Working Class Love Notes #3: "I'm not your kind of Southern woman."
Commemorating Anne Braden on her 100th Birthday
“In a sense, the battle is and always has been a battle for the hearts and minds of white people in this country. The fight against racism is not something we’re called on to help people of color with. We need to be involved as if our lives depend on it, because, in truth, they do.” — Anne Braden
“[The police] said, ‘You’re not a real Southern woman.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not your kind of Southern Woman.’ ” — Anne Braden
The past few weeks have felt like a lifetime, especially for me and my crew in Appalachia. From the shooting at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania to Appalachia’s enemy, the grifter J.D. Vance, being called up to run for Vice President on the Republican ticket, to Joe Biden dropping out of the Presidential race and Vice President Kamala Harris entering. Plus, the news that Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear is being considered for Vice President, the powerful protests against war criminal Netanyahu who visited Congress last week, and the wave of renewed hope as multiple groups are organizing themselves to block MAGA at the polls.
I’ve been wrestling with what to write for my July newsletter all month, and just when I think I’ve settled on the topic, the news cycle changes again. Not to mention, like so many of us, I’m exhausted. I’m working on my memoir so that I can make my Oct. 1st deadline which requires nearly all of my writing capacity. However, amidst the hundreds of thousands of white women organizing themselves in response to the 44,000 Black women who organized to support Kamala Harris for president, I finally found the topic, and it couldn’t be more critical and timely: white anti-racist Southern organizer Anne Braden.
Sunday would have been Anne Braden’s 100th birthday and I got to attend a celebration for her alongside two of my mentors at the Carl Braden Center in Louisville. In the midst of all of this, it feels like Anne’s wisdom is more important than ever so I wanted to share about her life and work, some photos of her, photos of her 100th birthday celebration, plus some words of wisdom from Anne herself and from two of her mentees, Carla Wallace and Pam McMichael, who happen to be my mentors and co-founders of my organizational home Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ). I hope you feel as inspired by Anne as I do.
Who was Anne Braden?
Anne Braden was a Southern white woman, a Kentuckian, who was a leader in the civil rights movement and a mentor to other white antiracist organizers. For the majority of her life, Anne dedicated herself to fighting racism, bringing white people into the conversation at a time when few white folks were publicly aligning themselves with Black leaders in the civil rights movement. Growing up in the segregated South, Anne saw the horrors of racism up close and it changed her life. She saw the ways it harmed Black people, but also she saw the way it harmed white people, how it destroys our souls, and she committed her life to doing what she could to organize white people away from white supremacy and towards multiracial movements for justice.
Anne was born on July 28th 1924 in Louisville. She was raised in Alabama, but moved back to Louisville when she was a young adult and lived most of her life here in Kentucky. Anne was a journalist, an organizer, and an educator who dedicated her life to working to advance racial and economic justice across the South. She was known as one of the fiercest, most public anti-racist white organizers in the Southern Civil Rights Movement and was commended by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail and she was an advisor to the young people in SNCC, the Southern Non-violent Coordinating Committee, in the 1960s.
When she moved back to Kentucky, she worked as a journalist for a Louisville paper where she met her husband, a radical left trade unionist and fellow journalist, named Carl Braden. They married in 1948 and dedicated their lives to social movements and fighting for racial and economic justice.
In 1954, Anne and Carl supported their friends Andrew and Charlotte Wade who wanted to purchase a home in the Louisville suburbs of Shively, Kentucky, but because of Jim Crow housing policy and practices, could not purchase it themselves. Unwavering in their commitment to racial justice, Anne and Carl purchased the home for the Wades. The Wades spent their first night in their new home on May 15th, 1954 and for weeks afterward, their white neighbors terrorized them. They burned a cross on the Wade’s yard, shot out their windows, and condemned the Braden’s publicly. The white segregationists tapped into McCarthyism and framed the Bradens as communists to try and shift blame away from them. Then, six weeks after the Wades moved in, white supremacists fire bombed the house while the Wades were out for the evening.
Anne, Carl, and some of their friends were blamed for the bombing with segregationists framing them as communists who were inciting violence. The Bradens and five other white people they associated with were charged with sedition and put on trial. Carl was seen as the ringleader and was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, but ended up doing eight months and getting out on a $40,000 bond after a supreme court decision came down making state sedition laws invalid. Ultimately, all of the charges were dropped.
