I wanted Anne Braden to give me all the answers, instead she put me back to work

An unpublished chapter from The Right Kind of White, about driving down to Louisville with salvation on my mind

Top notes:

Today’s essay deserves some explanation. The Right Kind of White is, quite intentionally, the kind of book you can read in an evening or two (books about race! they often just sit on the shelf!). To get it to that point, though, I cut out roughly an entire book’s worth of stuff— historical context, sociological commentary, but also stories. This is one of those stories. It’s about a trip I made down to Louisville, Kentucky to walk in Anne Braden’s footsteps. If you don’t know about Anne Braden, you’re in for a treat. This overview, from the SNCC archives, is a great place to start, but after you check that out I highly recommend Catherine Fosl’s incredible biography, Subversive Southerner.

Speaking of The Right Kind of White, I loved the two interviews I did last week, with

lyz

in her newsletter and with

Sarah Wheeler

in Romper. Sarah and Lyz are both absolutely brilliant. I also got to speak to full houses at Boswell Books in Milwaukee and Shakespeare and Company in Missoula. What a gift. Where will I pop up next? Pearl Street Books in LaCrosse, WI, of course! I’ll be there this coming Thursday, April 11th, at 6:30 PM. Come through, Driftless pals!

By the way, if you haven’t bought the book yet, thanks in advance for giving it a go. I’d love if you’d be up for reading and/or hearing my story (and I’d love even more if, after you do so, you’d be up to share your own story with me).

But wait, there’s more… Registration is now open for spring Barnraisers Project mini courses. These are standalone, two-hour-long, virtual classes on organizing for social justice in majority White communities. More information here, but suffice to say, these’ll be a lot of fun.

Another week, another long preamble. Ready for some storytelling? Cool.

In July of 2021— after a whole year of talking to White people in cities like Missoula about how to start affordable housing campaigns and suburbs like Columbia about how to integrate high school AP programs and towns like Clancy and Doland on how to start local community care networks so folks weren’t just home alone watching the reactionary yellers on TV— I took a pilgrimage. I was still chasing heroes, which in this era meant I was chasing Anne Braden, so I drove South towards Louisville. 

I made the drive during a summer where so many hopes were fading— not snuffed out, mind you, just left to slowly burn out. The vaccines were a miracle, but they did not end the pandemic. Donald Trump had been defeated just a few months previously. There had been dancing in the streets. Few said out loud “and now the work is done’ but that’s still how so many were acting. The bill hadn’t yet come due.

I expected it to be an emotionally triumphant trip. I was now doing the work that Anne Braden had started, so I wanted to see her old stomping ground and, I don’t know… be moved by it? Feel a kinship with my organizing hero? I wasn’t sure, to be honest, but it was worth a shot.

I left Milwaukee early in the morning and drove straight to Anne and Carl’s house at 4403 North Virginia Street, an address that was now legendary to me, having spent two years pouring over back issues of newsletters that Anne published from her living room. It was, well, a house. I mean, was I really expecting it to be anything but a house? It was a modest white shotgun house on a dead-end street in Louisville’s Black West End. A notary public lives there now, at least according to the sign out front. That wasn’t emotionally unsettling part. That came about an hour later, when I drove from the Braden House to Andrew and Charleen Wade’s old house a few miles down the highway.

The Wade house is the most famous part of the Anne and Carl Braden story. The Wades were a Black family who attempted to integrate the then all-White suburb of Shively. The Bradens purchased the house (but just as a pass through, the Wade’s put up the money for the transaction), a move that resulted in Anne and Carl being tried for sedition and the Wade house being firebombed. Before coming to town, I read a statement from the Commonwealth of Kentucky declaring that today, in a testament to the brave legacy of the Bradens and Wades, the city of Shively was now the most diverse, integrated community in the state.

I arrived in Shively around 5:00 PM, parking next to a worse-for-wear Marathon gas station with the words “Food Center” painted on the side in red letters. After a few minutes getting lost on unfamiliar streets, I was on Clyde Drive-- which in the Wade’s day was called Rone Court-- staring at a historical marker informing me in the past tense about a great wellspring of injustice that used to exist here, but that must have disappeared suddenly long ago.

“Louisville suburbs were racially segregated when African Americans Andrew and Charlotte Wade moved to Rone Court on May 15, 1954, two days before the Supreme Court condemned school segregation. Neighbors burned a cross and shot out windows and the Wade’s endured harassment until June 27^th when the house was dynamited.”

It was past quitting time now, so there were a fair number of neighbors milling about on Clyde Court’s sparsely landscaped front yards. Mostly Black families, but with at least a few White people sprinkled in. Everybody was friendly. I received a fair number of polite nods, hellos, and “how’s it goin’s?”. Nobody asked me why I was there, but neither did anybody seem perturbed by my presence.

