Anne Braden and the House That Was Bombed

In nineteen fifty-four, a Black man named Andrew Wade wanted to buy a house in a white Louisville suburb called Shively. No white realtor would sell him one. So he asked his friends Anne and Carl Braden, who were white, to buy the house on his behalf and then transfer the deed to him. The Bradens did it. Wade and his wife Charlotte moved in.

Their neighbors responded within days. A cross was burned on the lawn. Windows were broken. A rifle shot was fired through the house. On June twenty-seventh, nineteen fifty-four, a dynamite charge exploded under the house and blew out a section of the foundation. The Wades' infant daughter was inside. She was not hurt. No one was arrested for the bombing.

What happened next was not what you would expect. The local authorities turned their investigation toward the Bradens. Anne Braden was a journalist who had been active in labor and civil rights causes for years. Carl Braden was also a journalist. They were charged with sedition, with conspiring to damage property with the intent to spread the doctrines of communism. The theory was that the Bradens had arranged the whole episode, including the bombing of a house they had arranged for a Black family to live in, as a communist plot to stir racial tension.

Carl Braden was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. The conviction was overturned on appeal. The sedition charges against Anne were eventually dropped. The Wades never returned to the Shively house.

Anne Braden spent the next four decades as one of Louisville's most persistent civil rights organizers. She worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, with the open housing movement, with anti-war activists. She was monitored by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for decades. She died in Louisville in two thousand six at age eighty-one.

The house in Shively was not rebuilt. The Bradens had paid for it out of their own savings.