Anne Braden
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"Anne McCarty Braden" was an American advocate of racial equality. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, and raised in rigidly segregated Anniston, Alabama, Braden grew up in a white middle-class family that accepted southern racial mores wholeheartedly. A devout Episcopal Church in the United States of America/Episcopalian, Braden was bothered by racial segregation, but never questioned it until her college years at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Virginia. After working on newspapers in Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama, she returned to Kentucky as a young adult to write for the Louisville Times. There, in 1948, she met and married fellow newspaperman Carl Braden, a left-wing trade unionist. She became a supporter of the African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955–68)/civil rights movement at a time when it was unpopular among southern whites.

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The first task of whites in these struggles is to be vocal and visible.

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In every age, no matter how cruel the oppression carried on by those in power, there have been those who struggled for a different world. I believe this is the genius of humankind, the thing that makes us half divine: the fact that some human beings can envision a world that has never existed.

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