Identification and Evaluation of Sources Anne McCarty Braden, a daughter of the white South in perhaps the truest sense, was one of the greatest and most under-acknowledged civil rights activists of the 1950s and 60s. The reporter represented a changing view in the South towards segregation and social revolution beyond her time. How did Anne Braden’s perspective as a white, southern woman affect her role in the Civil Rights movement? Catherine Fosl’s Subversive Southern: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South, is the quintessential biography of Anne Braden – and the only one. This limited scope in terms of coverage of Braden’s life is the exact reason that Fosl started the biography, but presents issues (a main …show more content…
The fact that Braden was still alive and politically active gave Fosl access to a rich source for her biography, but also makes historical objectivity more challenging. Objectivity is also challenged by the biography’s purpose: to spotlight the leadership of a woman so often left in the footnotes of history. The book was even published four years before Braden’s death. Fosl balances perspectives by writing about the world around Braden as objectively as possible, while Braden herself is written from a much more human and subjective point of view. Anne Braden’s memoir, The Wall Between, was written in response to the Rone Court incident and sedition case of 1954. Braden intended for it to be like many of her articles, letters and other material: a call to action for whites to recognize the faults of the world around them and fight to make a change. She taps into her recognition of this wall between societies when she was young and covers up until the end of the case, all while outlining her own …show more content…
Anne developed a unique writing style that relied on metaphors and dialogue, both techniques most likely developed from her literary way of looking at the world as a young girl. Braden’s memoir about the sedition case, The Wall Between, is a metaphor in itself. Braden continually refers to a wall between blacks and whites and the negative effects its division has on the people of both sides. She uses this and other metaphors as a means to simplify ideas, like that of racial unity to overcome segregation: “For it can’t be crashed through – not from your side alone” (Braden, The Wall Between 8). In “Free Thomas Wansley” and The Wall Between, Braden recounts conversations like dialogue in a novel as a way to make her writing more approachable and vivid, something that is key to impacting her