Guide to Source Material for Anti-Racist Activists and Thinkers

The first biography of the legendary southern civil rights crusader Anne Braden introduces readers to the contributions of this extraordinary woman, and the witch hunt that targeted her in the 1950s. In 1954, she was charged with sedition by McCarthyist politicians who played on fears of communism to preserve Southern segregation. Though Braden remained controversial - even within the Civil Rights Movement - in 1963 she became one of only five white Southerners whose contributions to the movement were commended by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. in his famed "Letter from Birmingham Jail". Subversive Southerner, beyond a story of Braden's nearly six decades of activism, is also a social history of how racism, sexism, and anticommunism intertwined in the 20th-century South as ripples from the Cold War divided the emerging Civil Rights Movement.

A nonfiction finalist for the 1958 National Book Award, The Wall Between is Anne Braden's account of what resulted when she and her husband, in a challenge to racially restrictive housing practices, purchased a home in an all white-neighborhood and resold it to a Black family, the Wades: mob violence against the Wades, the bombing of the house, and imprisonment for Carl Braden, Anne's husband, on charges of sedition. The book analyzes how the anti-communism and pro-segregation movements overlapped and reinforced each other and its implications for civil rights activism.