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Reviewed by:
  • Anne Braden: Southern Patriotby Anne Lewis and Mimi Pickering
  • Tracy E. K’Meyer
Anne Braden: Southern patriot. Anne Lewis and Mimi Pickering. Appalshop, 91 Madison Avenue, Whitesburg, KY 41858. www.annebradenfilm.org. 2012. $25.00.

Anne Braden was a white woman raised in Anniston, Alabama, who fought racism in her adopted home of Louisville, Kentucky, in the South, and throughout the nation for half a century until her death in 2006. In Anne Braden: Southern Patriot, filmmakers Anne Lewis and Mimi Pickering employ first-person testimony, photographs, and historic footage to tell her story. Braden explains in an interview clip in the opening sequence that the point of the film is to use her biography to draw viewers’ attention to the struggle for racial justice, because “once they get interested in the people, they’ll move on to what the ideas are.” The film succeeds most when it explores Braden’s philosophy, especially her insistence that whites in general, and white southern women in particular, needed to play a role in the civil rights movement. Southern Patriot, moreover, provides a compelling portrait of one woman’s enduring commitment to overcoming white supremacy. An overly celebratory tone and missed opportunities to use oral histories for a more complex analysis, however, undercut Braden’s hoped-for portrayal of not just her life but the history of modern social movements.

Southern Patriotpresents Braden’s story in four chapters: childhood, education, and introduction to anti-racism; the Cold War fight for civil liberties and the consequences for the Braden family; the civil rights movement through the early 1970s; and Braden’s struggle for racial and social justice in the post-movement years. The content of the first half of the film adheres closely to Catherine Fosl’s Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South(published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2002 and cowinner of the OHA book award for 2003), telling the story of the 1956 sedition case against Braden, her husband Carl, and a number of their white associates, after the couple helped a black family obtain a home in a white neighborhood. The section on the civil rights movement emphasizes three of Braden’s key beliefs: [End Page 366]the importance of nonviolence, the failure of the movement to address economic inequality, and the demand that whites work against racism in the white community. The final section moves beyond material covered by Fosl’s work, focusing on Braden’s later career, which included organizing a proschool desegregation coalition in Louisville and Jefferson County, demonstrating against the Klan, and urging white peace and black justice activists to unite around police brutality.

Lewis and Pickering use interviews and other oral sources to tell the story, forgoing an omniscient narrator in favor of the words of Braden and her friends and associates. The filmmakers employ the interview material in a straightforward way; people tell stories about particular events or about Braden and her impact on them and social movements. Although the filmmakers do not indicate the provenance of the interviews, it appears that at least some of them were recorded for other projects. In order to avoid having such information break up the narrative flow of the film, the filmmakers might have used the web page of the project (http://annebradenflm.org/) to be more explicit about sources, not just for the interviews but other materials as well.

The film’s most compelling scenes come from historic footage and from moments of “performance” rather than from the oral histories. A segment from a 1961 documentary captures Braden family life on the eve of Carl’s departure for prison on contempt of Congress charges because of his refusal to name associates before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Speeches by well-known activists at events honoring Braden evoke the spirit of the movement in which she engaged. The most striking moment of orality comes at the end of the film. In an opening scene, Braden had explained that her path to rejecting white supremacy had begun when, as a young journalist, she caught herself dismissing the importance of a “colored murder.” The movie ends with...

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