Reflections on Anne Braden & the Importance of White Antiracist History: An Interview with Cate Fosl
On February 21, 2022, I interviewed Anne Braden’s biographer, Cate Fosl. Anne Braden is an essential figure in the history of White antiracism. In our interview, Cate discusses what drew her to Anne’s story, and what it was like to work with Anne. Cate also discusses her personal journey into antiracism as a White person raised in the civil rights-era South, and why she personally values White antiracist history and sees it as a useful tool in the service of racial justice. She closes by talking about her recent and forthcoming work. This interview is part of the White Antiracist Ancestry Project, which seeks to lift up the lessons from White antiracist history, in order to support White antiracist efforts today. You can support and receive updates about the project here.
Lynn Burnett: Can you tell us how you came to embrace racial justice yourself, as a White person?
Cate Fosl: Well, I would root it in three main things. One is the fact that I grew up during school desegregation, in rural Georgia. Through that experience, I almost immediately rejected all that I had been told about racial hierarchy, which was very much from a White supremacist viewpoint, which was how my family was. I was raised by my grandparents, so I was really two generations ahead. Once I encountered Black students in my classroom… that was the beginning for me. It’s not like I became a civil rights crusader. I was in seventh grade. I never even spoke to the young Black girl that was in my class that year. But I was awed by her, and her courage. And it really set me apart from my family, on that issue. And ultimately a lot of other issues.
So that was sort of the first step, or the first thing. I had bought into White supremacy, hook line and sinker, prior to that as a young child. It’s true that I saw civil rights demonstrations, on TV. I could never understand why my grandfather just hated Martin Luther King, so badly. But I didn’t engage the thinking [of the civil rights movement] deeply, until that year in seventh grade. And once I did, I broke with so much of what I’d been taught. I became a “White liberal,” in a vague sense, at that time.
The second piece of it, based on my own experiences as a young White girl… during and after college, I became a feminist. By then it was the 80s. White feminism, of course, was laced with racism, but I wasn’t alert to that at that time. But I met Black feminists who really inspired me. That was before intersectionality had been written about, but I was brought closer to the issue of racism, through my work as a feminist… and also as an anti-war feminist. So that avenue, in the early 80s, was how I heard about women like Anne Braden, for instance.
I became really enamored, through that same kind of thinking, with oral history, and I began to interview a lot of activists. White and Black, and not about racial justice in particular, but it often came up. By now it was the late 80s, and I was beginning to see a lot of sexism in the books that were coming out about social movement history. Like there were all these biographies about Dr. King, for example, but none of Ella Baker, none of Rosa Parks.
I started writing as a journalist… I wasn’t trained as an historian. But I saw that women had been so important in the Black Freedom Movement in the 50s and 60s, and their stories weren’t being told. So I got the idea to write such a story myself. And this is how I got connected to Anne Braden. And I would have to say that that connection is the third moment, and really the catalyst, of what gave me the consciousness that I have today… that was through Anne Braden, and my own work looking into the history of racism through her life, and more broadly as well. I knew very little, for instance, about the history of lynching. And when I began to examine that history, it really altered and expanded my consciousness.
And, I would have to say… I’m White, and I still have a lot of lessons to learn, and I learn those lessons all the time. I don’t want to make it seem like I’m so evolved. Just in terms of something as basic as microaggressions, I have had big insights into that just in the past few years.
Lynn: At the time that you met Anne Braden — I just want to clarify — had you already started to take a deep dive into history, or were you primarily a journalist who was interested in interviewing people who had been in the freedom struggle?
Cate: I wrote my first book — it’s called Women for All Seasons: The Story of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom — and it was half narrative history, and half oral history. It was a history of an organization that I had worked with… an old organization, founded in 1915 by Jane Addams and many others. So I was a journalist, but I was delving more into history. I had really hated history, honestly, as a kid. Because in those same rural high schools that I went to, the history teachers were always the coaches. And they were really bad… I never had a good history teacher in Georgia public schools. It was only later that I began to understand history in a broader fashion.
When I began the work on Anne Braden… I didn’t have a degree in history, and I wasn’t planning on getting a degree in history. But once I began the work on Anne Braden — which I did initially see more superficially, as an oral history project — I just began reading a lot of things. Like I mentioned the history of lynching… I just couldn’t get enough; I was absorbing so many lessons of U.S. history that I had never heard a thing about. And I just decided that I wanted to know more history. I had made up my mind to get a PhD, but I was initially going to get it in sociology. I was offered a fellowship at UNC in sociology. When I visited there, it was through Jacquelyn Hall — who I think of as a White antiracist historian, and who has been a major mentor for me — that I began to consider history. They wanted her to meet me, because we both did oral history, and she looked at my CV and said, “Why aren’t you applying for history?” I literally had never thought about it until that moment.
