Veteran Civil Rights Activist and Writer to Speak at Smith

Anne Braden, a writer, editor and organizer who has been active in civil rights, civil liberties, peace and labor organizations in the South for the past 50 years, will speak at Smith College at 4 p.m., Thursday, March 4, in Wright Auditorium.

Her talk is free and open to the public.

A native of Kentucky, Braden began her career as a reporter for "The Louisville Times." From 1957 to 1973 she worked with the Southern Conference Educational Fund, a South-wide interracial organization which had as its primary mission bringing whites into activity for civil rights. She edited "The Southern Patriot," the Fund's publication. Since 1975 she has worked with and led the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice, a
multiracial, multiethnic network of people working in their communities against racism, war, economic injustice and environmental destruction.

Braden also is active in anti-racist work in her hometown of Louisville, where she is a leader in the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and the Kentucky Rainbow Coalition. She played a pivotal role in both the 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns of Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Braden is the author of "The Wall Between," originally published by Monthly Review Press in 1958 and now being reissued by the University of Tennessee Press. The book recounts the efforts she and her husband undertook to desegregate a white neighborhood, an effort that resulted in her husband's imprisonment for sedition. His conviction was later overturned.

Braden, age 73, is the recipient of the American Civil Liberties Union's Roger Baldwin Medal of Liberty, given for a lifetime of service to civil liberties, and the alumnae achievement award from Randolph-Macon Woman's College.