She spent her adult life in an unrelenting struggle against racism. She began her working life as a journalist. She later said her radicalization came from covering the Birmingham courthouse as a reporter, seeing first-hand the brutal injustices done to African-American people under a segregated and racist legal system.

Along with her husband Carl Braden, she was the central figure in one of the key battles to end segregation. In 1954 they bought a house in an all-white Louisville suburb on behalf of African-Americans Andrew and Charlotte Wade. The house was dynamited and the Bradens were arrested under Kentucky state sedition laws passed in 1920 to support the anti-communist Palmer raids of that era that were being used in the 1950s to support local versions of the national McCarthy witch-hunts. A storm of red-baiting ostracized both Bradens. Carl Braden was convicted and ultimately jailed for a year in federal prison. Anne Braden expanded her work against segregation into a fight against what she described as “the Southern police state.”

Anne Braden was a constant voice for social justice in her local and regional community, speaking out against police brutality and environmental racism, and in support of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights. Her two “Open Letters to White Southern Women” embody her principled determination to forge bonds between oppressed peoples. Speaking of the false accusations of rape of white women that have been leveled against African American men, she rallied white women to struggle against racism as part of fighting for women’s liberation, saying, “All issues are ‘women’s issues,’ including war and peace, economics, and racism.