When I started to think about it… I was living in Atlanta, which was my home, originally. Anne Braden told me about Robin Kelley. He had just taken a job at Emory, in Atlanta. And we met, and we became friends, just informally… and he really mentored me into applying for the history department at Emory. I wouldn’t have had the courage to do it… I was a product of Georgia public schools! I was the first person in my family to get a college degree. I couldn’t imagine myself at an elite school like Emory. But Robin really encouraged me, and it was exciting to think about studying with him. But then he got hired away before I even started the program… he was on a superstar trajectory! But he was instrumental in encouraging me to apply, and encouraging them to fund me.
Lynn: What years were these? Had he already written Hammer and Hoe?
Cate: (Smiling): It had just come out. I started Emory in the fall of 1990.
Lynn: Can you say more about your connection to Robin Kelley, and how he influenced you?
Cate: He’s just a fabulous human being. And he’s probably the most brilliant person I’ve ever known well. He has this warmth, this depth of perception, that’s just not common… [laughing] certainly not in academics, let’s say that! I was blown away by his history of the Alabama Communist Party [in Hammer and Hoe]… it changed my understanding of what kinds of histories could be written.
Lynn: What was it like to meet Anne Braden for the first time? What was your original connection like?
Cate: Well, I talk about that in my introduction to my biography of her [Subversive Southerner]. I heard her speak at the first major demonstration I ever went to in my life, when I had just finished college. That was in early 1980. It was a massive protest, against the murders of the members of the Communist Workers Party in Greensboro, North Carolina. There were thousands of people… I could never see the stage; it was that big. But they set up loudspeakers all around the area, so you could hear the speakers. And when I heard that voice… I had never heard of Anne Braden at that time. But her voice was this ringing, White southern woman, and it was so rousing, it was so inspiring. I was impressed, with a magnitude that I hadn’t been with any other speaker. And so she stayed in my memory that way.
I met her — as I mentioned, my first book was about the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom — and Anne was a member. She did an antiracist workshop at a conference in 1985, in North Carolina that I went to. I was in a small group workshop with her. I couldn’t say that I got to know her there… but she made a big impression on me, again.
As I had mentioned, I had noticed that there was such a lack of writing about women in the Black Freedom Movement. At that time I was in D.C., and was thinking about writing another book. I started going to the Howard University African American studies reading room, which was such a wonderful, rarified place to spend time. I was reading a lot of first-person accounts of people who had been active in the movement, and I ran across her book, The Wall Between, which tells the Louisville story. I had no idea about the Wade house purchase, the sedition case… and my mom and grandmother come from Louisville! I was born the year after all that happened. We went to Louisville every summer when I was growing up. But I had never heard about it!
I had been in that same Louisville where she dwelled, but I never knew those stories. It felt like another layer of the underside of history to me. I was so gripped by that book; I just kept thinking about it. And I just wrote to her, and said, “I would like to work with you on a book about your life.” I had credentials… movement credentials meant something to Anne. They meant a lot. And I had written that book about the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and was very close to that network of women. I think if I had just been a trained historian, or a professor, she may have been less open to it.
We met for the first time in Atlanta… she was coming to a conference on women in the civil rights movement which I went to as well. We met at the reflecting pool at the Martin Luther King memorial in Atlanta, and we talked and decided to do it.
Lynn: So as you’re progressing with your interviews with her, and you’re putting together your book Subversive Southerner… what was that journey like, as you were getting to know her personally? How did that relationship influence you, and impact your own thinking?
Cate: Well, it was certainly one of the most significant relationships of my life. The relationship began with the interviews but it didn’t end that way… we became much closer friends after the book was written. It was a rocky relationship at the beginning, because she had been very misrepresented in print, and she was suspicious of anyone wanting to write about her. She was also very humble, and she didn’t want to be bothered. Anne was a workaholic, and she never stopped. So I began to be a bother to her. Initially we were going to make this book together, but finally she just let me write it as a biography because she just wasn’t going to give time to it. All these interviews that I did with her… I was catching her here and there, I was pestering her! [Laughing]: One thing my family can tell you… I can be a terrible pest! When I want something, I’m not going to give up. So I was pestering her quite a lot, and she was getting very annoyed. But, she never entirely blew me off either. Luckily for me, there were a lot of other oral histories with her out there.
