Praise
for Catherine Fosl's Subversive Southerner:
Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice
in the Cold War
South (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002;
University of Kentucky Press, 2006)
“We would be in Catherine Fosl’s debt if
she had done no more than create a clear-eyed and compelling portrait
of one of the great figures of our time. But Subversive Southerner does
more than give Anne Braden the full-scale biography she deserves. It
also provides a searing dissection of how anticommunism buttressed
white supremacy and of the price that those who struggled against that
deadly partnership paid. This book will join a critical debate on the
impact of the Cold War on the civil rights movement, and complicate our
understanding of the continuities and discontinuities between the Old
Left and the New. Equally important, it will take its place among the
very best of the feminist biographies that have changed the way women
imagine--and live--their lives.”
--Jacquelyn
Dowd Hall, Julia Cherry Spruill Professor of History and Director
of the Southern Oral History Program, University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill
“When the civil rights struggle engulfed
the South, Anne Braden was one of the courageous few who crossed the
color line to fight for racial justice. Her history is a proud and
fascinating one, and for many years we have marched together, picketed
together, registered new voters together. Please read this book. The
more we know about yesterday's struggle to redeem the South from
segregation, the better chance we will have to protect our children
from the neo-Confederates now trying to roll back our progress. Anne
Braden is indeed a ‘subversive Southerner’--a label she can wear with
pride, because she spent her life fighting to build
a New South, where all our people could live together in freedom and
equality.”
“What a gift! Carl and Anne Braden were
some of the fiercest fighters who walked across the twentieth century.
This is an important historical work where the author chooses wisely to
share her pages with the voice of the subject. It shows us Anne's
struggle to fight against the racism and injustice of southern culture
within her community, and her family, and remain a southerner. We see
the Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of one who came to that
struggle waiting for it to happen and often having to fight some of its
leaders for the right to be a participant. Anne Braden's life teaches
us the importance of following principle rather than people."
-- Bernice
Johnson Reagon of Sweet
Honey in the Rock, Distinguished Professor of History at American
University,
Curator Emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of
American
History
“Anne Braden's life stories drill down
to the roots of the country's struggles for Civil Rights and Civil
Liberties. I salute Anne for the extraordinary courage of her life.”
--
Bob Moses, former Mississippi SNCC field secretary and founder of
the Algebra Project
"Catherine Fosl's book is filled with
insights into the lives of Anne Braden and her husband Carl, prophetic
dissenters from the orthodox racism of the mid-twentieth century South.
But this is no narrow-gauged biography. In vivid and moving
prose, Fosl places Anne Braden in the context of a changing South and
shows her readers how and
why the Bradens joined with others in fighting to destroy a world in
which
white men ruled, white women served, and black Southerners were
supposed to
remain docile and subservient."
-- Dan T. Carter,
Educational Foundation Professor of History, University of
South Carolina, author of Scottsboro and When
the War was Over: The Failure of Reconstruction in the South, 1865-1867
as well as The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the
New Conservatism and the Transformation of American Politics
"Subversive Southerner is filled
with powerful gifts that we need in these difficult times when many
Americans seem to have forgotten that the central vocation that binds
us together as citizens is 'to form a more perfect union,' to expand
our democracy beyond the limits of its best possibilities. Catherine
Fosl's carefully researched and thoughtful story tells of Anne Braden,
a remarkable representative of that courageous, unsung group of native
white southerners who risked their social status and their lives to
stand openly with the African American Freedom movement of the
post-World War II years. This book is both a reminder of
important forgotten history and a source of inspiration to those of us
who are committed to the continued democratic re-creation of our
nation. In
our time of 'war against terrorism,' it is good to be reminded that
Braden
had to face not only the white terrorism and bitter ostracism of her
native
region, but also had to stand firm with her husband, Carl Braden,
against
the fierce anticommunism that was often used against workers for racial
democracy
during the Cold War. The fact that it is Anne Braden who remains
and
not the anti-democratic system of southern legal segregation strongly
suggest
that we need not be permanently shackled by the culture of our origin."
-- Vincent
Harding, Co-Chairperson, The Veterans of Hope Project and Professor
of Religion and Human Transformation, Iliff School of Theology
"Anne Braden’s life as a social activist
spans more than half a century, and her story is as instructive as it
is
inspirational. The old cliché certainly applies here: I could
not
put this book down, and did not want it to end.”
—John
Dittmer, Crandall Professor of History, DePauw University and
author
of Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi
