Fundraiser for the Davis-Putter Scholarship Fund to Support Student Activism
Film screening featuring Anne Braden: Southern Patriot (1924-2006) film showing

The film screening will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Davis-Putter Scholarship Fund and provide support for its’ work. The Fund has been supporting student activists for over 50 years and our grantees have been at the forefront of virtually every major progressive social movement.  They are artists, scholars, people’s lawyers, political prisoners, and organizers on the front lines.  Student-driven movements have been at the center of social change and our grantees have been integral to this work for peace and justice.  Learn more about the Fund here.

You will hear from a current grantee from SUNY Binghamton, Matt Birkhold, and have the opportunity to see the recently released documentary Anne Braden: Southern Patriot.  Anne and Carl Braden were early members of the Board of the Fund, and remained so for the rest of their lives.  We celebrate their commitment to the Fund and to the struggle for peace and justice.  Wine, cheese, and hors d’oeuvres will be served. Suggested donation $25- $500 (but no one will be turned away)

BACKGROUND:

Anne Braden: Southern Patriot (1924-2006) is a first person documentary about the extraordinary life of this American civil rights leader. Braden was hailed as a white southerner who was “eloquent and prophetic” by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail. Ostracized as a “red,” she fought for an inclusive movement community and mentored three generations of social justice activists. Learn more about the film here.

Braden catapulted into national headlines in mid-1954 when she and her husband Carl Braden were indicted for sedition for their leadership in desegregating a Louisville, Kentucky, suburb. Their purchase of a house in an all-white neighborhood on behalf of African Americans Andrew and Charlotte Wade violated Louisville’s color line and provoked violence against both families, culminating with the dynamiting of the house in June of 1954. A subsequent grand jury investigation concentrated not on the neighborhood’s harassment of the Wades, but looked to the Bradens’ supposedly communistic intentions in backing the purchase, and they were indicted for sedition that fall. The couple’s sedition case made national news and earned them the ire of segregationists across the South, which was reeling from the U.S. Supreme Court’s condemnation of school segregation in its Brown ruling earlier that spring. Only Carl was convicted, and that conviction was later overturned. The sedition charges left the Bradens pariahs, branded as radicals and “reds” in the Cold-War South, and they became fierce civil libertarians who openly espoused left-wing social critiques but would never either embrace nor disavow the Communist Party publicly because they felt that to do so accepted the terms of the 1950s anticommunist “witch hunts.”

“A magnificent portrait of the Anne Braden I knew: courageous, militantly anti-racist to the core. Anne Braden changed my life; this film will change yours.” ~ Robin D.G. Kelley, Author and Historian and Davis-Putter Scholarship Fund Sponsor

If you cannot attend but would like to offer support, you can  Donate Now to the Davis-Putter Scholarship Fund