It felt like a neighborly place, but it also felt like folks could use a little more money in their bank accounts at the end of the month. Most of the houses needed a fresh coat of paint or two. Every front yard looked like it’d be a little more welcoming if the city of Shively had built an actual sidewalk out front instead of a trail of dirt and patted-down grass.

I didn’t see the Wade house, of course, because the Wade house hadn’t existed for sixty years.

Maybe the forces of righteousness and justice won the war in Shively. It wasn’t the house bombers who were honored with a Commonwealth of Kentucky commemorative plaque. Black and White families really did live next to each other now. Squint hard enough and you could tell yourself that the I Have A Dream Speech had come alive.

I left Shively and drove to a neighborhood in the gentrified East End. I was immediately greeted by a different group of White people: White people jogging with dogs, White people enjoying al fresco cocktails, White people browsing boutiques. I met my friend Jessi—a White Mississippian by birth, a White Louisvillian by marriage. I knew her from my Barnraisers trainings. She had spent years trying to understand her place as a White Southern woman in a town like Lousiville. She was kind enough to meet me on a hip street side patio, buy me a couple bourbon slushies, and let me pepper her with questions about her adopted city.

I asked about Shively, and Jessi confirmed what I now suspected. There was, of course, context missing from those honey-tipped profiles of the Bradens and the Wade. The bombing and the sedition trial wasn’t enough to stop an eventual Federal desegregation push. When it became clear that wealthier White people of Shively couldn’t bomb the Blacks out anymore, instead they just abandoned ship.

“So where’d the White money go?” I asked Jessi already knowing the answer.

“It went as far East as possible. To places like Indian Hills.”

I laughed at the name. Of course it was called Indian Hills.

Indian Hills, an enclave that was over 95% White, where virtually nobody lived below the poverty line, which had successfully fought annexation by the City of Louisville for decades.

So, what I saw in Shively that day wasn’t a deliberately integrated neighborhood. It may have been racially diverse, but not due to collective high-mindedness. Instead, its situational integration was just one more byproduct of a marketplace in which Whiteness plus money offered a perennial “get out of community free” card.

We closed out our tab and I walked back to my hostel. The pieces were starting to click into place.

Anne and Carl Braden won neither a battle nor a war in Shively, but that’s not what they were trying to do there.

Ever since discovering Anne Braden, I lionized one small part of her racial justice work, the part where she got to stand apart from other White people, where she befriended famous Black people, where she got to be the exception to the rules of Whiteness. Her and Carl’s humble little house in the West End represented the platonic ideal of what I had tried and failed to create for myself over the past decade. I believed that If I mastered the language of anti-racism, learned to play Spades or how to dance to reggaeton, and never made an off-hand remark about a Black Woman’s hair or an Asian woman’s accent, then I, too, could be down like the Bradens. Perhaps my house as well could be visited by my generation’s Rosa Parks and Stokely Carmichael.

That wasn’t actually where Anne Braden spent most of her time, though. She was, quite frequently, on the road— drumming up support for the civil rights movement in many of the poorest, Whitest corners of the South, the places that other White leftists often wrote off as being too backwards and reactionary.

The Bradens didn’t win or lose a war in Shively because they weren’t trying to win or lose a war there. They hadn’t been organizing in Shively. They hadn’t built relationships with White people there. They were just doing a favor for the Wades—friends of friends whom they didn’t know but who needed any White couple’s name on a mortgage application.

It wasn’t the Braden’s fault that they didn’t transform Shively, but it is telling which of the two homes— the Wade’s or the Braden’s— was firebombed. A White couple moving to a Black neighborhood doesn’t actually threaten Whiteness. That’s an acceptable anomaly. Should Whiteness be asked to accommodate change on its own turf, though, that’s when the bombs come out. White people’s biggest challenge was never in the West End. It was always in Shively and Indian Hills.

The bigger problem was, it didn’t matter how hard Anne and Carl tried to reach out to other White people to shift that pattern. There was only so much they could do alone. The reinforcements never came. The (disproportionally Northern) student radicals who signed up in droves for the thrill and exceptionalism of Freedom Summers were asked directly–both by Anne and Carl and by Stokely Carmichael and other Black leaders– to stay in the South and to organize Whites as members of the Braden’s Southern Conference Education Foundation. All but a few packed up and went home. As Anne related wistfully years later, the radicals craved the credibility of the Black Freedom Struggle, but they “just didn’t love White people.” The Bradens didn’t fail, but there were more White communities to organize than there were Bradens to go around.

I had spent, at this point, half a lifetime searching for White social justice heroes to emulate. The Bradens were just the last in a long line. But I was missing the point. Just as Black organizers didn’t want any White saviors in their communities, so too did the Bradens not want other White people who dreamt of singlehandedly saving Whiteness from itself. They just needed more organizers. They just needed more boots on the ground, our ground. They just needed more White people who loved justice but didn’t look down on others in service of their own social justice dreams.

