Dissertation Information for Catherine Anne FoslNAME:
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SCHOOL: ADVISORS: COMMITTEE MEMBERS: MPACT Status: Fully Complete Title: \"Once comes the moment to decide\": Anne Braden and the Civil Rights Movement Abstract: Anne McCarty Braden is a southern White woman who made a dramatic break with segregationist culture in the years just after WWII and committed her life to the causes of racial and social justice, launching an unusual activist career in which she has become over half a century\'s time a sort of \"white southern conscience.\" This dissertation is an oral history-based feminist biography of Braden, covering the years from her 1924 birth and depression-era Alabama upbringing to the height of the mass civil rights movement in 1964. The study devotes particular attention to the post-WWII years, when a national anticommunist hysteria found heightened resonance in the South amid quickening civil rights agitation and federally mandated racial changes. In that context, Braden found regional notoriety as a communist after a sensationalized 1954 Louisville case in which she and her husband were indicted for sedition after the dynamiting of a house they had bought for African American friends in a segregated neighborhood. Her experiences in the 1950s form a near-perfect case study to illuminate the twinning of anticommunist and segregationist ideologies in the region in order to mute dissent. Her subsequent in both local and regional protest campaigns of the mass civil rights movement years illustrates both the staying power of anticommunism and Braden\'s own extraordinary resiliency. Relying heavily on oral sources, supplemented by relevant secondary literature and a variety of primary sources such as diaries and correspondence, this manuscript locates Braden\'s experiences as distinctly gendered and examines the influences of her gender, race, class, and regional identification in shaping her identity, which in turn shaped her relationships, activism, ideology, and ideals. |
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