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

Catherine Fosl

ISBN 10: 0312294875 / ISBN 13: 9780312294878

Published by St Martin's Press, 2002

About this Item

Anne McCarty Braden (1924--2006) rejected her segregationist, privileged past to become one of the civil rights movement's staunchest white allies. In 1954 she was charged with sedition by McCarthy-style politicians who played on fears of communism to preserve southern segregation. Though Braden remained controversial -- even within the civil rights movement -- in 1963 she became one of only five white southerners whose contributions to the movement were commended by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in his famed Letter from Birmingham Jail. Braden's activism ultimately spanned nearly six decades, making her one of the most enduring white voices against racism in modern U.S. history. Subversive Southerner is more than a riveting biography of an extraordinary southern white woman; it is also a social history of how racism, sexism, and anticommunism intertwined in the twentieth-century South as ripples from the Cold War divided the emerging civil rights movement.

Seller Inventory # CIN0312294875G

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South
• Publisher: St Martin's Press
• Publication Date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312294875
• ISBN 13: 9780312294878
• Binding: Hardback
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

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.