| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Catherine Fosl. Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South. Foreword by Angela Davis. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2002. Pp. xxix, 418. $35.00.
If biography at its most pedestrian traps the reader in numbing details of daily life, expansive biography embeds individual lives in a broad and textured historical context, bringing to light reciprocal relations between real human beings and historical phenomena such as migrations, wars, economic revolutions, and fundamental shifts in public policy. Good biography also highlights links between seemingly disparate events and movements in ways temporally limited period histories cannot. Catherine Fosl's account of the life of Kentucky journalist and antiracist activist Anne Braden is a biography that does all of these things.	1
Fosl writes beautifully, drawing both with a broad brush and a fine line. She embeds the life of one white southern campaigner for racial justice in a detailed tapestry of the times and places that Braden's life touched. Through Braden's narrative, Fosl makes important historiographic contributions. She roots the 1950s civil rights movement in the "radical inter-racialism" of the Depression and New Deal-era Southern left. She makes clear that, even before the Supreme Court's Brown decision, the left wing of the southern labor movement and the interracial progressive coalition galvanized by Henry Wallace's 1948 campaign for the presidency were chipping away at the foundations of segregation, both by actively challenging it and by doing something equally subversive: building communities across racial lines. These coalitions, Fosl argues, were the basis for a white support structure in the South when the black mass movement for racial justice exploded in the mid-1950s.	2
Like many feminist biographers, Fosl is interested in the relationship between the personal and the political in the life of her subject, and she makes a strong case that, in Braden's life, the two fed and reinforced each other. Communities formed in the working-class struggle, in resistance to Jim Crow and in resistance to the anticommunist hysteria that swept the nation after World War II, gave Braden a sense of belonging and meaning that she had never had as a white child growing up in the segregated South. Antiracist work gave Braden entrée into what one of her black activist friends called the "other America," where whites and African Americans worked together to realize Braden's vision of "a world without walls" (p. 139).	3
Honoring that vision, Braden and her husband Carl, a fellow activist and journalist, agreed in 1954 to purchase a home for an African-American veteran and his family in an all-white suburban Louisville subdivision. The litany of violence that followed the Wade family's move into their new home two days before the Brown decision is all too familiar: the death threats, the cross-burnings, the bombing. The story of what happened to the Bradens after they helped Andrew and Charlotte Wade offers readers terrifying insight into the way southern politicians used the 1950s Red Scare to punish and silence white opponents of segregation. The Bradens were charged with sedition. Prosecutor Scott Hamilton insisted they had themselves bombed the Wades' home to create sympathy for integration. Declaring war on "Communist conspiracy" in Louisville, Hamilton equated interracialism with subversion and made splashy headlines by hauling "Red" reading matter out of the homes of the city's best-known white racial justice activists. Carl Braden was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. He served seven months before the Supreme Court invalidated state sedition laws in 1956; the first forty-two days were in solitary confinement.	4
The Kentucky sedition cases became a cause celebre connecting the Bradens to kindred spirits across the United States. Among them were maverick journalist I. F. Stone, who wrote about their case, and New York City Episcopal priest Howard Melish, in whose home Anne and Carl met a young Birmingham activist named Angela Davis. Tapping this network, the Bradens spoke across the country about the vital connection between civil liberties and civil rights.	. . .

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