Braden, Anne McCarty, 1924-2006

Journalist, civil rights activist; interviewee married Carl Braden.

Journalist; civil rights activist; interviewee married Carl Braden.

Anne McCarty was born on July 28, 1924, in Louisville, Kentucky, but grew up in Anniston, Alabama. A devout Episcopalian, she studied literature and journalism at a Virginia women's college, then worked as a newspaper reporter in postwar Alabama before returning to Louisville. She joined the staff of the Louisville Times in 1947. Here she covered civil rights causes and met radical reformers for the first time. She met and in 1948 married fellow newspaperman and labor editor Carl Braden. The Bradens left mainstream journalism to apply their writing talents to the interracial left wing of Louisville's labor movement. They were propelled onto the national scene through their 1954 agreement to act as "fronts" for Andrew Wade and his family to purchase a home in Louisville's segregated suburbs. The Wades' new home was dynamited and this act of housing desegregation turned into a local variation of "McCarthyism." The investigation shifted from segregationist violence to the alleged Communist Party affiliations of those who had supported the Wades. In October 1954 Anne and Carl Braden and five other whites were charged with sedition, and Carl Braden was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Anne was never tried and the conviction was later overturned, but the Wades lost their home and never saw its bombers prosecuted. Blacklisted locally, the Bradens took jobs in 1957 as field organizers for the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF); for 16 years, Anne Braden edited SCEF's monthly newspaper, The Southern Patriot, and publicized civil rights campaigns through press releases and articles for other small journals. Although their radical politics marginalized them among many of their own generation, the Bradens were reclaimed by younger activists of the 1960s as civil libertarians who connected racism to war and poverty. After her husband's death in 1975, Anne Braden remained among the U.S.'s most outspoken white anti-racist activists and writers until her own death in 2006. Anne Braden was instrumental in organizing across racial divides in the new environmental and anti-nuclear movements in the 1970s-80s and she cautioned the women's liberation movement to act against racism. In the last decade of her life, Anne Braden focused on the Louisville community, working with the Kentucky Alliance against Racism and Political Repression; she also taught courses at University of Louisville and Northern Kentucky University. [Adapted from a biography by Catherine Fosl.]