The Remarkable Story of ‘Anne Braden: Southern Patriot’

Anne Braden didn’t think that guilt was productive. 

She thought that what got people involved in the civil rights movement was a vision of a different world.

Born in 1924, Braden grew up in Anniston, Alabama–where the Freedom Riders’ bus was fire-bombed in 1961. She talks about being a young white child in the south, and seeing her mother’s house cleaner’s daughter wearing her hand-me-down clothes. They were different sizes, so the clothes didn’t fit right, and Braden says, “Something happened to me when I looked at her. I knew something was wrong.”

Braden dedicated her life to exposing and fighting against racial and economic injustice. She was subversive. She was arrested. She was praised by Martin Luther King Jr.

She wanted a different world.

Anne Braden

Braden is the subject of the documentary Anne Braden: Southern Patriot, which is available on DVD and at select screenings nationwide.

Award-winning filmmakers Anne Lewis and Mimi Pickering created this first-person documentary, and its brilliance rests greatly on the fact that Braden herself and her contemporaries, biographer and mentees tell the story. The seemingly hands-off approach by the filmmakers (no audible interview questions or voiceovers) works incredibly well, and lets Braden’s remarkable legacy unfold on its own merits. The soundtrack is appropriately present, but not noticeably so, as it should be in a documentary.

This documentary, in short, is amazing. Aside from the technical success of the film is the fact that Braden herself was an extraordinary human being.

Braden says that when she had the realization that something was wrong, it was like photography: “You put the film in the developing fluid and it begins to come clear, but it’s been there all along.”

The images kept becoming clearer and clearer to Braden as she worked as a journalist in the south and covered the courthouse, seeing black men be imprisoned for looking at white women the wrong way, and seeing how murdered black people were not newsworthy.

She didn’t feel guilt. She felt motivated to change her world.

Early on in her career, Braden recognized that issues of class and race were inextricably linked. She says,

“I was in a prison and life builds prisons around people and I had the prison that I was born white in a racist society. I was born privileged in a classist society. The hardest thing was class. I don’t know that I could have ever broken out of what I call the race prison if I hadn’t dealt with class.”  

She married Carl Braden, who was a “radical” activist active in the labor movement. “We got married to work together,” she says. By 1951, Braden was combining marriage, motherhood and activism.

Early on, her activism focused mainly on writing for and talking to black audiences about white people’s roles in racism and classism. The head of the Civil Rights Congress, William Patterson, told her that black people already know what she’s telling them–she needed to talk to white people, because they are the problem. She remembers that he said to her, “You know you do have a choice. You don’t have to be a part of the world of the lynchers. You can join the other America–the people who struggled  against slavery, the people who railed against slavery, the white people who supported them, the people who all through Reconstruction struggled.” She says, “I was very young, and that’s what I needed to hear.” Her work began in earnest.

The Bradens bought a house for a young black family, the Wades, in an all-white neighborhood (it was a way around segregation–Andrew Wade gave them the down payment, the Bradens purchased it, and then transfered the deed). The Wades’ home was shot at, crosses were burned in the yard and a bomb was set off underneath their daughter’s window (remarkably no one was physically hurt).

The Wades, showing where rocks had been thrown and broken the windows of their home.

The bomber was never caught or tried, but the Bradens were, along with five other whites who helped defend the Wades’ house. They were charged with sedition–it was, prosecutors said, all a plot by communists to overthrow Kentucky and the nation.

Braden says that “If you use every attack as a platform, they can’t win and you can’t lose. It works like a charm.” They used their arrest and jail time as a platform. “You can’t kill an idea anyway,” she says. “To a segregationist, integration means communism.”

The film highlights footage from Ku Klux Klan rallies, newspaper stories, meetings, marches, beatings and shootings during the red scare and the civil rights movement. The footage–often presented without narration–is powerful and provides the visual, historical context to Braden’s stories.

The film moves forward through each decade, highlighting social justice struggles (especially regarding race and economic injustice) and Braden’s continuous role. The complexity of anti-communist sentiment, the freedom of speech and association and violence of the ongoing civil rights struggles are examined in depth.

It was difficult watching the momentous struggles and changes of the 60s make way into the 70s, when she says, “That sense of being part of something larger gets lost.” Political activists were repressed and imprisoned, and much of the momentum was lost.

Anne Braden

As the footage from the 70s surfaces, it’s in color; all of a sudden history doesn’t seem so far away. When white women are screaming and chanting about “Niggers” when busing was implemented in 1975, and throwing rocks at the buses, it’s jarring how close it all is. David Duke screams about white power. Communist workers at an anti-Klan rally are shot and killed in the late 70s.

In a statement that seems all-too true today, Braden says of the lasting legacy of this era:

“And this idea of reverse discrimination took hold of the country, and I think it’s the most dangerous idea that’s ever been inflicted on this country. It tells white people that the source of their problem is people of color and it’s such a damn lie because it’s based on the theory that what black people got took something away from white people, and that is the opposite of what happened, every piece of legislation everything that happened that the black movement won, helped most white people and certainly poor and working class white people.”

At a 1980 rally in response to the communist workers’ deaths, she said,

“The real danger today comes from the people in high places, from the halls of congress to the board rooms of our big corporations, who are telling the white people that if their taxes are eating up their paychecks, it’s not because of our bloated military budget, but because of government programs that benefit black people; those people in high places who are telling white people that 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 scape goat mentality. That, that is what is creating the climate in which the Klan can grow in this country and that is what is creating the danger of a fascist movement in the 1980s in America.” 

As the film progresses, we see Braden marching for economic justice and to end police brutality. She stands out, with her cropped gray hair, small body and denim jumpers. Her voice shakes into a megaphone when she speaks at rallies, but her age doesn’t stop her. She keeps marching. When she can’t march, she’s pushed in a wheelchair.

Braden passed away in 2006 at age 81. Right before she died, she said, “I just don’t have time.” She still felt she had too much to do.

Anne Braden and Cornel West

I don’t know that I’ve ever been so inspired by a documentary. By the end, I was crying, near-sobbing–in celebration of Braden’s life, in mourning her death and in feeling a burning fire in my white belly that I needed to do something in this world. Anne Braden had effectively told me that I needed to get to work.

At a march, Braden says, “We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it’s won.” It hasn’t been, and we must continue her legacy.

Anne Braden: Southern Patriot puts Braden’s lifelong activism into the developing fluid and makes it clear to all of us. We should all look carefully at these images and be moved to not just frame them for display, but to make them shape our world now.