Subversive Southerner : Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice

Winner of the 2003 Oral History Association Book Award!
Winner of the 2003 Gustavus Myers Oustanding Book Award!

Anne McCarty Braden is a southern white woman who broke from her segregationist and privileged past in the late 1940s to become a lifelong crusader who sought to awaken the consciences of white southerners to the reality of racial injustice. Martin Luther King praised Braden’s extraordinary integrity in his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail, but even among civil rights supporters, she was as much a controversial figure as an ally. Branded a communist and seditionist by southern politicians who used McCarthyism to prop up segregation as it crumbled, Braden nevertheless became a role model to students who launched the 1960s sit-in movements and to successive generations of young peace and justice activists. In this compelling, oral history-based biography, Catherine Fosl demonstrates how racism, sexism, and anticommunism intersected in the 20th-century south. Braden’s story connects southern reform drives of the 1930s and 1940s to the mass civil rights movement of the 1960s and to the continuation of racial justice campaigns today. Fosl’s book also reveals dramatically—as has not been done before—how the Cold War divided and limited the southern civil rights movement.