In the years after the trial, Anne and Carl became organizers for the Southern Christian Educational Fund (SCEF), a small civil rights organization based out of New Orleans whose mission was to engage white people in the civil rights movement. Anne and Carl put their journalism skills to use and published their own newspapers to talk about the violence happening in the Jim Crow South and the growing civil rights movement, primarily publishing the SCEF newspaper The Southern Patriot.
Carl died suddenly of a heart attack in 1975. Anne was heartbroken, but she never stopped organizing. She continued to become one of the country’s most visible and outspoken white racial justice organizers in history, being a leader in the multiracial Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice (SOC), a leader in the 1980s Rainbow Coalition to elect Jesse Jackson for president, co-founding the Kentucky Alliance against Racist and Political Oppression, and countless other racial justice, anti-war, LGBTQ, and feminist campaigns until her death on March 6th, 2006.
“I believe this is the genius of humankind, the thing that makes us half divine: the fact that some human beings can envision a world that has never existed.” — Anne Braden
Anne’s Legacy: Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ)
Even though we lost Anne from this world in 2006, she lives on in many of us, especially those she mentored and her friends who are still organizing in the South and beyond. In fact, two of her mentees, fellow Kentuckians Carla Wallace and Pam McMichael, co-founded Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), the largest national organization bringing white people into the fight for racial and economic justice, to carry on Anne’s legacy and her important work. SURJ is now fifteen years old and we lead power building organizing work all over the country. We have a national SURJ chapter network that is specific to the fights happening in each location, plus we mobilize national members into electoral campaigns and longterm base building work across the country with a focus on the South, including my home state of Kentucky, just like Anne did.
Last week we had tens of thousands of white people get on zoom calls to take action with us to block MAGA in November through our Many Over the MAGA campaign. I got the opportunity to speak on our White Women Against MAGA call this past week that had nearly 10k registered and 4.5k who joined us on zoom where we shared about Anne’s legacy and laid out plans that we as white women can take to block Project 2025 while still fighting for a Free Palestine.
If you missed the webinar, White Women Against MAGA, you can watch it here.
Sign up for SURJ’s mailing list.
Live into Anne’s legacy by joining SURJ’s Many Over the MAGA campaign!
What might Anne say to us now?
We commemorated Anne’s 100th birthday on Sunday, July 28th, 2024 at the Carl Braden Center in Louisville. The center was packed with Anne’s friends, mentees, and people like me who never met her, but who are inspired by her and working to carry on her legacy. It was beautiful. I am so grateful I got to hear people share stories about her and be in the community center that has been a home to so many Kentucky organizing campaigns over the years.
Since I was there with Carla and Pam, two women Anne mentored and two women who mentor me, I had to ask them what they think Anne might tell us today. Here’s what they had to share:
“Among the things she might say is that white women have been held up as fragile and needing the protection of white men, against Black men. This blocks the liberation of those of us who are white women, and it has to be one of the reasons we fight the racism that harms us differently, but harms us all. She would say we need to get out there and talk with other white women about how fighting racism is a big part of how we all get free.” — Carla Wallace, co-founder of SURJ
“Anne reminds us that when they were organizing in the civil rights movement, the South was a police state which is similar to a future we are facing today, so I think she’d be reminding us to get out there and organize, to get our people, to not write people off, and step up to our responsibility to show up in this context. And this message resonates for white people, but it also resonates across race. — Pam McMichael, co-founder of SURJ
Learn more about Anne:
Books: The Wall Between by Anne Braden; Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South by Catherine Fosl; Anne Braden Speaks: Selected Writings and Speeches 1947-1999 by Anne Braden and edited by Ben Wilkins
Documentary: Anne Braden: Southern Patriot directed by Mimi Pickering and Anne Lewis, Appalshop
Follow Catalyst Project and apply for their annual anti-racist training program for white organizers The Anne Braden Program (I am a graduate!)
Donate to the Braden Center, a crucial movement space in Louisville for folks continuing the fight for racial and economic justice. I signed up to be a monthly giver. Join me?
Let’s do what Anne would do. Let’s get our people.
Love, Beth