Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Gender and American Culture)

by Barbara Ransby

Over the course of her life, she was involved in more than thirty major political campaigns and organizations, addressing such issues as the war in Vietnam, Puerto Rican independence, South African apart-heid, political repression, prison conditions, poverty, unequal education, and sexism. Still, because of who she was—a daughter of the Jim Crow South and a granddaughter of slaves—and because of the political analysis she formulated early in her career, which was centered on antiracist politics, Baker's primary frame of reference was the African American experience and the struggle for black freedom. Baker identified with and helped advance a political tradition that is radical, international, and democratic, with women at its center. She critiqued black separatism as a narrow, dead-end strategy, yet she did not hesitate to criticize the chauvinism and racism of white colleagues in multiracial coalitions all the while stressing the importance of black leadership. Her own political ideology and worldview was a result of the cross-fertilization of the vibrant black Baptist women's movement of the early twentieth century, the eclectic and international political culture of depression-era Harlem, and the American tradition of democratic socialism—a variegated mix of northern and southern, religious and secular, American and global, left and liberal elements. Ella Baker's life gives us a sense of the connections and continuities that link together a long tradition of African Am...

Baker's message was that oppressed people, whatever their level of formal education, had the ability to understand and interpret the world around them, to see that world for what it was and to move to transform it. Her primary public constituency was the dispossessed. She viewed a democratic learning process and discourse as the cornerstone of a democratic movement.

Who one's people were was important to Ella Baker, not to establish an elite pedigree, but to locate an individual as a part of a family, a community, a region, a culture, and a historical period. Baker recognized that none of us are self-made men or women; rather, we forge our identities within kinship networks, local communities, and organizations.

Anna and Ella were imbued with the conviction that their relative privilege carried with it a fundamental obligation to work for the improvement of their race and, especially, to better the condition of the many women and children who were denied such advantages.

person part of and apart from the group.”6 Ella Jo Baker's life is marked by the working-out of this paradoxical position: she drew on the strengths of her childhood community, rejected the strictures of middle-class womanhood and the dominant ideologies of her society, and affiliated herself with the poor black people whom she saw as the most oppressed and the most able to transform the world through collective action.

Baker was well aware that she was only two generations removed from slavery and only one generation removed from the poverty and illiteracy that trapped so many southern blacks. All of these factors helped to mold Ella Baker's sense of morality, justice, and social obligation.

From the northern Baptists' perspective, a well-educated black vanguard constituted a buffer between white society and the black masses… . In the event of rebellion, the Talented Tenth would serve as a critical mediating force between several million oppressed blacks and white America.24 Du Bois's conceptualization of the Talented Tenth was distinct from the visions of white missionaries and other black leaders like Booker T. Washington, who primarily advocated industrial, manual training for blacks and accommodation in matters of civil rights. In Du Bois's view, a classical liberal arts education for a black leadership class could serve as a means of achieving civil rights for the entire black community.

By 1930, 55 percent of all foreign-born blacks in the United States lived in Harlem.

First, cooperative economics was rooted in the long-standing tradition of black self-help, mutual aid, and uplift, so it had wide appeal to both small entrepreneurs and socialists. Cooperatives could be viewed as a way of navigating the racist stumbling blocks within American capitalism; alternatively, they could be seen as a direct challenge to its legitimacy. Second, in a time of systemic economic crisis, many small business people were eager to try any methods they could, however unorthodox, to keep their businesses afloat. For blacks in particular, the repertoire of survival strategies included the pooling of resources and a willingness to at least temporarily substitute cooperation for competition.

In other words, organization at the point of consumption was potentially as important as the Marxist strategy of organization at the point of production. By acting collectively as consumers and as workers, ordinary people could influence the economy and improve the condition of their lives. In her WEP course syllabus, Baker raised fundamental questions about the economic injustice of American capitalism and suggested that an independent, aggressive consumer movement had an important role to play in changing that system.

Baker saw the necessity of forming alliances across racial lines and national boundaries on pragmatic political grounds. In response to remarks made by a Philadelphia minister urging blacks to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, that is, without allies, she argued in an unpublished essay written around 1940: I could but think “how true and yet how false.” True that a new economic order must be built, but false to hope that it can be built by the Negro alone on any policy of racial isolation. True that the Negro's future will be determined by his own efforts, but false to expect … that it can be achieved by … racial isolation. While we are tugging at our own bootstraps, we must realize that our interests are more often than not identical to that of others. We must recognize the identity of interests, work with other groups … [and yet not sacrifice our interests to that of the larger cause]. A difficult but unavoidable task.158

By the 1940s, Baker was convinced that how one fought was as important as what one was fighting for; the key to change lay in the process of movement building. Therefore she lobbied to make the structure and practices of the NAACP more inclusive and egalitarian and to infuse a greater spirit of activism and militancy into its local campaigns as a strategy for grassroots empowerment.

