Oral History Interview with Anne Braden

BRADEN: Well, my husband and I--this was in 1954--my husband and I were, we had two little children--, were very much opposed to racial segregation. We just didn't believe in it. And we wanted to live in a world where people were people, and dreamed of that. And we wanted, and we were very active in community efforts to, to break down segregation in Louisville--and Louisville at that time was pretty totally segregated--the busses weren't--people--blacks could vote--it was a little different from the deep South. But schools were segregated--blacks couldn't go in restaurants downtown anywhere, and the parks were totally segregated. There was one park for blacks, and whites weren't supposed to go there. That was illegal too. So we lived in a segregated world but we were a part of a community of black and white people who were opposing it. And we were working against school segregation, this was before the Supreme Court ruled it out. We were working trying to get the hospitals opened up, which were closed to blacks, and along in that period, I think it was in March as I recall. I believe it was March, 1954, a young man named Andrew Wade, who was African-American came and asked us to buy a house in Shively, which is right outside of Louisville, and then was almost--was still farmland, it really wasn't developed as a town, but was beginning to develop as a suburb. And would we buy--well actually he didn't ask us to buy the house in Shively, he asked us to buy a house outside the city in the suburbs and transfer it to him, because he wanted to move his family out of the west end of Louisville, which was checkerboard. The area he lived was totally black, and there were white neighborhoods; and there were some old houses in the west end of Louisville that he could have bought to get to a bigger place. He had one child, his wife was pregnant, they were expecting another baby, and they--but they wanted to get out of the city and into the suburbs. And this was after--when--after World War II when there was a great movement to the suburbs. People wanted to get out of the city and suburbs were growing up around the cities everywhere and that was true of Louisville. But African-Americans couldn't buy in those places because there had been, what was called restrictive covenants, written into the deed that whites couldn't sell--you couldn't sell to anybody who wasn't white. Those had been ruled illegal by the Supreme Court, but there was an unwritten law that banks wouldn't lend you money. The real estate people wouldn't show you the houses, you just couldn't do it. But he tried anyway; he was young, he had fought for freedom in World War II, he had been active in things, he felt he could stand up for his rights; and he felt that he had a right to be able to live out there if he wanted to. So he would go and he would see houses and he would get in touch with the real estate person, but as soon as he met the real estate person in person and it was obvious that he was African-American he couldn't buy the house. So some real estate person told him the only way he was going to get a house was to get a white person to buy it house for you, so--and transfer it--so that was what he decided to do. And he, asked us--he had asked a number of other--several other white people before he asked us, who for one reason or another said they couldn't. So he came and asked us and we actually never, we said, "Of course we'd do it." We never even thought of saying no. And later people said, "Well, why would you do such a thing, you knew it was going to be trouble?" We didn't really think about it. Our minds were on other things, we were--there was no organized movement for what's called open housing, or to desegregate housing at that time. That was not the issue that was people--people were thinking about schools, the parks and other things. But we had our minds on other things. But we just said, "sure" and it would have been unthinkable to us say, "no." because this was something we believed in, you live by what you believe in or you don't. That's all. I mean you know we thought about it later, if we had thought about it more we couldn't say, "No."

