[Antiracism] Anne Braden, White Anti-Racist Activist, Dies

[Mary Bombardier]

>
>
><http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?key=92217079&url_num=1&url=http://www.arc.org/racewire/index.html>
>Inside-Out and Upside-Down
>An Interview with Anne Braden
>
>By June Rostan, ColorLines RaceWire
>
>     Anne Braden, long-time activist and civil rights leader, died on 
>March 6 at a hospital in Louisville, Ky. She was taken there over 
>the weekend suffering from pneumonia. She was 81.
>
>
>     Anne entered the civil rights struggle in 1954. At the time, 
>black couples couldn't buy homes in segregated neighborhoods so 
>Andrew and Charlotte Wade asked a white couple, Anne and Carl 
>Braden, to buy a house on their behalf in an all-white area of 
>Louisville, Kentucky. The Bradens bought the house, and the uproar 
>that followed changed all their lives. The house was bombed. No one 
>was hurt, but the perpetrators were never caught. Instead, the state 
>charged Anne and Carl with sedition--Carl was sentenced to 15 years 
>in prison and served eight months. Anne wrote a book about this 
>incident, The Wall Between, in 1958 that was reissued by the 
>University of Tennessee last year with a must-read 40-page epilogue. 
>The bombing catapulted Anne into the freedom movement, and since 
>that time she has been at the heart of anything that has to do with 
>race and justice in the South.
>
>     Anne and Carl formed a lifetime partnership of social activism 
>and were so committed to self-determination and leadership for 
>people of color that for years they were regarded as pariahs by 
>white liberals and castigated as Communists. In the late '40s and 
>early '50s, they worked with civil rights and labor groups in 
>Louisville. In the 1960s, they staffed the extraordinary Southern 
>Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), and were central to the civil 
>rights movement. After SCEF broke up in the early 1970s, Anne helped 
>found the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social 
>Justice (SOC) and continued working with them into her 70s. Anne set 
>the benchmark for white, anti-racist organizing in the South for 
>more than 50 years.
>
>     The following is a conversation recorded with Anne in 2001.
>
>Q: You have an incredible ability to look at people who opposed you 
>and Carl, to understand where they are coming from and not be 
>judgmental. How were you able to do that?
>
>I never did hate those people who opposed us in the `50s because I 
>knew that I could have been in their position. I was just lucky that 
>I was able to break out of being white in a racist society and 
>privileged in a classist society. The "open sesame" for my 
>generation was race. Once we could understand what racism had done, 
>then everything fell like a house of cards. It opened everything to 
>question: economic injustice, foreign policy. If you don't 
>understand white supremacy, then you do not understand the country. 
>The first thing I had to realize was that the people I loved, my 
>family, my friends, the people running Alabama were wrong. But once 
>you realized that, it was not hard to realize that the people 
>running the national government were wrong too.
>
>Q: What did your generation learn from the civil rights movement of 
>the `50s and `60s?
>
>The '60s were so important because the country had to confront the 
>issue of racism which it was built on. When African Americans began 
>to organize, they were the foundation. The foundation moved and the 
>whole building shook. That is why people were able to organize 
>against the war. That's why women were able to organize. All that 
>happened because of the black movement.
>
>I think our country was moving tentatively in the `60s toward 
>turning its assumptions, policies, and values upside down. Southern 
>whites of my generation who got involved in the civil rights 
>movement turned our lives around. What we did is what this whole 
>country needs to do: turn itself inside-out and upside-down and 
>build a society that is not based on racism. You have to come to 
>terms with this: that the society you live in is totally wrong and 
>that it is destroying you as well as people of color. I have not 
>overcome racism in myself. I have worked at it for 50 years but I 
>still see life through white eyes.
>
>Q: How do we get other low-income and working-class white people to 
>start working to overcome white supremacy?
>
>If you want to get white people involved in the anti-racist 
>movement, the starting point is not to ask them to give up their 
>privileges. That is not a good organizing approach. White people who 
>are struggling economically or living in terrible poverty have a 
>hard time seeing that they have white privilege.
>
>A lot of white working-class people have been turned off to our 
>movements because they have been put down. There is an assumption 
>among white intellectuals who think they are liberals or 
>anti-racists that all working-class and poor whites are flaming 
>racists. They may have been some of the people who joined the Klan, 
>but I have met just as many flaming racists in the country-club set.
>
>Q: Why do you say that white people have to come to their 
>understanding of racism, not just through an intellectual 
>experience, but through something emotional?
>
>Because racism goes so deep. The kind of emotional experience that 
>can make a difference varies with different people. Some get there 
>through personal relationships. I didn't meet just one person, I met 
>a movement. A community has to go through a process of turning 
>itself inside-out. I think of Birmingham--it's not perfect, but it's 
>better than a lot of places in the South today. It went through the 
>turmoil. White people in Birmingham in the `60s had to look at what 
>the heck was going on. You had four little girls killed when the 
>church was bombed; you had dogs and fire hoses turned on black 
>protesters.
>
>Q: Do you think we can build multi-racial social justice and 
>organizing groups in the South?
>
>The South is not black and white any more. We have growing Latino 
>and Asian populations. And the Native Americans were always here, 
>but we didn't know it until that movement surfaced visibly in the 
>`60s. To build multi-racial organizations in a racist society is 
>virtually impossible. Impossible means it just takes a little 
>longer. I tell people not to get discouraged if they try and fail, 
>to try again.
