Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South

Born in 1924, Anne McCarty Braden is a southern white woman who broke from her segregationist upbringing to become a lifelong civil rights activist in the late 1940s. Unlike many southern reformers of her generation, Braden refused to become an exile fro either her region or her race, and instead sought to awaken the consciences of white southerners to the reality of racial injustice in the South and in America. Hailed as a courageous heroine and a role model by her colleagues in the nascent civil rights movement of the 1950s, Braden was simultaneously accused of being a Communist and a seditionist by her neighbors in Louisville, Kentucky and by southern politicians that rallied around the anti-Communist movement of the period. Catherine Fosl not only shares the extraordinary life of Braden, but also offers a valuable history of the struggles that white southern activists faced in the segregated, cold war South.

Catherine Fosl teaches Women’s Studies and Humanities at the University of Louisville. She is the author of Women for All Seasons: The Story of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.