Braden Censures HUAC Activities

Carl Braden, white integrationist leader released two weeks ago after a prison term for contempt of Congress, charged yesterday that progress in civil rights and integration in the South will halt unless the House Committee on Un-American Activities is abolished.

"If non-violent leaders are silenced by jailing or Red-baiting them, the violent factions will gain control of the integrationist movement," Braden claimed. The NAACP is already losing some members who are discontented with the slow progress made through peaceful action, he added.

Sponsored by the Students for a Democratic Society, Braden spoke of the events that led to his imprisonment. In a white district of Louisville, Ky., he and his wife bought a house for a Negro couple.

He was arraigned under the Kentucky Sedition Act, charged with participating in a "communist party program to establish a Negro republic in the South." Nine men from what Braden charged was HUAC's "stable of informers" testified against him, "none of whom," he said "had ever been in Louisville, or in Kentucky, or had ever heard of me." His friends raised $40,000 ball to release him while his case was on appeal.

During subsequent HUAC investigations, Braden refused to testify as to whether or not he was a Communist, claiming that the First Amendment denies to Congress the power of investigation in this field.