In the NAACP, as in other political organizations, women were indispensable but underappreciated. The association had never elected a woman as its executive secretary, and women were often excluded from the informal inner circle of decision makers.2 On the other hand, women formed the backbone of many of the most active local branches, as well as of the national office staff itself. Women's contributions had to be acknowledged, even if they did not translate into formal positions of power.

Over the course of Baker's years with the association's national office, from 1940 to 1946, its membership mushroomed from 50,000 in 1940 to almost 450,000 by 1945.

In Baker's political philosophy, personal relationships were the building blocks that led to solidarity and collective action. Sociologist Belinda Robnett suggests that emotions are also critical variables in mobilizing and organizing people for action. It is important that people feel as well as think about what they are involved in.

Baker felt that the class hierarchy within the black community was a major obstacle to creating more active and effective branches that would be able to reach out to every sector of the African American community. In Baker's opinion, some of the middle-class black professionals who ran local branches “had attitudes that were not particularly helpful in terms of change. For instance, … they would be against the idea of going to battle for the town drunk who happened to have been brutalized when being arrested, because who was he?”56 Baker referred to this hypothetical scenario of police brutality toward the town drunk repeatedly, and it reveals her fundamental criticism of the vision of change embodied by the black elite. In essence, some middle-class black leaders felt that only those blacks who conformed to the dominant culture's notion of social respectability should be held up as deserving of civil rights and full citizenship. This was not always the position they articulated publicly, but it was implicit in their actions. Baker felt that this viewpoint had to be rooted out and challenged, first, as a matter of principle and, second, in order to mobilize the support and participation of poor and working-class members of the black community who were, after all, the overwhelming majority.57

At the same time that Baker worried about the threat of white vigilante violence, the federal government worried about the alleged “danger” that she represented. Throughout the World War II period and the Cold War years that followed, Baker was under constant surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and by Military Intelligence. They monitored her moves, speculated about her motives, and compiled reams of reconnaissance data on her public activity and her private life. FBI informants called Baker on the phone to obtain information about her whereabouts, feigned interest in her politics to get a closer view of her day-to-day activities, and pumped her friends and associates to amass a profile of a woman they deemed potentially subversive.87 Most of the FBI agents who spied on Baker from the 1940s through the 1970s did not know what to make of this middle-aged hell-raiser who defied categorization. She led an unconventional life, made enormous sacrifices for the causes and campaigns to which she devoted herself, and asked for very little material reward or recognition in return. She maintained an eclectic circle of friends of various ages, races, and political affiliations, yet she herself never belonged to any one organization for very long. Reading between the lines of the FBI'S individual reports on Baker's activities, one can almost hear the agents' queries, pregnant with all the biased stereotypes the agency held about dissidents: What is she up to? Who does ...

Over twenty years after leaving Littleton and abandoning her mother's missionary zeal, and over a decade after renouncing her own missionary ambitions in order to pursue a more secular path, here she was with her little, dusty, tattered suitcase living a missionary's existence: traveling from one town to another preaching the “Gospel” of racial justice, and at times attempting, as she herself put it, to “pass a miracle.”89 Baker admitted, “I was the missionary type—I was on a crusade to save something.”90 But what was that “something”? And how would she ever succeed against such enormous odds?

She believed strongly in linking economic and social justice issues and, for her, civil rights and labor were a perfect fit.

In the fall of 1957, the eyes of the nation were focused not on efforts to desegregate public schools in northern cities but rather on the pitched battle being waged in the streets of Little Rock, Arkansas,

Building on the attention that Little Rock had garnered, New York activists were eager to point out that racial disparities were not unique to the South and that militant challenges to government intransigence would be necessary in New York City as well. As was often the case, Baker found herself trying to push her civil rights colleagues—particularly the national leaders of the NAACP—toward a more militant stance at the same time that she was leading a popular struggle against those in positions of government power. The national NAACP office, afraid of negative publicity and of alienating its moderate, liberal supporters, sought to discourage confrontation and advised the activists to “adopt a less provocative endeavor, pointing out that after all northern school officials, unlike the hostile segregationists of the south, had agreed to integration; it was just a question of how and when,” according to Galamison.12 Baker founded the grassroots parents' group in order to circumvent the NAACP's paralytic bureaucracy and “go slow” politics.13

Complaining about distorted media coverage of the New York school struggle in a letter to her friend Ruth Moore, Baker wrote: “The headlines especially are designed to give the impression that the only thing with which we are concerned is integration rather than the fact that integration is desirable because where there is separation, even in New York, the schools are too often inadequate.”17 Second, Baker helped to forge an important biracial alliance between the African American and Puerto Rican communities.

