Anne Braden:  Southern Patriot

                I thought I knew about Carl and Anne Braden before I saw this remarkable documentary, “Anne Braden:  Southern Patriot,” made by Anne Lewis and Mimi Pickering.  But I was very wrong.

 The documentary,  features Anne herself speaking near the end of her life at length before college classes and commentaries by  her biographer,  Catherine  Fosi; scholar civil rights/civil liberties  leader and former CPUSA Vice Presidential candidate, Angela Davis; Vincent Harding(leading scholar of African American history and many others whose lived she touched and and enriched.  It  connects beautifully the personal with the political to tell the story of a women whose life intersected and addressed the major issues confronting modern U.S. society

  Anne Lewis was kind enough to send me the DVD after I learned about it through the  Internet Labor History Discussion List sponsored by the American Historical  Association.    Books and articles, however  well intentioned and well done they are, cannot convey in effective content and form as this documentary does  the contextual  meaning of Anne Braden’s life—a life, to borrow a key concept from Karl Marx Capital,  lived fully  with and for its  “use value,”  confronting the contradictions of the time and enriching community and society as against  a life lived for its  “exchange value ” that is,  lived to accumulate  personal wealth, status and  fame, indifferent to community and society   

                Anne Braden grew up in relative privilege in post WWI Alabama.  Although she considered herself a “new woman” of a “new South,”(no Scarlet O’Hara in a chauffeured Pierce Arrow) she really didn’t begin  confront the central question of her society, what she later saw as the dehumanizing institutional racism of  the  “Southern police state,” until she became a newspaper reporter following events in a Birmingham  courthouse during  WWII. 

The U.S. was at war with  Hitler/ Axis/fascism, which she came to realize  was also a war against “our{meaning the segregationist South’s} ideology.”

 In Birmingham seventy years ago she saw an African-American man sentenced to twenty-years in prison for the way he looked at a white women.  When an African-American waitress asked her another  time  what had happened in the courthouse, she said matter of fact “just a colored murder” and watched with surprise and guilt as the waitress trembled before her. 

This was the “ordinary racism” of the Southern police state  and she realized that she was a part of it.  But she also came to realize that without understanding class relations, “classism,” one couldn’t either fully understand or overcome racism. Like her later friend, Martin Luther King, she was always a Southerner, never rejecting the language, literature, food preferences, music, of the culture into which she was born and raised. 

                After WWII, Anne Braden would spend the rest of her life as a social revolutionary fighter for a real “new South” without any shred of either racism or the poverty and inequality  that was the was the dialectical cause and effect of that racism.

 In 1947, she left Alabama for Louisville, where she would meet Carl Braden,  who came from a working class American socialist family.  Together, they lived  and worked  in the following decades for workers rights against brutal coal mine operators; risked their lives in 1954  to try to sell a home in 1954 to an African American family;  endured terroristic threats and arrests and imprisonment under laws reminiscent of the Prussia of Karl Marx youth;  published while they could the militant independent  The Southern Patriot; and through organizations like the Southern Conference Education Fund(SCEF) became valued allies of Civil Rights activists like the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth(who appears in the documentary) and his close associate, the Reverend Martin Luther King.

In the process they  influenced many people who came into contact with them through a reasoned and responsible progressivism—one very different than the anarchist influenced “new left” personalities and organizations which confused revolutionary  rhetoric with social reality and posturing with policy, as if they had the wealth, organizational power, and ownership and control of media that the establishments they condemned had.  

 After Carl passed away three decades later, Anne continued to work  for what most people  through the world would call  genuine human rights, freedom, and democracy.

                Anne and Carl were red-baited and of course worked closely with real "card carrying" Reds all of their political lives.   Who else would they work with?  Anti-Communist “social democrats”  and liberals who spoke about the need to end segregation in order to win the cold war in the “third world” while they supported loyalty oaths and political purges in the U.S.?   Those for whom compromise and respectability took precedence over militancy and united  action. 

  To use an historical analogy that would give shake up the purveyors of conventional wisdoms old and new, one might say that the Bradens were as much a part of a larger “Communist led” resistance movement as the Viet Minh during and after WWII in Vietnam, the Partisan forces in wartime Yugoslavia, Greece and Italy, fighting against a dictatorship that used  racism and police terror to sustain its power. 

They were of course not “agents” of a dictatorial party serving the interests of a foreign power, the Soviet Union, the “interpretation “ of those who harassed and imprisoned them (whom one might saywere agents of  a dictatorial power structure serving  the capitalist class).   But neither were  any of the wartime and postwar liberation movements, however many libraries could be filled with both general and footnoted, peer reviewed propaganda to prove that they were  

I suspect that some  who respect  admire Anne Braden and whose memories are an integral part of this brilliant documentary might not like the tone of this review essay, and I meant no offense them But  I think Anne and Carl  would have enjoyed  

 “Anne Braden:  Southern Patriot” deserves  to be seen on American public television and perhaps, MSNBC, the commercial cable network that reaches out to media’s most neglected market, the broad American left, which has much to learn from this life.  It deserves to be ordered by college and high school libraries through the country.   It even richly deserves to be banned by Texas and Arizona school boards and education departments, which would probably help its general circulation,  since in today’s U.S. that is a badge of honor.

 Finally, it deserves to be shown at the White House by President Obama, as Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt once showed films and documentaries with serious social content in the White House.   At the very least, readers should find the information about the documentary in DVD form and both purchase it for home use and encourage friends  and local libraries to purchase it. 

P.S. Readers might also purchase and ask friends to purchase Catherine Fosi’s excellent biography, Catherine Fosi,  Subversive Southerner:Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South(New York:MacMillan:2002).  With a forward by Angela Davis, it is a sophisticated and sensitive analysis of Anne Braden’s life and times and their larger meaning.