Carl and Anne Braden and the struggle for Equality

I came across an article about Carl and Anne Braden this week while on Facebook, of all things.

The Bradens' story is pretty extraordinary. They were placed on trial for sedition -- and convicted -- for buying a home in an all-white neighborhood of Louisville with the intent of transferring the title to a black family. Carl spent months in prison on the Sedition conviction before being released on bond.

Carl and Anne worked tirelessly for racial equality in the US for a very long time. After Carl passed in 1975, Anne continued the work until her passing in 2006. I can't do their story justice in this format but there are plenty of resources on the internet. Here's another one that focuses primarily on Anne's work.

And now more than a half-Century later, there are still plenty of hateful white supremacists around. It's just that most of them have gotten pretty good at covering over their hatred with a thin veneer of respectability.

But it's also true that after Hair Hitler assumed power, many of them were/are happily letting their hate flag fly. That's only a little less common now that the former Racist-In-Chief is not squatting in the Oval Office.

So even though they now longer have the force of hateful and evil laws and the advocacy of a openly-racist President and his staffers backing them up, we must counter their machinations and actions at every turn as the Bradens and so many of others have done for so many years.

This we must do until they're compelled to stand down and slink away, discredited and impotent.

"Bulldog Ben" Basile

© 2021 Ben Lawrence Basile