In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

692 The Kentucky Anthology Anne McCarty Braden from The Wall Between Black people were always in the forefront of the battles that freed them and later earned them their citizenship rights. From William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown to the Louisville journalists and civil libertarians Carl and Anne McCarty Braden, however, many white people of conscience and goodwill have been their able supporters . In 1954 the Bradens sought to enable a black couple to live in an all-white neighborhood in Shively, a Louisville suburb, by buying a house on their behalf. The house was dynamited. The Bradens were accused of being Communists and became pariahs in their hometown. Carl Braden was indicted for sedition and jailed. Anne Braden, who was born in Louisville in 1924 and grew up Anniston, Alabama, chronicled their struggles to help tear down the remaining walls of segregation in Louisville in her highly acclaimed memoir, The Wall Between (1958). In the excerpt below she reconstructs their decision to become involved in the struggle against segregated housing. h It was on a beautiful spring day in 1954 that this story begins—one of those days in early March when the earth throbs with the promise of new life and it is hard to believe that all is not right with the world. I had been to town and my husband, Carl, had stayed home to take care of our two children, Jimmy, two and a half, and Anita, a year old, and to wait for a friend, Andrew Wade, who had called the day before to say he was coming by to see us. When I came in, Carl followed me into the kitchen where I was putting groceries away. “Darling,” he said cheerfully, “we’re going to buy a house.” I stopped dead in my tracks. We had bought the house we were living in only two years before and had paid no more than a few hundred dollars on the $6,500 mortgage. Carl’s salary as a newspaperman was adequate for our needs, but we rarely had any money left after living expenses were paid, and our savings were practically nil. A new house at this point was utterly fantastic. “Buy a house?” I exclaimed. “Oh, Carl!” “Sure,” he insisted. “Don’t you want to?” “What are you talking about, Carl?” I asked. “We can’t buy another house, and anyway I like this house.” The house we lived in was a small four-room 692 Anne McCarty Braden 693 cottage, and it had been a little crowded since Anita’s arrival over a year before. In addition to our own children our family included Sonia, Carl’s sixteen-year-old daughter by a previous marriage. But at that very moment we were in the process of converting the unfinished attic into two more rooms. It seemed to me this would make the house quite sufficient for our family and even for the new baby we were hoping would soon be on the way. “But this house will be in the country,” Carl went on, his eyes twinkling. “Wouldn’t you like that?” I looked at him in confusion, and he evidently realized he had joked long enough. His face suddenly became serious. “No,” he explained. “Andrew Wade wants us to buy a house and transfer it to him. He’ll put up the money for the down payment of course.” Immediately I understood. Andrew Wade was a Negro. We were white. Louisville was a segregated town—a town of unspoken restrictive covenants long after restrictive covenants had been declared non-enforceable by the Supreme Court of the United States. “What’s the problem?” I asked. I knew the answer. The question was almost rhetorical. “He’s been looking for a house for months,” Carl said. “He’s got a little girl two years old—just Jimmy’s age—and his wife is pregnant. They’ve been renting a little apartment and they’re crowded up. He’s looked all over the Jim Crow sections and there just aren’t any new houses for sale. They haven’t built any new houses for Negroes here to amount to anything since the war. He could get an old house, but that’s not what he wants. And anyway the down payment on those old houses is too much, and he doesn’t have much money saved. His wife has her heart set on a new little ranch-type house out in a suburb. There...

Share