Later Activism
Blacklisted from local employment, the Bradens took jobs as field organizers for the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), a small, New Orleans-based civil rights organization whose mission was to solicit white southern support for the beleaguered southern civil rights movement. In the years before southern civil rights violations made national news, the Bradens developed their own media. Both through SCEF’s monthly newspaper, The Southern Patriot, and through numerous pamphlets and press releases publicizing major civil rights campaigns. In 1958 Anne wrote The Wall Between, a memoir of their sedition case. One of the few books of its time to unpack the psychology of white southern racism from within, it was praised by human rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Eleanor Roosevelt, and became a runner-up for the National Book Award. Although their radical politics marginalized them among many of their own generation, the Bradens were reclaimed by young student activists of the 1960s. They were among the civil rights movement’s most dedicated white allies.
The Bradens also had three children: James, born in 1951, a 1972 Rhodes Scholar, and a 1980 graduate of Harvard Law School (where he preceded Barack Obama as editor of the Harvard Law Review), has lived and practiced law for over 25 years in San Francisco, California. Elizabeth, born in 1960, has worked as a teacher in many countries around the world, serving as of 2006 in that capacity in rural Ethiopia. Anita, born in 1953, died of a pulmonary disorder at age 11. While raising their children, the couple remained deeply involved in the civil rights cause and the subsequent social movements it prompted from the 1960s to the 1970s.
After Carl’s death in 1975, Anne Braden remained among the nation’s most outspoken white anti-racist activists. She instigated the formation of a new regional multi-racial organization, the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice (SOC), which initiated battles against environmental racism. She became an instrumental voice in the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition of the 1980s and in the two Jesse Jackson presidential campaigns, as well as organizing across racial divides in the new environmental, women’s, and anti-nuclear movements that sprang up in that decade.
From the 1980s into the 2000s (decade), she wrote for Southern Exposure, Southern Changes, and the National Guardian and Fellowship.
No longer a pariah, Anne received the American Civil Liberties Union’s first Roger Baldwin Medal of Liberty in 1990 for her contributions to civil liberties. As she aged, her activism focused more on Louisville, where she remained a leader in anti-racist drives and taught social justice history classes at local universities. Anne Braden died on March 6, 2006. The Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research was established at the University of Louisville in November 2006 and was officially opened on April 4, 2007. The institute focuses on social justice globally, but concentrates on the southern United States and the Louisville area. Over her nearly six decades of activism, her life touched almost every modern U.S. social movement, and her message to them all was the centrality of racism and the responsibility of whites to combat it.
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