But our relationship deepened. She eventually became resigned, and finally even pleased, with the prospect of the book. She would invite me to come to things where she was going to speak, or receive an award… she wanted to give me that level of access. So we became closer friends. But, I could never have finished that book before moving to Louisville. It was too episodic. I just did not have good access to her until then. I kept moving closer and closer… like I was in Atlanta, then I was in Virginia, then I was in Lexington, then finally in Louisville.
Lynn: So there’s a point in your relationship, where you feel like you’re pestering her… and then you became closer, after the book.
Cate: I mean, we became closer in the journey towards the book being published. But after, our relationship was free of that tension we had, with me pursuing her. I had been pursuing her for years. After the book came out, we did a lot of joint talks, and she always used to say [laughing]: “I like that book. If only it weren’t about me!”
Lynn: What did she end up thinking about the book, once it was published? I know she was humble, and hesitant to have something written about her. But once it was all said and done, how did she feel about it?
Cate: Well, at the time there weren’t really any other books out there that talked about the connection between that fierce anti-communism, and the silencing effect it had on the freedom movement. I think it’s fair to say that she really liked it, on that basis… even if she felt embarrassed to have a biography.
Lynn: What’s your connection with Anne Braden like after the publication, when you didn’t have to worry about hassling her for interviews and that kind of thing?
Cate: Well, we became very close. We travelled together, doing talks about the book. As I had mentioned before we started this interview, she loved the theatre… but she didn’t allow herself to have a lot of personal pleasures. But she really wanted to see Naomi Wallace’s play, on the Alabama Communist Party, so I took her to Pittsburgh to see that play, along with my son Isaac, a teenager at the time who was seriously into theatre. [Isaac went on to work with a group called Squallis Puppeteers, which has developed an Anne Braden puppet show that people can bring to their local schools!] So we were friends. She was getting forgetful later in her life… when she couldn’t remember details of her own life, she would just call me to get the details! [Laughing]. When she gave me an autographed copy of her book The Wall Between when it was re-released, she wrote, “To Cate, who knows me better than I know myself.” Which of course was a little tongue in cheek!
Lynn: [Smiling.] That’s very sweet. Thinking more about the legacy of Anne Braden, what do you feel her life and her legacy has to teach us today, and especially White people who are striving for racial justice today?
Cate: I’ve said this in every forum I’ve been invited to say it in: the central message is, how entirely central White supremacy is to the United States. Our history, and our present. And: how fully the battle against racism is White people’s responsibility.
Lynn: When we think of Anne Braden as an organizer, are there key lessons from her life as an organizer, especially in terms of — as you just said, it’s our responsibility, it’s White people’s responsibility — are there key organizing lessons that you would lift up, in terms of how to mobilize White people for racial justice?
Cate: Well, she had an approach of using every platform that she was attacked in, as a platform to fight back. And she was attacked a lot in her lifetime, as an activist. And she turned those circumstances around, to give more publicity to her point of view, and to the struggle itself. So that’s one thing. That’s a pretty generic lesson, but a powerful one. The other thing that she used very effectively was the power of the printed word. She got the word out. She had no problem with using journalism as propaganda… not that she would change the facts, but she wasn’t hesitant to put an interpretation on those facts.
She also felt very firmly that Whites shouldn’t wait to act, and especially shouldn’t wait to take concrete actions at the local level… she believed very strongly in that. And, they needed to work with and follow Black leadership, so they weren’t going off kind of half-cocked.
Lynn: For people who are reading this interview, and might not be so familiar with why it’s so important for White people to be organizing other White people… How would Anne Braden describe the importance of that? What’s your own thinking about that? If you were to talk to a general White audience, how would you help them understand that it’s White people’s responsibility [to end racism], and that so much of that responsibility is about organizing other White people?
Cate: The lessons of U.S. history suggest that, pragmatically speaking, you need White people to be on board. Then there’s the moral lesson: that White people have benefitted from the systematic disadvantaging of Black people and people of color, and therefore it’s our responsibility to correct that inequity. That I think is the most powerful argument, and it’s certainly one that carried a lot of weight with Anne, and that you felt in her manner of speaking and in the kind of person she was. Because she was a person of faith, too, and that was how she understood Christian faith. It’s not the way it’s understood by the large number of charismatic Christian churches today. She had a real belief in the social gospel message that we owe a debt to our brothers and sisters. All of them.
