USA Projects

At the University of Louisville an elderly professor speaks to her students, "I don't want you to agree with me, it's more interesting if you don't, and it doesn’t affect your grade whatsoever.” Then she says, "They're doing this documentary on me which embarrasses me highly, but really what they're trying to do is look at the movements I've been a part of through the lens of my life."

Anne Braden: Southern Patriot is a film about ideas, told by Anne Braden through the arc of her life through sixty years of movement history.  It’s about the dream of building a better world. Through Anne’s understanding, we look at the intersections between civil rights and civil liberties, race and feminism, peace and justice, told truthfully through direct experience. Your contribution will help to make this film come alive by allowing us to discover and purchase source material.  The more specific and clear and powerful that footage is, the more it can be used, not for illustration, but to deepen meaning and to make ideas become real.

Starting in 2004, Mimi Pickering (my work partner for the project) and I filmed Anne as she taught, organized, demonstrated, remembered, and reflected. I remember in particular the interviews. Anne would stuff envelopes, make phone calls, ask about family. Finally she’d put out her cigarette, put down her coffee, and submit to a question. She’d ignore the specifics -- unless it was something she wanted to talk about anyway. It was rare that I got five questions in and probably unnecessary. She said what she had to say fully, in common language, and with a persistent passionate intelligence. Anne would transform the quantity of knowledge that came from her long experience in the struggle for social and economic justice into a quality of understanding that all could share.

In 1954, one week before the school desegregation decision, Anne and Carl Braden signed the deed to a house in an all-white neighborhood and transferred it to a black couple, Andrew and Charlotte Wade. Crosses were burned, death threats made, and finally the house was dynamited. No charges were filed against the white neighbors who at least partially admitted guilt. Instead the Kentucky Commonwealth’s Attorney said that it all had been a communist plot to foment racial tensions, lower citizen morale, and create a path for a foreign government to take control of the neighborhood. Carl and Anne Braden were indicted under Kentucky’s Sedition Act and Carl Braden was sentenced to 15 years in prison. From that point on, through the mass Civil Rights movement, the fragmentation of the seventies, the school busing crisis and social movements of the eighties and nineties, Anne was marginalized as a “communist.” She never let that branding stop her. Anne said about civil liberties, “The whole theory of the right of free speech is not my right to speak but your right to hear. The rock bottom essential to have any sort of democracy is that people be able to examine ideas and look at them… It was born in struggle and the only time it’s meant something is when people struggled for it.”

Then, in 2006, when all of us had much more to do, Anne died. Since then we have had to rely on other voices than Anne’s to tell the story. What voices they have been! C.T. Vivian. Bernice Reagon Johnson, Fred Shuttlesworth, Blaine Hudson, and Anne’s biographer Cate Fosl. Angela Davis, who was freed in part through Anne’s efforts; Bob and Dottie Zellner from SNCC; Al McSurely indicted for sedition himself. Vincent Harding gave us his interviews. Philip Burton gave us Wasn’t that a Time! (1961) with verite scenes of Anne. Signe Waller gave us a copy of Red November/ Black November about the KKK killings in Greensboro, NC in 1979.  The coverage includes Anne’s speech at a mass memorial march and rally a year later: “The real danger comes from people in high places, from the halls of Congress to the boardrooms of our big corporations who tell white people that if their pay checks are eaten up by taxes it’s not because of our bloated military budget but because of government programs that benefit black people.  If young whites are unemployed, it’s because blacks are getting all the jobs. Our problem is the people in power who are creating a scapegoat mentality. That’s what is creating the danger of a fascist movement in America.”   That speech rings especially true today (substitute undocumented immigrant workers as well as African Americans).

Intolerance towards dissent, homophobia, sexism, class oppression, and white supremacy is on the rise in many of our communities. This project looks deeply at these issues from the voice, mind, and history of a passionate activist. Anne Braden’s history includes repression, marginalization, and public condemnation of her ideas. Contemporary Americans and others will benefit from a deeper understanding of this legacy, and the first-hand account by a southern white woman will provide an accessible point of entry for many. Anne Braden’s story is a model of a good life lived in the struggle for social justice.