>
>I am part of two organizations that are really interracial, 
>multi-ethnic, and definitely led by people of color. They are the 
>Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice (SOC) 
>and the Kentucky Alliance Against Racism and Repression. We need 
>more whites who are willing to take action and to serve in 
>organizations with people of color in the leadership. Those of us 
>who are white have to be careful that we aren't trying to dominate. 
>We are so used to running things.
>
>In the late `40s when it was so repressive, the Southern Conference 
>for Human Welfare (SCHW), which was started in 1938 as an economic 
>justice group, reorganized into SCEF around a single issue: race. 
>There were other issues but Jim Crow segregation had to be dealt 
>with first. SCEF was bi-racial from the beginning. Its outreach was 
>to white Southerners. We wanted to get them involved in action on 
>picket lines and going to jail, not just sitting around in human 
>relations meetings.
>
>When the movement won the lunch counter battle and voting rights, 
>SCEF began to shift back to more economic justice issues, as the 
>black movement did. But then SCEF broke up in 1973. I came to the 
>conclusion that the basic weakness in SCEF was that it became 
>overwhelmingly white. We got this great influx of whites, after SNCC 
>(the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) told whites to go 
>organize whites. SCEF became a battleground for white people to 
>fight out their quarrels. The real purpose got lost.
>
>I made up my mind then that I would never spend another minute of my 
>life building something that was all or mostly white because it is 
>not going to change anything. It is a waste of time.
>
>We deliberately organized SOC as an interracial group. It has 
>evolved into an organization that is clearly led by people of color.
>
>Q: Do you think it is important to keep bringing in new people?
>
>That is the biggest weakness of our great progressive movement. We 
>are reluctant to reach the people who are not involved. It's worst 
>among whites who consider themselves anti-racist. They don't want to 
>talk to white people who are not involved. Most whites who come into 
>anything interracial go through the stage of working mainly in black 
>communities because it is more comfortable and exciting. That is 
>what I did years ago.
>
>In 1951, I wrote to William Patterson, head of the Civil Rights 
>Congress, about what I was doing, including going to some of the 
>black churches. He wrote me and said, "You don't need to be going to 
>the black churches, Anne. They don't need you to tell them that they 
>are oppressed. You need to be talking to the white churches." That 
>changed my life right then.
>
>That was when I really decided that my mission was to get out and 
>talk to white people. That is why I was startled when all these 
>white folks in SNCC got upset when they were told to go organize 
>white people. Didn't they know that was what they ought to be doing?
>
>My father, a working-class white man, said to me in the late `60s, 
>"There's a revolution coming in this country and I don't have 
>anything to lose from it." Then 10 years later, his attitude was 
>altogether different. He'd gotten this sense that blacks had asked 
>for too much, that they had gone too far. What do you think happened 
>to change his mind?
>
>He did not come to that conclusion by himself. That was the 
>propaganda that was being put out. The people in control knew what 
>to do to keep control. This was what was being said in academic 
>circles, in government, in the media, everywhere else. He heard 
>that. He didn't think that up himself.
>
>There was a campaign for the minds of white people and a campaign of 
>repression against blacks. People don't understand the repression 
>that happened in the late `60s. That movement did not just go away. 
>It was destroyed by repression. They chopped off the black 
>organizers.
>
>It was irrevocably damaging to the country that the movement was 
>blunted at that point. It really was merging the issues. It was 
>taking on economic justice. The unfinished business of the civil 
>rights movement was economic justice.
>
>Q: What is our hope for the future?
>
>I think that there will be a new mass movement. I have been part of 
>three mass movements in my life, times of great drama when things 
>really explode: the upsurge of the `50s and `60s, the anti-Vietnam 
>War movement, and the Jesse Jackson campaigns of the `80s. They were 
>movements that really changed things.
>
>At the first meeting of the Jackson delegates in 1984, there were 
>400 people. People started talking about what was happening in their 
>communities. There were white coal miners from Appalachia, Latinos 
>from New Mexico, people from all over the country. To me, one of the 
>political tragedies of the 20th century is that the grassroots base 
>of the Jackson movement collapsed after 1988. If it had kept going, 
>we'd have a viable third force and an alternative to the two main 
>parties.
>
>Mass movements usually start from a specific struggle. The main 
>thing you do, when you don't see the mass movement you have been 
>hoping for, is work to build struggles around specific issues. We've 
>spent lots of time in Louisville around the police brutality issue. 
>We do the battles at our doorsteps, bringing new people in around 
>specific issues. They are the building blocks. I don't know when 
>this will explode into a movement. Nobody thought that Montgomery, 
>cradle of the Confederacy, would be the place where the movement 
>would break out in the 1950s.
>
>For whites, none of this will change unless we deal with white 
>supremacy. It's fine to sit and talk and get your heart in the right 
>place, but it ain't going to have one bit of impact. Whites need to 
>be visible and engaged. We have to break that solid white wall of 
>resistance.
>
>
>To find out more about plans for Anne's funeral and a memorial 
>service, or to send a contribution in Anne's name, contact the 
>Kentucky Alliance at 3208 W. Broadway, Louisville, Ky. 40211, 
>502-778-8130, <mailto:kyall at bellsouth.net>kyall at bellsouth.net.
>
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