Lynn: Transitioning away from Anne Braden, I want to get to a more general question about White antiracist history. Of course you’re steeped in the legacy of Anne and Carl Braden. Did you find yourself drawn as well to the more general history of White antiracism?
Cate: Well, it is certainly the case that when I first set out — when I first got interested in the Braden’s — it was to find a White southern past that I would not be ashamed of. I felt true shame about a lot of what I saw of the White South growing up. I don’t identify myself specifically as a historian of White antiracism. And yet, I have sought out and researched an awful lot of White antiracists in U.S. history, far more than I had any inkling could have existed. I think that has an emotional resonance for me because I am White, and I come from the South, and maybe even more so because much of my family was on the way wrong side of history.
Lynn: I want to see if I’m understanding this right. There was a part of you that — even though you don’t identify specifically as a historian of White antiracist history — gravitated towards that history… it sounds almost as if there was something healing about that history, personally?
Cate: That’s correct. That was certainly the genesis of it. And I find it meaningful to uncover more layers of White antiracist history, and quite honestly to share. Not just to research, but to share those stories, especially with a lot of people, White and others, who didn’t know it. When Dr. King first met Anne Braden, at Highlander, he told his wife Coretta that he could not believe such a White woman existed. Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, of the Birmingham movement, told me that same thing. Anne — and Carl, to a lesser extent — were exemplars of an approach to justice that many in the civil rights movement were unaware of at the time. I think White antiracist history helps to interrupt our understanding of how so much of U.S. history is still taught — and maybe ultimately to transform it.
Lynn: So the genesis of your interest in White antiracist history comes from this healing… as you go deeper into it, were there lessons from that history that felt especially important to you, or that influenced you?
Cate: This sounds like a basic point, but I do think it’s powerful to see examples of people being willing to stand up and go against the grain, to take a stand, to stand out from the crowd. There’s an irony about that, because individualism is emphasized in a somewhat toxic way, I would say, in American culture. The power of collectivity is deemphasized by this idolatry of individualism. And going against the grain… I mean, that is an individual act, right? But for White people who are just relaxing into white privilege — I’m not talking about wealthy people, but “normal” people, meaning professional and working-class people — who are just living their lives and see race as invisible when it comes to them… I think to become aware of people like the Bradens, Guy and Candie Carawan, Virginia Foster Durr, Frances Pauley… there are so many. The quintessential, and in some ways the hardest sell, is John Brown. But to really delve into those stories… I think opens up many more possible courses of action that your average White person doesn’t really see.
It’s not a perfect analogy, and I make this analogy very tentatively and hesitantly, but it’s like how Black children have often been denied big parts of their history… have been encouraged to see themselves only in a passive way, as descendants of enslaved people, in the way their history is represented. Often, in U.S. history classes, the richness, the fullness of Black culture is not examined. When I was growing up, I was never taught that there were also free Black people in the South, for example, during slavery times. I never knew that. All I’m saying is, that if you never see people that show the fuller range of “your people’s” experiences, it gives you a very skewed and limited lens on what’s possible.
Lynn: To back up a little bit, you were talking about your first experiences with White antiracist history, and there’s something healing about it, and then you start to feel this drive to share that history. And I feel that you’ve just been describing why. Because it sounds like a source of motivation and inspiration for White people.
Cate: It’s very gratifying in fact, when you’re talking to audiences and you see a lightbulb go off, and you can see the change right then and there. Not that they’re going to go out and join the NAACP or whatever, but they just see something they never saw. Anne’s story has given me a tool for doing that, for offering that to people.
Lynn: Something that comes up for me when I imagine that lightbulb going off… I imagine that maybe if that lightbulb goes off one time, maybe that isn’t the thing that leads them to the NAACP. But maybe if they encounter it a few times!
Cate: Exactly.
Lynn: To transition towards the end of the interview, you’re the founding director of the Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice, founded back in 2006. Can you share something about the vision for that, and what led you to found that institute? And if there’s any particular memories that you’d like to share.
Cate: Well, I do want to say that I was the co-founder, along with our dean, who was J. Blaine Hudson, who was one of the founders of the Pan-African studies program at the University of Louisville. He was the first Black dean of the college of arts and sciences, and was my boss at the time of Anne’s death. Without him, there never would have been such an institute. It would have just been a cool idea… he was the person who was able to make it happen. Blaine Hudson had a background with the Black Student Union, at our university as a young student. He had known the Bradens growing up. He too was mentored by Anne. He really took this project on. With him, and many other supportive faculty members, we were able to set up the Institute.