The next morning, I parked my car downtown and walked to the river.

The Ohio River is separated from downtown Louisville by Interstate 64—a hulking, foreboding concrete barricade. I found a parking spot close to the Louisville Slugger Museum. The streets were full of families returning to their car— all big smiles and souvenir bats. I headed in the other direction, away from the buildings and towards the greenspace that the city of Louisville had constructed along the riverbank.

The Ohio felt different from all the rivers I’d loved in my life. This wasn’t the Clark Fork in Missoula, a river I will always associate with benefit concerts and peace protests and a city full of graying ponytailed elders who loved me and made me feel at home. It wasn’t the Milwaukee River either, its verdant trail system the legacy of a past generation of benevolent socialist mayors. This was a river weighted with history— the great dividing line between South and North, between freedom and slavery, between the protagonists and antagonists of history, between the sin that needed to be addressed and the forces that presumably brought the reckoning.

Oh goodness, what a great, seductive story… good and evil, clear dividing lines, the whole works. And all things considered, it would have been a pretty good morning to buy into the weight of that story—the foggy grayness of the skies made the wide river stretch even further into the horizon. The wind blew just enough to leave a choppy, foreboding wake. It was a meteorologically appropriate day for stark metaphors.

It was never that simple, though. I knew that by now. The good White people didn’t live on one side of the river and the bad White people didn’t live on the other side of the river. Everybody on both sides played the macro-economic roles that had been asked of them. In the part of the country where cotton flourished but picking it was laborious and taxing, capitalism gave some human beings permission to own and terrorize other human beings. In the part of the country where the cotton didn’t grow, capitalism allowed for textile mills and banks and other institutions that would profit from the work of the enslaved, just at a righteousness-enabling distance.

White people on both sides of the river lived their lives and had kids and grandkids and great-grandkids. Some of those kids and grandkids grew up poor, others grew up with great wealth— wealth that existed because their ancestors were declared to be human and other people’s ancestors were declared to be less than human. All of us, the descendants on both sides of the line, were bequeathed a legacy of shame and guilt, but one by one we all learned how to shove those feelings off to the side when they became too overwhelming.

The thing is, rivers are never just lines in the sand. Their driving animus is to connect, for better and for worse. For years, the Ohio was the kind of connector that ensured that as many hands as possible had blood on them. It was a route to ship slaves, a route to ship cotton, a route to transport money from one set of White bank accounts to another set of White bank accounts.

A few decades after the Emancipation Proclamation, the Ku Klux Klan was strongest on the Kentucky side of the river. The next century, it would be was strongest on the other side, in the Hoosier State. The canonically bad White people on the Kentucky side of the river may have dynamited a Black house in Shively, but just a few decades earlier, in the 1930s, a similar mob in Marion, Indiana lynched a pair of Black men in that Northern town’s square, an event that inspired Billie Holliday’s “Strange Fruit.”

I knew all that long before I came down to the river that morning. But here’s what I either didn’t know or didn’t let myself believe for all those years:

Whatever role this and all rivers have been given in the past, they will keep moving, they will keep flowing, they will keep connecting. They will continue to remind us that, whether we like it or not, we are bound together, regardless of the lines we draw. Those of us who are White are particularly stuck with one another, bound by a shared catastrophe, one that we did not invent but from which we gladly reap the benefits.

The Bradens never asked us to be heroes. The Ohio River never asked us to stand on its banks and scoff at the other side. Nobody asked for me to figure out the way forward for Whiteness alone.

“They just didn’t love White people,” Anne Braden once said, bemoaning the White student do-gooders who wouldn’t organize by her side. That’s an easily misunderstood statement. It’s not the same as saying “they didn’t love White supremacy” or “they didn’t love Whiteness.” It’s a statement of faith that, when you strip away the myths of Whiteness, there is a messed up but empathetic community of human beings capable of contributing to a better world.

I stared at the Ohio River that morning. I was no longer trying to manufacture a magical, emotional moment, but the tears came anyway. Because that’s the thing about rivers. If we give in to their promise as connectors rather than dividers, if we stop dumping our poisons on their banks, rivers don’t just bind us together. Rivers cleanse. Rivers refresh. And then, when they’re finished doing so, rivers ask us to keep moving.

End notes:

Song of the week: Ohio River Boat Song (of course!) by Palace Music.

As always, the song of the week playlist is on both Apple Music and Spotify.

Oh, and here’s a bonus Youtube video. It’s of me, recording the audio version of the book. I am embarrassed by my slovenly posture, but I like that I wore my Weakerthans shirt with the Marcel Dzama art. I also think I sound pretty darn goo. That’s to say, did you know that there is an audio version of the book and that I narrate it? Very cool.

Oh, and here’s a picture of me and my kids after the Missoula book event. There’s no message here. This picture just makes me unspeakably happy.