BRADEN: People said later, "Didn't you know there was going to be trouble?" We didn't--we didn't really think about that. We thought things in Louisville were getting better at that time. Which they were to a certain extent. I think the libraries opened up, ( ) that had been all segregated, one thing after another it looked like it was changing and it seemed like a lot of people--we had a lot of people supporting desegregation of the school--a lot of white people. So we thought things were getting better. I think if--I grew up in Alabama, not in Louisville, and I think if I had been in Alabama I would have--if I thought there was going to be trouble I probably--I hope I would have done it anyway to tell you the truth. But here I--I didn't really think about it. Later Andrew Wade, the young man who came to us and bought the house, said, "That he didn't really think about a lot of trouble either. He thought there might be some neighbors be hostile, but that there would be other neighbors who were friendly and if there was any sort of flurry or people objected it would blow over quick. And there had been a situation a few months before that where a Pilipino woman had moved into an all-white neighborhood, and she wasn't white either, you see. And there was resentment and people threatened her and that sort of thing. But other neighbors came and brought fruit and flowers, and were friendly. And he thought--he knew about that. So he hadn't decided--hadn't found the house, he just wanted to know, "Would we buy it? And we said, “Sure." So then you know he came back a few weeks later and he eventually picked this house in what is now Shively. In an area that was pretty much farm land. The man who owned it, owned a whole lot of land there, and he was a factory worker and he built houses and he was trying to develop a little housing development there. So he would--he lived in an old house at the beginning of the street. He was making the street--it was a new street. His name was Roan, James Roan, and he was calling it Roan Court, for himself. And he had built one house and sold it I think, and then he was building this one and he was about finished, that Andrew wanted. And then he would sell that one and he would build another, He wanted to build up the whole street. So it was really like moving to the country. And so, ah, that was the house that Andrew picked out. Later we realized it might not have not been the best place, you know, and he did too. Because ah, because a lot that happened was comical incidents; a lot of white people were moving out of the West End, they were--black people were moving in from segregated neighborhoods from parts of the West End. And some people--whites--were moving out of the West End to get away from African-Americans. They were bewitched by the notion that they needed to live in a white world. Right. But, and so, a lot of them lived in that area so you know, we might have--he might have picked--he thought later--picked the worst area in the county. But the other thing that I will come to in a minute. They moved into the house, the Wade's did, the week end before May 17, 1954. Which a lot of people now don't know what that date was; but for many years people said that, that was the date that the Supreme Court decided that segregated schools were illegal, and there was a huge repercussion to that. And I've always felt that the Wade's and us became lightning rods; they couldn't get at the Supreme Court, but they could get to us, and that was just a coincident. But anyway we, we contacted the real estate agent who was handling it, and arranged to buy the house. Andrew was putting up the money for the down payment, I forget how much it was. And they put us in touch with the bank and so forth. And we went to the bank and made a loan and all that and then we went out and saw the house and that kind of thing. And then it was along just a few days I guess before--it was on a Thursday I think, that we--that we closed the deal with the bank and drove out to the house--Andrew was already there and gave him the keys to the house. Well all hell broke loose.

BRADEN: I think they had seen him around there that week, but the day that they someway--Roan--who owned the house found out he was moving in. I think that he thought at first that he was somebody working for us at the house. And as I recall, Andrew said--we weren't there of course--that Roan came up and said, "Are you--are you doing some work here for the Braden's?" And Andrew said, "NO," he said, "I'm moving in." And then Roan was, "You're doing what?" You're moving in?" "I'm, I'm--I've bought the house." And Roan said, "Well, I've got to go see about this." And he ran off. And that same night he and a whole bunch of white men came to our house like a mob. I wasn't there, my husband was; and we live in the West End of Louisville near Weston Parkway, what would you say, maybe four or five miles from Shively I guess. Five or six miles from where this was 'cause we lived in the city. And knocked on the door of--my husband told me about it later, because by the time I got home they were gone. I was somewhere doing something. And one of these guys said to him--I don't think it was Roan it was somebody else--"We hear you have sold that house out there to "N's." Said, "You get them out of that neighborhood." Well, they didn't--and Carl said, "Yeah, I've sold the house. I have a right to sell the property to anybody I want to." "Well, you better get them out or something is going to happen to you." You know, like that? And they, they, weren't, weren't really planning to do anything that night, I think. Because Carl said to them--he said--said, "Get out of this yard and quit stomping on my grass." And they left. So nothing else happened at our house. But it was the next night, I think, I believe that was on a Thursday if I recall, and it was on a Saturday night--by that time the Wade's moved their stuff in, or had moved out there with their little girl. And that Saturday night--I think when they went back--I may have some of this sequence wrong--but when they went back to the house on Saturday the picture window in the front had been broken by rocks. I think that happened while they were not there. And then that night, they heard gun shots, and somebody was firing at the house. And Andrew said he told his wife to get down and so forth, so it didn't hit anything. And they looked out and there was a cross burning in the field next door. And so he called the police and he called us and told us. And then there hadn't been any--nobody in town knew about this. But that was on a Saturday night, and then the next day on Sunday someway the newspaper got ahold of it, which was ( ) that was news I guess, because he had called the police. So it became public knowledge and there was a story in the paper about it on Monday, on the front page. And I remember the reporters called us and wanted to know about it. And why did we do this, you know? And Carl and I were both writers and often wrote things together, and we sat down and wrote a brief statement. I don't remember exactly what it said; but it said that we believe in democracy and freedom and if you don't practice what you preach you shut up talking about it. That is sort of a quick summary. Well the fury began to feed right then and then the Supreme Court decision came on Monday. And when we heard about the Supreme Court decision we thought that would help. We thought we had won: like a lot of people in the South that were watching the school case on its way to the Supreme Court. Once it decided that, we thought we had won, I thought the schools were going to be integrated the next fall, and I'm not just na--well I'm naive certainly, but I'm not the only one. I know people I worked with later in the South, black and white, thought the same thing. And, of course, there was huge resistance, and that went on for years. But it really stirred people up worse. And the main paper in town, the Courier Journal, where my husband worked at that time, at night on the copy desk; came out with an editorial about what a terrible thing it was that we had done, and blamed us. It was understandable why Wade would want such a house, but why would we do such a thing to make it possible?