For me there are so many highlights about it. One of the great things was that when Anne was alive, was that her organization which meant so much to her and that she co-led — the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression — had an annual unity dinner. And they still were doing it up through the pandemic, which has put a lot of things on hold. But every year, Anne would tap this enormous number of national contacts that she knew… it was people like Bernice Reagon, or Cornell West… these amazing speakers would come to Louisville to help her raise money for the Kentucky Alliance. We were able to pay people of that magnitude to do the annual Anne Braden lecture in racial justice history, and that was always an exciting experience. Our inaugural lecture was delivered by Julian Bond, who had been the lead publicist in SNCC, and who wrote the foreword for the newer edition of The Wall Between. He had been a very dear friend of Anne’s. We had Barbara Ransby, who was Ella Baker’s biographer, who’s been so important in The Black Radical Congress, in Ella’s Daughters, and in so many other initiatives.
Every year, to see the diversity of the crowd, to see that bridge… that’s our mission, to be a bridge between campus and community, between research and action for social and racial
justice. To really see the community come into the campus and be welcomed into the campus. It was the kind of diversity that you don’t often see in this very segregated city, and on a campus like ours, which has certain institutional barriers. No annual lecture can cure the divide between campus and community, of course. But it really did become like a town forum. We would often have it on the radio locally. When Robin Kelley did the talk, he worked with a group called Youth Build, which is a community organization that helps young people who have dropped out of high school… the morning after the lecture, Robin went and did a teach-in with them. [Smiling]: We’ve done some very cool things over the years!
I could just go on. But another thing I would say is in 2014, when it was the 60th anniversary of the Wade house purchase and the Braden sedition case, we did a major exhibit at the public library with photographs from the case. We were able to get in touch with the Wade family’s grandchildren and nieces and nephews. The family had not wanted to get involved with talking about that case, previously… it was a painful case for that family’s history. But there was a lot of healing around that.
One last thing. We authored the first ever statewide report on LGBT Kentuckians’ history. So it wasn’t always and only racial justice. We had a very intersectional approach, but antiracism was always at the center of our projects. So those are just a few of the highlights. We had so many!
Lynn: So how does it feel, after directing that for fifteen years, to now have stepped away?
Cate: Well, it was bittersweet — of course it was! But I had been thinking about it for two or three years. I’ve seen many instances where things can get stale if you have the same leadership year after year, and I felt that we needed new leadership. We needed to expand. And, for my own self, I really wanted to do more writing. I was able to do some writing… I co-authored a book in the course of that fifteen years, but building the institute limited my writing time a lot, and there are other books I’d still like to write. I felt too like it was time for me to begin stepping away from the University of Louisville altogether, frankly.
Lynn: Well, I’m excited to hear more, and I’m sure anyone reading this is excited to hear more about your forthcoming work, now that you’ve stepped away from the directorship. What are the things that you’re excited about doing now, and what are some of the projects that you might be working on?
Cate: Well, I can think of three main things. I’m still a faculty fellow with the Braden Institute this year, and I’m charged with developing a page of resources about Anne Braden. The institute has never been an iconic institute, but it did tend to have Anne and Carl Braden at least at the periphery of anything that we did, and that will look different now that the director is not a Braden biographer. So I wanted to be sure and anchor her story in the institute, so that’s what I’m working on right now.
The second thing is, I’m working on a book with and about Candie and Guy Carawan. Guy is no longer living, but his widow Candie is. They were longtime southern cultural activists associated with the Highlander Center. Very little known… far lesser known than Anne Braden, but played a significant role, both in the Black Freedom Movement, the folk revival movement, and the Appalachian working people’s movement… so I’m working with her on a book about their life and work.
I’m also writing a little auto-fiction… stories drawn generally from my own life and times, but fictionalized. I used to write fiction as a teenager, and I haven’t done it in a long time! So I’m doing more of that again now. Plus, I have a lot of oral histories that I’ve done, with a White South African Communist named Amy Thornton. I hope to pull those together into a book, but the pandemic, and administrative duties with the Braden Institute have kept me away from that longer than I’ve intended. I’m less certain that that will see the light of day, but I hope it will! So those are just a few of the things that I have going on.
Lynn: Well, I look forward to diving into all of that once you publish it, and I hope that anyone reading this interview does as well! Thank you for making so much time in your day for this.
Cate: It was a pleasure!
