Carl Braden

Who was Carl Braden?

Carl Braden was born in New Albany, Indiana, and died in Louisville, Kentucky. He was a left-wing trade unionist and social justice activist. He worked for the Louisville Herald-Post, Cincinnati Enquirer, and Louisville Times. He also wrote for other news services including the Harlan Daily Enterprise, the Knoxville Journal, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Newsweek, and the Federated Press.

In 1948, while both reporters in Kentucky, he met and married Anne Gambrell McCarty. The Bradens had three children: James, born in 1951, a 1972 Rhodes Scholar, and a 1980 graduate of Harvard Law School, has lived and practiced law for over 25 years in San Francisco, California. Elizabeth, born in 1960, has worked as a teacher in many countries around the world, serving as of 2006 in that capacity in rural Ethiopia. Anita, born in 1953, died of a pulmonary disorder at the age of 11.

While raising their children, Carl and his wife Anne Braden remained deeply involved in the civil rights cause and the subsequent social movements it prompted from the 1960s to the 1970s, because of this they were frequent targets for attacks from southern white supremacists.