Another great American died yesterday morning. Odds are you're not familiar with the life or work of
Anne Braden, but her story is inextricably woven into the fabric of the civil rights movement and touched the lives of everyone from Martin Luther King Jr. to, well, me. Her activism for all forms of social justice continued up until she was admitted to Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky this weekend at the age of 81.
More below.
This is the part where I attempt to encapsulate her life with retellings of epic battles, or a timeline of her life's most pivotal moments, but I'm not going to do that. To find out about her life, find yourself a copy of
The Wall Between and dive in. This is the story of how she was launched into the civil rights movement in the 50s when she and her husband, Carl Braden, bought a house in an all-white neighborhood on behalf of Andrew and Charlotte Wade, a black couple, in 1954. Six weeks after the transfer of the house, and a couple of weeks after shots were fired into the windows and a cross was burned on the lawn, it was bombed. The perpetrators were known, but rather than bring them to justice, the Braden's were put on trial for sedition. Carl served several months of a 15 year prison sentence before he was cleared. (It wouldn't be the last time, for they were again charged with advocating sedition under Kentucky law in 1967 when they and three others were protesting the practice of strip mining. The law was declared unconstitutional.)
Anne was one of the most amazing women I have had the pleasure of meeting. Far from being interested only in civil rights, she was involved in virtually every movement since the 1950s regarding social justice. She treated everyone as an equal to her, albeit with the respect and grace one finds in the South. After Coretta Scott King died, she was interviewed by her old employer, the Louisville Courier-Journal:
It was the early 1960s, and Louisville activist Anne Braden had arrived at Coretta and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Atlanta home for a civil-rights strategy session.
"We were sitting at a big dining-room table, and you could hear her stirring around in the kitchen," Braden recalled. "I said, 'Could we wait? Coretta should join us.' He turned and said, 'Cora?' She sat down. But she didn't enter the discussion."
Since 1997, Anne has been teaching one course each year at NKU on the Civil Rights and Social Justice movements. She was teaching one this semester in fact, and I only got the news this morning. In the nine years I've known her, she was always on her feet, always active in organization or protest or teaching. She could talk a mile a minute, and you would have to lean forward in order to hear her clearly, but it was always worth it just to listen. She rarely talked about her own story, and never felt that what happened to her was very important -- it was the activism that mattered, it was getting the message out there that she cared about. When Catherine Fosl, her biographer and author of Subversive Southerner, began working with her to tell her story, she often complained about the context, saying the book shouldn't be about her at all. Yet I hope that more people will learn her story, and more importantly learn from it.
I wasn't sure what to do today after I heard she had died. I was upset, unfocused; but I did want others to know who she was, why she mattered, and to maybe even live by her example. So, naturally I turned to you. I feel certain that she is once again sitting at the dinner table with Coretta and MLK. My greatest hope today is that, when the time comes for each of us, we will be welcomed to that same table. May they not feel obliged to wait for us.