By Lynn Burnett

Vernon Bown was a White member of the Wade Defense Committee, a group that was formed to defend the home of Andrew and Charlotte Wade. The Wade’s were a Black family who, with the support of Anne and Carl Braden, had purchased a home in a segregated White neighborhood in Louisville. When crosses were burned in front of the house and shots were fired into it, supporters of the Wade’s formed an armed defense committee. Most members had to work during the day, but as a truck driver who worked the night shift, Vernon Bown was able to protect the Wade family’s home during the daylight hours. As a former soldier who had volunteered to fight the rise of fascism in Spain in the years preceding World War II, protecting the Wade’s home was a job Bown was well prepared to do.

When the house was bombed and a trial ensued, the White supporters of the Wades were hauled before McCarthyite courts, where their support for desegregation was deemed subversive activity. While Anne and Carl Braden were the main targets of this trial, Vernon Bown’s commitment to living in a Black home and to protecting it – with force if necessary – was also viewed as evidence of a subversion of the social order. While the Braden’s were charged with sedition, it was Bown who was charged with the actual bombing of the Wade house… despite overwhelming evidence that the bombing was conducted by segregationists. Luckily, when the case reached the Supreme Court, the charges were dropped.

Bown, who was born in 1917, lived until 2012, at which point he was one of the last surviving members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of American volunteers who had fought fascism in Spain. According to The Volunteer, a website dedicated to Brigade veterans, in his old age Bown “grew his own garden and kept his own bees to make honey. He enjoyed going on walks and dancing at the senior center as often as he could.”

Additional Resources

Twitter post by @LincolnBrigade.

Entry in The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.

Entry in The Volunteer: Founded by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

Books: Vernon Bown is briefly mentioned in Catherine Fosl’s Subversive Southerner and Anne Braden’s The Wall Between.