"The Wall Between is a chilling depiction of a pattern repeated over and over again across the South as brave Blacks and whites tried to breach the barrier between the races. . . . We need to know Anne Braden's story, perhaps even more in 1999 than when she wrote it in 1957." —from the foreword by Julian Bond In 1954, Anne and Carl Braden bought a house in an all-white neighborhood in Louisville, Kentucky, on behalf of a black couple, Andrew and Charlotte Wade. The Wall Between is Anne Braden's account of what resulted from this act of friendship: mob violence against the Wades, the bombing of the house, and imprisonment for her husband on charges of sedition. A nonfiction finalist for the 1958 National Book Award, The Wall Between is one of only a few first-person accounts from civil rights movement activists—even rarer for its author being white. Offering an insider's view of movement history, it is as readable for its drama as for its sociological importance. It contains no heroes or villains, according to Braden—only people urged on by forces of history that they often did not understand. In an epilogue written for this edition, the author traces the lives of the Bradens and Wades subsequent to events in the original book and reports on her and her husband's continuing activities in the Civil Rights movement, including reminiscences of their friendship with Martin Luther King. Looking back on that history, she warns readers that the entire nation still must do what white Southerners did in the 1950s to ensure equal rights: turn its values, assumptions, and policies upside down. In his foreword to this edition, Julian Bond reflects on the significance of the events Anne describes and the importance of the work the Bradens and others like them undertook. What's missing today, he observes, is not Wades who want a home but Bradens who will help them fight for one. Anne and Carl Braden showed that integrated groups fight best for an integrated world, and The Wall Between is a lasting testament to that dedication. The Author: Ann Braden was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and worked as a newspaper reporter and a public relations agent for trade unions. She served as a delegate to the 1984 and 1988 Democratic National Conventions and has been a visiting professor at Northern Kentucky University, where she teaches civil rights history. She continues to work with the Kentucky Alliance against Racial and Political Repression.

Letter to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1960) -- The Southern Freedom Movement in perspective (1965) -- The SNCC trends : challenge to white America (1966) -- Black power and white organizing (1966) -- Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968) -- Statement from a group of socialist women (1971) -- Communist Party elector speaks out (1972) -- A letter to white Southern women (1972) -- Salute to Cuba (1975) -- Capitalism and freedom (1976) -- Sermon in Nashville (1977) -- The struggle against racism in the 1980s (1980) -- Education for building a people's movement (1981) -- The witch-hunting committees : never again! (1982) -- Expanding the notion of peace (1983) -- Ella Baker Memorial speech (1986) -- Years of racism in U.S. Foreign policy (1992) -- Honoring Kwame Ture (1996) -- Finding the other America (2006).

The time has come, Lillian Smith wrote in 1962, for women to risk the "great and daring creative act" of discovering and articulating their own identity. Three years later, Southern women of a younger generation, fortified by the skills and self-respect earned in the black civil-rights movement, issued the first manifesto of a new feminism. Their words landed with explosive force, setting off cultural reverberations which have shaken the lives of men and women alike. A little more than a decade after that, this issue of Southern Exposure began to take form. Its creation has taken us back into history and deep into the meaning of our own lives. As we set out to understand the situation of Southern women, we found ourselves "in search of our mothers' gardens." We found ourselves naming an experience we share across the generations. "So many of the stories that I write," Alice Walker discovered, "are my mother's stories." To speak in our own voices, we had first to give expression to a "promise song" that has been there all along.

When Judge Ernest N. "Dutch" Modal was elected "the first black mayor" of this South Coast city November 13,1977, political observers all around the country sat up to take notice. New Orleans is the nation's fourth blackest city (relative to percent of total population), and the largest and most powerful city in the third blackest state in the country. When he took over the reins of the nation's second largest port — the Southern terminus of the mid continent grain export/oil import traffic carried by the Mississippi River — Dutch Morial became perhaps the country's most powerful elected black official. The true significance of Morial's November victory can really be understood only in the context of the history of Afro-American involvement in the city's political and cultural life. African slaves were first imported into the state of Louisiana, then a French colony, after Indian slavery was abolished in 1719. By 1724, colonial administrators had finished compiling the Code Noir, a document outlining the mutual rights and obligations of Louisiana's masters and slaves. By Bill Rushton's first book, on the French speaking Cajuns of South Louisiana, will be issued this fall by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. comparison to conditions in Anglo- American colonial areas, the results of the Code Noir were relatively progressive. All slaves were required to be baptized in the Catholic Church, establishing common cultural ties between blacks and whites in Louisiana that were closer than those anywhere else in the South — ties that were preserved through the Civil War until separate, black Catholic parishes began to be formed with the consent of the Archbishop of New Orleans in 1897. Colonial-era slaves were permitted to retain a good many of their own cultural traditions as well, and in New Orleans they were allowed Sunday afternoons off to gather in what was then called Congo Square to dance the bamboula to their own music, forming a unique milieu which helps explain why jazz originated here rather than in, say, Savannah or Charleston.

Before it was over, they fired him from the little schoolhouse at which he had taught devotedly for ten years. And they fired his wife and two of his sisters and a niece. And they threatened him with bodily harm. And they sued him on trumped-up charges and convicted him in a kangaroo court and left him with a judgment that denied him credit from any bank. And they burned his house to the ground while the fire department stood around watching the flames consume the night. And they stoned the church at which he pastored. And fired shotguns at him out of the dark. But he was not Job, and so he fired back and called the police, who did not come and kept not coming. Then he fled, driving north at eighty-five miles an hour over country roads, until he was across the state line. Soon after, they burned his church to the ground and charged him, for having shot back that night, with felonious assault with a deadly weapon, and so he became an official fugitive from justice. In time, the governor of his state announced they would not pursue this minister who had caused all the trouble, and said of him: Good riddance.