BRADEN: Andrew, and Charlotte too, his wife Charlotte were determined to stay in the house. And they--and people came together to support them in the black community, and some whites, right away. There was a committee formed called the Wade Defense Committee, which met every week. And what they did was to try to get public support for them, for one thing both the black and white communities; but also to send people out there to stay at night so they weren't by themselves. So they got guards to stay out there every night. The police set up the guard across the street, but they didn't trust the police; because the police were the county police, were sitting right by the house where Roan lived. At one end of this court and they were chummy: they would bring them coffee, and you know, they just weren't to be trusted he felt. But people would go out there and stay, and it was very tense. I went out there that very weekend I think, and it was just tense in the neighborhood. And then there was a suburban paper that began to stir up a lot of hysteria, called The Shively Newsweek, what an evil thing this was that had happened. But there was, there was support for him, and--but every night they went back there, and I thought about that and I still think about it. And I think that they are among the heroes of our community and our state. They've never been honored although a lot of people have from that period, because the kind of courage it took really, much more than it took for Carl and me. We were, you know, safely in Louisville, sort of, you know. To go back to that house night after night; they'd come into town for whatever, but Andrew was an electrician and he worked during the day. But they'd go back out there and they always--I remember he would be sitting at our house and he'd call up to see who would be coming as a guard that night. And he'd say, "Charlotte we're all set, let's go." And they went every night back to that house for six weeks, determined to establish their right to live there, and feeling like it would die down. And it--and it kind of got quieter you didn't hear as many threats. They were getting threats all the time on the phone, and so were we; our phone was ringing constantly: people threatening us, but nothing ever happened at our house. But they were threatening they'd blow up our house and all that. Until late June …

BRADEN: But anyway, things had gotten quieter toward the end of June, and we thought that things were going to be better and we had filed some kind of an answer to the court thing. And it was late Saturday night, my husband worked at night, and it was after midnight I think, the phone rang. The phone rang a lot at nights; but I picked it up and it was Andrew. And he was very calm, and he said, "We're all right." And I--I'd been--I'd fallen asleep in a chair by the phone, I think and I wasn't quite awake. And I remember thinking--well, what's he--it must be--maybe it's okay he's gotten--something about the bank or something, you know, or something had happened; because we had, you know, all these people problems. He said, "We're all right but they just blew the house up." So the house had been--dynamite set under it, on one side of the house blew all that side of the house to pieces. Nobody was hurt, and it was the grace of God that nobody was; because Andrew and his wife had just come in. It was the first Saturday night after all this happened they decided to go out. Go to dinner or something, just take a night out. And there was somebody staying there one of the guards was staying there. And Rosemary, their little girl, three year-old little girl; almost three, was not there. She rarely was there on Saturday night because she would come into town and spend the night with her Grandmother to go to Sunday school the next morning. We never knew whether the people who put the dynamite under the house knew whether she was there or not, because the dynamite was set right under her bedroom. But she wasn't there. So nobody was hurt but they were shook up, you know, when it went off. They saw lights flashing around before, before they heard the noise, see. Like a light over here and a light over here, like somebody was signaling, you know, or something. And it was very quiet. Andrew said, "He remembers when they drove in that night everything was dark on the street. That the couple of other houses there were all dark. And then he saw a light flashing over there, and he said, "That's strange everything is all dark." So--but he didn't think, you know--he didn't realize obviously what was going to happen. So the house was destroyed; they couldn’t live in it any more after that. So they moved into town I believe, and lived with his parents. And then all that summer, the rest of the summer, I guess it was the end of June, the Wade Defense Committee kept trying to get the police to do something about who blew it. Arrest people. And they--the city police chief put a guard at our house, he said, "We are not going to have this happen in Louisville," for we were getting threats and everything. And he said, "Don't worry about it. It will be over soon because they got a confession from the man who set the dynamite. There will be arrests in a few days," but there was not. There was a confession, it became kind of an open secret who it was. What they said, when anybody asked, they didn't have corroborating evidence. They never charged anybody with it. It went on all summer, and we would go down, whole lot of us, delegations every week to the county police, to the prosecutor, "something's got to be done," you know "about the people who blew up this house."