Why I Love Ella Baker

Ever since reading Barbara Ransby's excellent biography of Ella Baker over a year ago, I have wanted to write about why I love this woman's contributions to the Black Freedom Struggle and social justice. Ransby's biography, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement is a must-read for anyone interested in significant but lesser known figures in the Civil Rights Movement. A product of a middle-class black southern family, collective uplift and racial justice defined Baker from the start. From her days as a member of the small but growing cooperatives in New York City to SNCC, Baker's influence was paramount on many younger activists whose names have survived well over the years. Anywho, here are my reasons for loving Ella Baker, based on Ransby's text:

1. Ella Baker was interested in and supportive of cooperatives since the 1930s in Harlem. Baker was always interested in alternatives to the current systems, which is obvious from her support for the Young Negroes' League Cooperative as its national director. This site demonstrates the importance of cooperatives to Baker as a training ground for resistance, building activism, sustaining democratic and non-hierarchical structures, and empowering individuals through the collective. As someone who has lived in cooperative housing and appreciates non-hierarchical structures that empowers individuals to help themselves instead of rely on leaders, reading about Baker's days as a proponent of cooperatives in 1930s New York thrilled me. Her interest in economic and labor cooperatives also assists in elucidating her involvement with labor unions and organizers in the Jim Crow South, often being the only woman in attendance. Can you imagine that, a black woman travelling across the South to recruit for the NAACP? We know from McGuire's Dark End of the Street, that black women were frequent targets for phsyical and sexual violence. Indeed, sexual violence and rape was one of the underpinnings Jim and Jane Crow.

2. Baker's participatory approach to social activism focused on building people to lead themselves, instead of solely following 'leaders.' Her whole mentality far more democratic, empowering to the subaltern masses, and appealing than the leaders of the NAACP, SCLC, and other civil rights organizations. Indeed, Baker, who was a field organizer for the NAACP in the Jim Crow South during the 1940s, always believed the focus of the NAACP should be on training activists instead of persuading blacks to limit their activity to fundraising and supporting the national organization. Baker also butted heads with Walter White, current leader of the national NAACP at the time, for his undemocratic practices of making decisions without discussion with the rank and file. 

3. Baker was very involved with New York City activism, being elected the New York branch of the NAACP's president in 1952. During her involvement with NYC civil rights in the 1950s, Baker became very closely tied to the battle against school segregation, to improve educational facilities for black and Puerto Rican children. In addition, Baker served as a member of the Intergroup Committee chaired by Kenneth Clark, which was set up by the NY Board of Education to address some of the problems BLack and Latino children encountered in the public schools. She even ran for public office and engaged in various forms of protest: sending public letters, leading noisy street demonstrations, confronting the mayor in front of the news media, etc. Later, she became involved with national civil rights networks, including In Friendship, where she worked with Bayard Rustin as the organization endeavored to maintain it's interest in empowering, grassroots activism.

4. Baker was at the founding meeting of SCLC in January 1957! Bayard Rustin, Stanley David Levison, and Ella Baker helped lay blueprint for SCLC and King let the above two men in his circle, but not Baker. According to Ransby, he never treated her as a political or intellectual peer despite her experience in organizing. Can you imagine the chauvinism and ingratitude of being in such an environment? Despite her full-time staff position on campaigns for SCLC and her role in the founding of the organization, her work (and that of other women) was devalued. Ministers leading the organization, who often lacked the proper skills and were engaged in improper sexual relationships (all in spite of their Christian morality), of course took all the credit. Even MLK, who quickly became the center of hero worship, told Baker that's what the people wanted. In such an atmosphere, Baker concluded that hero worship for King deterred building local activists across the South as well as trapping poor blacks, particularly sharecroppers and the most destitute, in hopelessness without realizing the power to change their lives rested in themselves. Besides, unlike many in SCLC, Baker never internalized nonviolence as a way of life, solely as a tactic for justice, which may have been another reason for her leaving SCLC. 

5. She was also tied to the Shuttleworths in Birmingham, part of the the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, which had the largest working poor membership of any of Birmingham’s civil rights organizations. Baker also knew the Simpkins, two organizers in Shreveport, Louisiana, who did not care to follow the politics of respectability model of SCLC and mainstream civil rights organizations. Although ambivalent to anti-communist sentiment among some aspects of the era, Baker was friends with the Bradens, two white radicals engaged in civil rights activism. Therefore, Baker, indirectly or directly, was connected to various campaigns and sites of resistance throughout the US during the turbulent period. New York City, Atlanta, Birmingham, and various other parts of the nation were stops on her endless train to social justice.

6. Baker, present at and coordinating the Raleigh meeting where SNCC formed, did the following tasks for the organization: she typed minutes, drafted internal documents, maintained a mailing list, kept in phone contact with interested students, and recruited new ones; found meeting sites and office space and secured funds from SCLC and sympathetic donors. She guided and trained young activists in the 1960s, but wanted them to remain radical and unconfined by bureaucracy. Baker's selflessness throughout these many years of activism took a toll on her health, but she kept trucking on, assuring the students and youths who increasingly took over the helm of civil rights activism since the sit-ins in Greenboro, North Carolina, would carry on the struggle. 

7. Baker's involvement in political parties returned in 1964, when she was the national director for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the very same party featuring prominent female leaders and voices, such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Annie Devine and Victoria Gray. Baker's support and organizing on behalf of this party brought her a lot of criticism from white liberals and some blacks, for thinking a campaign could be won with just poor people. She also stood by SNCC even when their positions differed from her own, which shows her trust and respect for the next generation's decisions in the Black Freedom Struggle. Many older activists would disagree or distance themselves from how youths and students engaged in struggle in the 1960s, so Baker standing aside and defending younger activists' right to make their own decisions is commendable. Even with the rise of Black Power and SNCC's transformation into a black-only organization, Baker sympathized and stood by Carmichael's conceptualization of Black Power. 

These aforementioned seven reasons provide more than enough reasons for loving Ella Baker, who played a largely behind the scenes role in several key moments and struggles in the Civil Rights Movement. Her ideology of empowering the oppressed to lead themselves, or, as Ransby would call it, radical democratic pedagogy, significantly shaped SNCC and the offspring of the student activist organizations from the 1960s, including Students for a Democratic Society. She nurtured and  guided SNCC, and even brought Bob Moses into SNCC, the latter taking the group into a radical democratic direction, according to Ransby. Thus, the Freedom Summer and various SNCC campaigns for voter registration in the South, are all extensions, to a limited degree, of Baker's interest in collective uplift, empowering the poorest of black folk, and ensuring democratic decision-making.

Oh, and in case I neglected to mention the fact, Baker never lost touch of the broader national and international dimensions of leftist social justice movements. She became involved in Puerto Rican Solidarity Organization after her friend, Annie Stein, a white leftist involved in the struggle for desegregation of NYC schools. In the 1970s, she was involved in the Mass Party Organizing Committee, an attempt to establish a viable leftist party in American politics. She did a lot in her life, for the Black Freedom Struggle, democracy in activist organizations, attempting to avoid paternalistic attitudes toward the oppressed. The fruit of the free of liberty sown by Baker has been cultivated over and over again. Rest in peace.