She was well aware that the issue had larger ramifications. Not only did police brutality against individual black people violate their civil rights, but the intimidation that the entire community faced from local law enforcement was a key way that oppressed communities were discouraged from political protest.

Eleanor Roosevelt and other Cold War liberals saw themselves as both anti-McCarthyites and still devoutly anticommunist. As Carol Polsgrove writes, they hated McCarthy because he “was giving anti-communism a bad name.”46 So, there was no contradiction in their minds between purging communists from their organizations and opposing what they viewed as extremist practices initiated by Senator Joseph McCarthy and continued by the House Un-American Activities Committee after his censure by the Senate in 1954.

The Atlanta group met as the Southern Leadership Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration; it later changed its name to the Southern Christian leadership Conference. The choice of the new organization's name is a subtle indicator of the Cold War ethos that permeated black politics, as it did white society, during the 1950s. The decision to include Christian in the group's name was not simply an affirmation of people's faith that God was on their side but also a conscious effort to deflect any allegations of communist infiltration or influence, since the materialist worldview of communists meant that they were assumed to be atheists.18

Once it was decided that the new coalition would be an extension of the church, a patriarchal ethos took over. Neither Rosa Parks nor Joanne Gibson Robinson nor any of the women who had sacrificed so much to ensure the Montgomery boycott's success were invited to play a leadership role in the new organization.

Baker felt that SCLC's increasing reliance on King's celebrity and charisma had all sorts of hidden dangers. Less polished leaders were likely to receive less recognition and might become disaffected from the struggle. For example, E. D. Nixon, the labor and civil rights activist who played a pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott, resented the way that an outsider eclipsed local leaders. In a 1958 letter to a friend, Nixon complained bitterly about King's fame and his own diminished stature in the movement. It is disheartening, he explained, “when people give all recognition to one because of his academic training and forge[t] other[s] who do not have that kind of training but are making a worthwhile contribution.”67 Furthermore, no one person could possibly meet the needs of a growing and increasingly complex movement. Even leaders who were motivated by high ideals rather than personal ambition and adopted a humble rather than top-down style had to make way for many others to assume leadership roles. According to Baker, organizations had to alter their very concept of leadership: “Instead of the leader as a person who was supposed to be a magic man, you could develop individuals who were bound together by a concept that benefited the larger number of individuals and provided an opportunity for them to grow into being responsible for carrying out a program.”

Still, King and Baker were more alike than Baker was ever prepared to admit. Both were southerners by birth, and both had grown up in the social and spiritual circles of the southern black Baptist church. Both were college-educated intellectuals, articulate spokespersons for the cause of black freedom and social justice, and eloquent public speakers. And both came from class positions of relative advantage. But Baker and King had made very divergent choices about how to utilize their skills and privileges. They translated religious faith into their political identities in profoundly different ways. Above all, they defined the confluence of their roles as individuals and their roles as participants in a mass movement for social change quite distinctly. Baker was a militant egalitarian, and King was a sophisticated southern Baptist preacher.

While many black leaders criticized racial hierarchies in the dominant society, they recreated hierarchies based on class, gender, and personality within the movement itself. Baker insisted that leaders live by the principles they espouse. In this sense, she argued, not only is the personal political, but the political is inescapably personal. Transformation has to occur at the societal and institutional level, but also at the local and personal level.

The preacher's presumed authority did not trouble men like King, however. As he himself put it, “Leadership never ascends from the pew to the pulpit, but … descends from the pulpit to the pew.”83 But Baker saw this flow of authority as a weakness, not a virtue. The socialization of women missionaries meant that they practiced a more democratic and decentralized style of religious service than male ministers did.

Rustin's pacifism was rooted in his Quakerism, while Baker's Christian faith carried no imperative to turn the other cheek or love your enemies. For her, nonviolence and self-defense were tactical choices, not matters of principle. “Mine was not a choice of non-violence per se,” Baker reiterated.85

This seems too strong

From her point of view, it was a semi-spontaneous action from below—Rosa Parks's reasoned decision to violate a segregation ordinance—that had sparked the Montgomery boycott. It was another semi-spontaneous action—a handful of college students sitting in at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960—that would ignite the next phase of movement activity. These actions were thought through and conscious, but they were both examples of leadership coming from below (the metaphorical pews) rather than from the political pulpits above. These actions also tapped into a subterranean oppositional culture and gave it a political outlet.

