Anne Breden: Goodbye to A Friend

OVEC mourns the passing of Anne Breden, who died In Louisville, Ky. on March 6 at the age of 81. In the mid-90s, Anne worked with OVEC’s Laura Forman in Louisville to draw attention to environmental justice issues and the behavior of Ashland Oil, Inc.

Anne stood only 4-foot 8-inches tall, but she was a giant in the civil rights movement. She was an organizer of the fight for black integration and equality, and an American radical of untamable commitment who – together with her husband, Carl – educated several generations of young activists for civil rights and social justice. She was recently included in the Kentucky Civil Rights Hall of Fame.

In 1967, authorities in Pike Co., Ky. used sedition laws to imprison Anne and Carl, accusing them of being communists trying to overthrow the county government because they had been helping a couple protest strip mining. Before the Bradens could be tried, a federal appeals court declared the state’s sedition law unconstitutional.

Good-bye Anne. The thousands you mentored will follow your lead in fighting like hell for the living!

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Finding the Other America, by Anne Braden
(Excerpted. Please take the time to read this entire stirring article: www.forusa.org/fellowship/jan-feb_06/braden.html)

If we are serious about the challenge of the unfinished business of racism, we must start by realizing that this is not a task we must complete. It is one we must begin.

It is the basic contradiction in our entire history as a nation. The first European settlers who landed on these shores saw themselves as creating a great new experiment in democratic government. Yet they were enslaving a whole population of human beings, Africans, and committing genocide against the indigenous peoples of North America.

As a nation, we have never really dealt with this contradiction. We’ve only picked around the edges of it. So our first step is to turn ourselves inside out and our institutions upside down.

…The problem is that the assumption that the good things of life are for whites first was built into our institutions from the beginning so firmly that we accept it as part of the scenery. Given this framework, whites must make a very conscious decision and take concerted action to “change sides” on the issue of race.

But once we make that decision, we can feel overwhelmed. This problem is so massive, what can we possibly do to change it? The Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, with which I work in Louisville, has an approach to this problem. We say we have to grab hold of something specific, some specific manifestation of racism in our local institutions – for example the police force, the court system, our educational institutions, or job discrimination. Joint struggles around these specific issues actually do bring people together.

…we must stop acting as if history started two years ago. Things have not always been as they are now. In the South, for instance, our greatest change happened when we lived under a literal police state. And it does not take a mass movement to begin. Every mass movement has started because a few people came together and began to talk to others…