Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South (Civil Rights and the Struggle for Black Equality in the Twentieth Century)

Description

With a Foreword by Angela Y. Davis Winner of the 2003 Oral History Association Book AwardWinner of the 2003 Gustavus Myers Center for Human Rights Outstanding Book Award Anne McCarty Braden (1924-2006) was a courageous southern white woman who in the late 1940s rejected her segregationist and privileged past to become a lifelong crusader against racial discrimination. Arousing the conscience of white southerners to the reality of racial injustice, Braden was branded a communist and seditionist by southern politicians who used McCarthyism to buttress legal and institutional segregation as it came under fire in deferral courts. She became, nevertheless, one of the civil rights movement's staunchest white allies and one of five southern whites commended by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in his 1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail." Although Braden remained a controversial figure even in the movement, her commitment superseded her radical reputation, and she became a mentor and advisor to students who launched the 1960s sit-ins and to successive generations of peace and justice activists. In this riveting, oral history-based biography, Catherine Fosl also offers a social history of how racism, sexism, and anticommunism overlapped in the twentieth-century south and how ripples from the Cold War divided and limited the southern civil rights movement. Cover Contents Foreword Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Chronology of Anne Braden’s Life Introduction Part One Prologue: The Power of Place Chapter 1: A White Southern Childhood Chapter 2: Intellectual Awakening Chapter 3: Alabama Newspaperwoman Part Two Chapter 4: Political Awakening Chapter 5: Marriage and Movement Chapter 6: The Wade Case—No Turning Back Chapter 7: Fighting Back—The 1950s Resistance Movement Chapter 8: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness—Early SCEF Years Part Three Chapter 9: The Mass Civil Rights Movement—Beginning of a New Day Chapter 10: Opening Up the Southern Police State Chapter 11: End of an Era Part Four Chapter 12: The Next Three Decades: The Struggle Continues Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W Y Z