"There Was No Middle Ground": Anne Braden And The Southern Social Justice Movement

Anne McCarty Braden is a southern white anti-racist activist who made a dramatic break with segregationist culture in the years just after World War II and committed her life to the cause of racial and social justice. Braden found her life's work and meaning through the racial justice movement in the South, and the longevity of her activism has made her into a sort of "conscience" for the white South, a reminder that whites bear an equal stake in opposing racism. This article is essentially biographical, framing her (1) political transformation;(2) early activism; (3) Kentucky sedition case and (4) overall contributions to racial change in the post-World War II South, in terms of race, gender, class, and place. A theme of the essay is Braden's broad-based vision of social change, which has provided important points of connection with most of the great social upheavals of this century, even though her own work has centered primarily on civil rights campaigns in the former plantation South. She has lived her life as a feminist and has brought a highly gendered presence to all of her organizing, raising questions of women's rights in every movement of which she has been a part and urging inclusiveness within the women's movement. Her commitment to trade unionism and economic justice also has led her to build alliances between southern civil rights crusades and union drives and economic reform projects in the Appalachian South.