The Wall Between by Anne Braden, Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Justice in the Cold War South by Catherine Fosl (review)

colleges and universities escalated sharply. And that meant black students arrived on campuses across the country just at the moment when the nation' s discussion of racial issues had begun to be shaped by the notion of Black Power. To whites on those campuses, it often seemed as if black students constituted a strongly united and uniformly militant bunch. But what appeared to be solidarity from the outside could seem very different from inside the black student community. Racial cohesion proved to be a fragile thing,consensus on political means and goals elusive, although student leaders constantly worked to build cohesion ( or at least the appearance of it).The difficulty of the work accounts for some of their stridency. Williamson deftly captures the complexity of the social situation in which black students found themselves, as well as their ideological and organizational responses to it. She has an equally complex view of the relationship between the university administration and black students. In fact, many in the administration at Illinois expressed a good deal of sympathy for many of goals of black students on campus. In 1968, for example,administrators proposed bringing five hundred disadvantaged students , most of them black, to campus, a far larger number than most schools proposed to recruit at the time. Nevertheless,University of Illinois administrators had to placate a watchful state legislature that tended to see black students as ungrateful and unqualified. More poignantly, however sympathetic they may have been, administrators tended to see black students through a cultural lens that made them appear culturally deprived, a view that consistently undermined the good intentions of administrators. They,for example, could understand courses in African American history as a kind of therapy for black students, but they could not understand why black students raised fundamental questions about the curriculum as a whole and argued that the courses then available left all students illserved . In short,although conflict over differing interpretations of social reality may have been unavoidable,Williamson argues convincingly that students,animated by the ideas of Black Power, ultimately changed the University of Illinois for the better for everyone. Charles Payne Duke University Anne Braden. Tbe Wall Between. With a new epilogue. Foreword by Julian Bond. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999. 349 pp. ISBN: 1572330619 (paper), 19. 95. Catherine Fosl. Subversive Soutberner: Anne Braden and tbe Struggle for Justice in tbe Cold War South. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,2002. 418 pp. ISBN: 0312294875 ( cloth), $ 35.00. r-« hese two volumes illuminate the life of Anne Braden, longtime resident of Louisville, and one of the outstanding leaders of the twentieth century movement for human and civil rights. Born into a family that upheld conventional notions of racial subordination, she moved far beyond those moorings, becoming a bold, determined battler against racism and segregation. Conscious of the broad context of economic and political change in which the American racial crisis was set,Anne Braden and her husbandcomrade Carl, who died in 1975,committed themselves to the work of rallying Southern whites to support the black freedom struggle,and she continues that work today. Catherine Fosl's meticulously researched and eloquently written biography insightfully fuses the personal and the political,linking Anne Braden' s life to the influences exerted upon her by broader forces in the community,region, nation and indeed the world. Fost ably depicts the Alabama and Kentucky in which Anne Braden grew to adulthood, became SUMMER 2004 75 BOOK REVIEWS a journalist, and came to challenge the status quo. black neighborhoods. An outburst of racist hysteria While maintaining her independent judgment,Fos] ensued that resulted in the bombing of the Wade draws Braden into the book by quoting from vari- family home. All this took place within days of ous oral history interviews she has given and by the Supreme Court's historic desegregation ruling including a response by Braden to the biography n the Brown v.Board of Education case. Later,the itself. Part of the response is a comment on the Bradens helped lay the basis for the 1963 challenge author' s reference to her as a Marxist. Braden to J zi Crow laws and practices in Birmingham, finds the reference not entirely accurate...