This is the story of a woman named Braden
Written: May 02 '03 (Updated May 04 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Many interesting details.
Cons: Left-wing bias, deliberately omits important information.
The Bottom Line: Typical left-wing academic history.
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| lilburne's Full Review: |
This is a biography of Anne Braden, a longtime left-wing political activist in the South. The author of the book is a professor named Catherine Fosl. Fosl’s last name is an amalgam of her maiden name and that of her husband. “Fosl” is not an abbreviation of the word “fossil,” as one might assume from her fossilized left-wing academic perspective.
Anne Braden has been working for her vision of social justice in the South since the 1940s. Together with her husband Carl (who died in 1975), Braden has been active against Jim Crow, pushing to have Southern white people support the campaign by black Americans against segregation. With Jim Crow out of the picture, Braden has been working on many “peace and justice” projects.
Anne Braden was born in a well-off white family in Alabama. Her family was pro-segregation, but its encouragement of Anne’s career helped lead her ultimately to work against segregation. As a reporter in Louisville, she met Carl, a fellow-employee at her paper. The Bradens began a career of activism, working with Communist-front organizations like the Civil Rights Congress.
Braden and her husband first came to national attention in 1954, when they helped a black family get a house in an all-white neighborhood in Louisville, Kentucky. Someone blew up the house, and prosecutors alleged that the incendiaries were not white supremacists but Communists trying to stir up trouble between the races. Carl was convicted of sedition under state law, based on the testimony of a witness who said he belonged to the Communist Party, and police witnesses who described the radical literature which had been seized from his home. Another defendant, the alleged bomber, was a white man who had served as a guard to defend the black family’s house against white supremacists. The prosecution alleged that the guard had in fact set the bomb, but the prosecution was later dropped.
After Carl’s conviction was overturned (based on the unconstitutionality of Kentucky’s sedition law), Anne and Carl began a long career of activism on behalf of the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF). This group engaged in publicity campaigns to persuade southern whites to work against Jim Crow. Not many southern whites took up the invitation, however. SCEF, and the Bradens as the most prominent representatives of the organization, were under suspicion among segregationists and among more moderate civil-rights groups, who worried that the Bradens and SCEF were Communists. The Bradens refused to say whether or not they were in fact Communists, claiming that it was a matter of principle for them not to encourage “red-baiting.” Anne published a pamphlet urging non-Communist civil-rights activists to work with Communists, saying that anti-Communism was a bogus issue raised by segregationists to divide the civil-rights community.
True to his anti-antiCommunist rhetoric, Carl Braden defied the House Committee on un-American Activities (HUAC), the famous Communist-hunting committee of the House of Representatives. HUAC met in Atlanta in 1958 to investigate Communist activities in the South. Braden was summoned to testify, as was Frank Wilkinson, a political associate of the Bradens who was working to abolish HUAC. Both Carl and Wilkinson refused to tell HUAC whether they were Communists, and they were both convicted of contempt of Congress. After the United States Supreme Court upheld both their convictions, Carl and Wilkinson served prison sentences in the early 1960s.
The 1960s proved to be a fruitful decade for the Bradens and for SCEF. Many young civil-rights activists were fervent anti-anti-Communists who believed that any attempt to exclude Communists from the movement would aid the segregationists. Thus, despite the distrust which they encountered from mainstream civil-rights groups like the NAACP, the Bradens were able to work with younger activists in their own organizations.
As part of this effort, SCEF held a meeting in New Orleans, together with the National Lawyers’ Guild (another group which had been accused of Communist associations), to discuss providing legal representation to sit-in demonstrators. The Louisiana authorities broke up the meeting, seizing many of SCEF’s records and accusing the group once again of Communist ties.
After the end of Jim Crow and Carl’s unexpected death, Anne Braden continued to work on many activist projects, both in her home town of Louisville and on a broader scale. Fosl clearly admires Anne Braden and sees her as a courageous role-model for future activists.
As acknowledged in a favorable review in the New York Times (quoted by Epinions), “the main failing of SUBVERSIVE SOUTHERNER--unfortunately, it is a central one--is that Fosl...declines to discuss the substance of the Bradens' relationship with the Communist Party....” Fosl says that she refuses to discuss this issue because it would in some way give credence to the idea that there’s something wrong with Communism. Since there’s nothing wrong with Communism, Anne Braden’s links (if any) to the Party must not be discussed. At least, this is how I interpreted Fosl’s convoluted explanation.
For those who don’t see a problem with this, imagine a biography of a prominent right-wing activist. Imagine that this activist had frequently said that his fellow right-wingers ought to work with Nazis in pursuit of common goals. Imagine, further, that this activist had said that accusations of Nazism were simply a left-wing plot to divide the Right. Imagine that this activist had frequently been accused of belonging to the American Nazi Party. Finally, imagine that this person’s biographer refused to discuss whether he had ever belonged to the Nazi Party. Wouldn’t this be a serious omission? Of course it would!
No academic historian would be able to get away with ignoring the possible Nazi links of a person he was writing about. Fosl is able to get away with ignoring Braden’s Communist links because of the strong current of anti-antiCommunism in the academic community. As has often been observed, prominent members of the intellectual establishment think that it would be McCarthyism to describe a Communist as a Communist.
During the long struggle against Jim Crow, many civil-rights activists had learned from hard experience not to work with Communists. The American Communist Party was subordinate to the Soviet Union and promoted that country’s goals, not the interests of the United States. While moderate supporters of civil rights wanted black people to get a fair share of the fruits of America’s capitalist system, Communists and other radicals wanted to abolish that system. For example: While moderates wanted restaurants to serve black and white customers equally, the Communists were apologists for the Soviet system, in which the government owned the restaurants, resulting in horrible service for customers of all races.
In the Turbulent Sixties, Communism and related forms of radicalism had a new vogue. If anything, the Communist Party was regarded by some activists as too square and conservative. Radical baby-boomers were greatly alienated from the capitalist system (How good could a system be which had produced the baby-boomers?). Instead of getting black people a fair share of the American pie, the radicals wanted to re-cook the pie itself.
At the very least, Anne Braden was a left-wing radical in full sympathy with the pie-recooking idea. It is possible that she was an actual Party member. Fosl gives enough evidence as to lead at least to a suspicion that there was some fire behind all the smoke. Consider the following pieces of evidence which are consistent with the hypothesis of Anne Braden’s Communist Party membership: Braden had a history of working with Communist-front groups like the Civil Rights Congress. She refused to confirm or deny whether she was a Communist. She urged left-wingers to cooperate with Communists. Her husband was identified as a Communist at the Louisville sedition trial. And, oh yes, Angela Davis wrote a Foreward to this book. All this does not prove Anne Braden to be a Communist, but it shows the need for further investigation.
If you ignore the blatant left-wing bias and the huge gap in the narrative concerning Anne Braden’s Communist ties, you might enjoy this book.
Recommended:
Yes
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lilburne
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Member: Maximilian Longley
Location: Durham, NC, USA
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