Braden was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on July 28, 1924, but grew up in the more segregated town of Anniston, Alabama with her middle-class family. She was bothered by racial segregation at an early age but didn’t question it until her college years at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Virginia.
After college, she worked as a newspaper reporter in Birmingham, covering the courthouse. The lack of harmony between the Bible and the racist practices of her community troubled her, motivating her to leave the deep South. In 1947, Braden moved to Louisville to work for the Louisville Times. She found that although blacks there could vote and sit where they wished on buses, race relations were otherwise very similar to what she had experienced farther south. The following year, she married newspaperman Carl Braden.
In 1948, the Bradens worked on Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign. Following his defeat, they left journalism to devote themselves fully to the Progressive Party. Anne also fought civil rights abuses. In 1951, she was arrested for leading a delegation of Southern white women organized by the Civil Rights Congress to protest the execution of Willie McGhee, a black man convicted of allegedly raping a white woman.
In 1954, the Bradens agreed to purchase a home for Andrew and Charlotte Wade, a black couple who wanted to buy a house in a suburban neighborhood but had been unsuccessful because of Jim Crow housing practices. On May 15 (just two days before Brown v. Board of Education), the Wades spent their first night in their new home in the Louisville suburb of Shively, but once their white neighbors discovered that blacks had moved in, they burned a cross in front of the house, shot the windows and condemned the Bradens for buying it for them. Six weeks later, the Wades’ home was dynamited while they were out one evening. The bombers were never sought nor brought to trial, although Vernon Brown, an associate of both the Wades and the Bradens was indicted. In October of that year, the Bradens and five other whites were charged with sedition after the ordeal was said to stem from the Communist Party support in the Wades’ housing quest.
Carl was the perceived ringleader and was convicted and sentenced to 15 years imprisonment. Anne and the others awaited their sentencing while Carl served eight months but was out on a $40,000 bond when the Supreme Court invalidated state sedition laws. All charges were dropped and the Wades moved back to Louisville.
The Bradens then took jobs as field organizers for the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), a small, New Orleans-based civil rights organization whose mission was to solicit white Southern support for the Civil Rights Movement. Before Southern civil rights violations made national news, the Bradens developed their own media through the SCEF’s monthly newspaper, The Southern Patriot, and through numerous pamphlets and press releases publicizing major civil rights campaigns.
In 1958, Anne wrote The Wall Between, a memoir of their sedition case. It was one of the few books of its time to unpack the psychology of white Southern racism from within and was praised by human rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Eleanor Roosevelt, and became a runner-up for the National Book Award, one of the highest literary prizes in the United States. Although their radical politics marginalized them among many of their own generation, the Bradens were reclaimed by young student activists of the 1960s, and in his ‘‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail,’’ King singled out Anne as one of the white Southerners who understood and was committed to the Civil Rights Movement.
After Carl’s death in 1975, Anne remained among the nation’s most outspoken white anti-racist activists. She instigated the formation of a new regional multiracial organization, the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice (SOC), which initiated battles against environmental racism. She became an instrumental voice in the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition of the 1980s and in the two Jesse Jackson presidential campaigns, as well as organizing across racial divides in the new environmental, women’s and anti-nuclear movements that sprang up in that decade.
In 1990, Braden received the American Civil Liberties Union’s first Roger Baldwin Medal of Liberty for her contributions to civil liberties. Her activism focused more on Louisville in her later years, where she reamined a leader in anti-racist drives and taught social justice history classes at local universities. Braden died on March 6, 2006. On April 4, of the following year, the Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research opened at the University of Louisville, focused on social justice globally but concentrating on the Southern U.S. and particularly the Louisville area. Over her nearly six decades of activism, Braden’s life touched almost every modern U.S. social movement, and her message to them all was the centrality of racism and the responsibility of whites to combat it.
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