Braden, Anne and Carl

BRADEN, ANNE AND CARL (b. 1924 and 1914–1974, respectively). Prominent journalists who joined forces in Louisville, Kentucky, where they met as education and labor editors, respectively, for the Louisville Times, Anne and Carl Braden spent their careers at the center of battles to transform the South. They were repeatedly attacked as subversives for their work supporting Black freedom.

Ann Gambrell McCarty, the college-educated daughter of a relatively privileged family, was raised in Mississippi and Alabama. As a result of her upbringing and the Episcopal church, her education at Stratford and Randolph-Macon (Virginia) women’s colleges, contact with a young Black woman in New York, and her experiences as a reporter in Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama, she came to abhor the ugly effects of the South’s segregation system on whites and its humiliating impact on Blacks. She returned to Louisville, her birthplace, in 1947 at age twenty-three. There she met thirty-three-year-old Carl Braden, who had already been married and divorced, had organized unions, and had worked his way up through a variety of newspapers in Harlan County, Knoxville, and Cincinnati. Carl came from Portland, a poor white section of Louisville. His father, a railroad shop worker and factory hand, imbued him with the socialist teachings of Eugene Debs, while his Catholic mother taught him the social gospel. Carl attended Catholic schools and proseminary, but abandoned plans to join the priesthood and instead went to work in 1931 as a newspaper reporter. He and Anne married in 1948, and the couple became public relations directors for Left-led unions affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations and worked in the Progressive Party campaign.

Mississippi authorities jailed Anne in 1951 for leading a delegation of southern white women to the governor’s office to protest the scheduled execution of Willie McGee, a black man charged with raping a white woman. Following the Supreme Court’s Brown desegregation decision in 1954, Kentucky state prosecutors arrested the Bradens and charged them with plotting to incite insurrection when they bought a home in a white neighborhood and sold it to a Black family. Local newspapers blacklisted them from employment, prosecutors confiscated their books as “evidence,” and racists bombed the home they had purchased for Andrew Wade. Held on $40,000 bail, Carl served eight months of a fifteen-year prison sentence for state sedition before a higher court overturned his conviction. Anne popularized the case in a book about segregation titled The Wall Between (1958).

Unable to secure employment as journalists, the Bradens became field organizers and writers for the integrationist Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), which James Eastland’s Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) had called a Communist front. In 1958 HUAC called the Bradens to Atlanta to testify about the integration movement in the South. In the hearings, Carl stated, “My beliefs and my associations are none of the business of this committee.” He refused to testify based on his right of freedom of speech and association contained in the First Amendment. He and anti-HUAC organizer Frank Wilkinson nearly succeeded in winning their First Amendment test case against HUAC but lost it in a celebrated 5–4 decision before the Supreme Court in 1961. As in the Louisville case, authorities put off questioning or prosecuting Anne. She meanwhile wrote and circulated 200,000 copies of a pamphlet, HUAC: Bulwark of Segregation, and traveled across the country in a clemency campaign. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other black leaders held a dinner honoring Braden and Wilkinson before they entered prison to begin serving ten months of a year’s prison sentence for contempt of Congress.

From that time forward, the Bradens continually upheld the position that the First Amendment guarantees freedom of belief and association and, like the struggle for Black rights, was integral to all other struggles. They helped launch the National Committee to Abolish HUAC, and throughout the 1960s organized support for most of the major civil rights campaigns. State and federal authorities continually attacked the Bradens and attempted to isolate them from the civil rights movement (Alabama even enjoined Carl from working in the state) and from southern whites. However, the Bradens used every attack against them and against the movement as a platform to raise issues. More than others on the Left, they perfected the use of media and the written word to fight back against repression. In 1967, during a period of increased radicalization in the southern movement, the Bradens became executive directors of SCEF. In the same year, Kentucky authorities again arrested them on charges of sedition, this time for setting up a community organizing project among poor whites in Appalachia. The courts ultimately overturned the law as unconstitutional.

In 1972 the Bradens retired as SCEF directors, Carl setting up a training institute for activists and Anne returning to full-time editing of SCEF’s paper, the Southern Patriot. By this time factional and ideological splits of the New Left had torn SCEF apart. Carl resigned to protest what he considered Red-baiting within the organization, and Anne left shortly thereafter when the SCEF board voted down a proposal to renew the organization’s formal commitment to interracialism. Carl directed the Training Institute for Propaganda and Organizing and initiated the fight to free North Carolina’s Wilmington Ten. The National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, an organization that emerged from the fight to free Angela Davis and other political prisoners, recognized his stellar role in fighting racism in the South by putting him on its national board.

Carl died suddenly of a heart attack in 1975 at age sixty, embittered with what he saw as New Left ultra-leftism and sectarianism, but never backing down from his participation in the movement. Anne, along with others who had been in SCEF, formed a new group, the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice (SOC). She continued to build interracial coalitions, to work against racist violence, and to support Rev. Jesse Jackson and other Black leaders. In the 1990s, Anne worked with Connie Tucker and other SOC leaders to organize a mass conference and a variety of campaigns to confront environmental racism, which became one of SOC’s major points of focus. Anne worked also with the National Alliance and people in Louisville formed a chapter that continues today as the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, which supports Black Lives Matter and other human rights campaigns and has active websites and Facebook pages.
For many on the Left, the Bradens symbolized a grass-roots, southern white and radical challenge to the segregation system from within the white South. Although the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other authorities warned Black civil rights leaders not to work with them, the Bradens developed close working relations with Black activists throughout the region and supported the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Power movement when many liberals turned away. They were widely respected for their unwavering commitment to the struggle against racism, and despite the inquisitions and arrests directed against them, the Bradens never rejected Marxist politics. As principal victims of anticommunism in the South, the Bradens never affirmed or denied whether they ever held membership in any Left party. As a matter of principle, they believed those who did not want to disclose their political affiliations should not have to and so they stood up for that First Amendment right. At the same time, they steadfastly worked with and supported Communists and others on the Left and stated their own socialist beliefs when they thought them relevant to the struggle at hand.

Anne received the 1989 Roger Baldwin Medal of Liberty from the American Civil Liberties Union for “outstanding commitment to the cause of civil liberties.” She donated the $25,000 prize to SOC. The American Civil Liberties Union in Louisville likewise honored her on her seventieth birthday in recognition of her fearless work in the South. The money from that event helped to rebuild the Carl Braden Memorial Center, the former SCEF office building at 3208 West Broadway, “to provide a place where people come together across lines of race, class, age, nationality, language, religion, ability, sexuality, and gender to build justice for ALL people,” according to its website. The Braden Center served as a library and meeting place in the west end of Louisville that has helped build bridges between races and generate new social movements with active members and online presence.

Throughout their years of activism and writing, the Bradens placed their main focus on the struggle for racial justice as the key to changing the South and the nation. As Anne Braden explained her antiracist commitment in the Louisville Defender in 1978, “Our future and that of our children rides with the fate of the Black struggle for progress, and [we must] join in that struggle as if our very lives depend on it. For, in truth, they do.”

Catherine Fosl. Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South. (Palgrave, 2002; University Press of Kentucky, 2006).

Braden, Anne. “The Southern Freedom Movement in Perspective,” Monthly Review 17 (3): March 1965.

Anne Lewis and Mimi Pickering. “Southern Patriot,” Appalshop Film and Video and California Newsreel films, San Francisco, c. 2012.

Braden, Anne, and Carl Braden. Papers. State Historical Society of Wisconsin; and University of Louisville Special Collections Research Center archive.