The year was 1955 and my Father was sending me newspaper clips while I was in school in California. They concerned the sedition trial of a white couple, Anne and Carl Braden. The Bradens had, seditiously, it seems, bought a house for a Negro couple. (That was the terminology of the day.) The Kentucky Civil Liberties Union was formed to provide their defense.

I didn’t meet them for many years afterwards until the open housing movement put its toe gingerly in the water of popular opinion by holding meetings on the subject around town. It must have been the mid ‘60’s by then and Ed and I attended an open housing forum at the Douglass Methodist Church.

A pretty woman and a white haired man sat in front of us. The moderator asked for comments from the audience and Ed asked if the housing problem couldn’t be solved by having a “straw man” buy houses for Negroes. The white haired man passed Ed a note that read “Talk to me later.” He was Carl Braden and the pretty woman was Anne.

Many years later when I became President of the KCLU, I called Anne and Carl to solicit ideas for programs. They had been shunned by the community that provided their defense.  I think they were in shock, because they never turned me down when I asked for help. Never. Two months ago I called Anne and asked her to come to my house to meet the new Director of the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights. She didn’t want to come…..but she did. And Alice Wade dutifully drove her over.

I can’t imagine how my life would have turned out without Anne Braden in it. She was a hard task master but she was always “there.” When I had an idea for a new approach to an old problem, I ran it by Anne to see if I was on target or off base.

She worked with me on the school desegregation lawsuit, on open housing, and ten years before that, on the campaign to get a civilian police board. She was ready at any time of the day or night to listen to my ideas….unless she was on deadline, and then she hung up in a big hurry.

She would call and ask me to do things I simply could not do because of a family and five children, but I knew that I would have to make it up to her in the future in triplicate. She shamed me into going to meetings I didn’t want to go to. She badgered me to ask all of my “wealthy” friends for money for this or that project. She gave me jobs to do and then called ten times to make sure that I had done them..

When I was going through chemotherapy she assured me that my presence was urgently needed and that the civil rights community would collapse if I didn’t attend. She never took no for an answer and she could make you feel about ten inches tall if you even proffered it.

Anne pushed me to be a better civil rights advocate than I would have been without her. When she started getting awards, she genuinely believed she had lost her edge and had gotten too respectable. When Jan Phillips nominated her for the national ACLU’s first Roger Baldwin award, she was stunned to receive it. She resisted attending because, she said as she often did for events like this, that she “didn’t have anything to wear”. I think Jan might have taken her shopping just for that New York presentation.

Anne is going to be missed not only for her critical analyses of difficult social issues like racism and police brutality, the wealth divide, and environmental justice. She will be missed because younger activists coming up will not have her counsel. But they, and all of us, will always have an inner voice asking, “what would Anne say, what would Anne think, what would Anne do.”

Suzy Post is a former member of the ACLU national Board, former Executive Director of the ACLU of Kentucky, and founder of the Metropolitan Housing Coalition.  She lives in Louisville.