This is a concept that southern segregationists and the FBI found difficult to grasp. They persisted in the erroneous assumption that southern blacks would simply not stand up for themselves and demand fair treatment unless someone “smarter”—white or northern—put them up to it. Baker and the Bradens vehemently rejected such racist and elitist assumptions.

Baker was content to use King's celebrity to attract young people to the meeting, but she was determined that they take away something more substantial. Most of the student activists had never heard of Ella Baker before they arrived. Yet she, more than King, became the decisive force in their collective political future. It was Baker, not King, who nurtured the student movement and helped to launch a new organization. It was Baker, not King, who offered the sit-in leaders a model of organizing and an approach to politics that they found consistent with their own experience and would find invaluable in the months and years to come.

Baker's imprint was all over the Raleigh meeting. She did not make any unilateral decisions, but she handled virtually all of the logistical details.5 She understood how important details were in shaping the character of an event like this, and she gave every task her utmost attention.

Since young people were less socialized and less indoctrinated with prevailing ideas than their elders, they were generally more rebellious and more open to new ways of thinking. But certainly youth was no guarantee of political radicalism, and age did not always mean moderation. It was radical youth Baker was concerned with. She wanted to preserve the brazen fighting spirit the students had exhibited in their sit-in protests. She did not want them to be shackled by the bureaucracy of existing organizations. At this early stage, the nascent political ideas of the students were not much more radical than those of SCLC's leadership. However, Baker saw enormous promise in their courageous actions, their creativity, and their openness to new forms of struggle, and she wanted to give them the space and freedom for that potential to develop.

She was instrumental in SNCC'S rejection of bourgeois respectability as a defensive political strategy, a rejection that opened the organization up to historically marginalized sectors of the black community. When SNCC broke with the largely middle-class, male-centered leadership of existing civil rights organizations, it stripped away the class-based and gender-biased notions of who should and could give leadership to the movement and the black community.

In pursuing a more egalitarian political practice, SNCC broke new ground. According to the Mississippi historian John Dittmer, “Not since Reconstruction had anyone seriously proposed that illiterate sharecroppers had the same right to the franchise as did teachers, lawyers and doctors.”21 This radical departure from the approach favored by liberal civil rights groups was heavily influenced by Ella Baker's ideas and organizing style. Through her own life, teaching, and example, she connected the young activists to a tradition of black radicalism that hearkened back to the early twentieth century and before.

At every opportunity, Baker reiterated the radical idea that educated elites were not the natural leaders of black people. Critically reflecting on her work with the NAACP, she observed, “The leadership was all from the professional class, basically. I think these are the factors that have kept it [the NAACP] from moving to a more militant position.” She urged SNCC, as she had urged SCLC and the NAACP, to seek out “indigenous leaders,” ordinary people engaged in struggle, regardless of credentials or social class, and to affirm their right to define the politics and direction of the movement.23

Baker recognized that an organizer's own personal interests and desires might readily become conflated with the larger goals of the group, and the group's partisan interests might get conflated with the goals of a larger movement; so she took deliberate steps to prevent such confusion. Her motto was “I was never working for an organization. I always tried to work for a cause. And that cause was bigger than any organization.”26 Having repeatedly built, let go, and rebuilt movement groups, on some level, Baker considered the process healthy and rejuvenating.

If only more pastors and other christians took this advice

On his arrival in Albany in December 1961, King ignited controversy. After being arrested in a protest demonstration, he allowed himself to be bailed out of jail and gave a tacit nod to the city leaders' offer to negotiate an end to the protests. Although recollections vary, there was apparently a breakdown in communication between King and sectors of the Albany Movement. He felt that he was adhering to the consensus of the local leadership, but some local movement participants and SNCC organizers disagreed.33 Baker saw King's highly publicized visits as undermining local people's confidence and autonomy and lessening the visibility of the Albany Movement's own spokespersons.

Despite their slight degree of economic independence, Ruth and Amzie Moore never enjoyed much financial stability, and by the mid-1950s they had been pushed to the verge of financial ruin. White-owned banks and businesses, in a carefully concerted effort, threatened them with foreclosure and bankruptcy. After Amzie Moore insisted that these problems were the result of his NAACP activities, the national office had offered some help, but the couple's financial situation remained precarious. It was, in part, the desperate plight of organizers like the Moores that had led Baker and her New York allies to form In Friendship in 1956. Amzie and Ruth Moore were among of the first recipients of In Friendship's aid.

As Howard Zinn's report on Baker's speech attests, she offered her listeners “a vision beyond the immediate.” She advised those gathered that evening that, even as they prepared to face hostile crowds and potentially violent police in defense of their right to vote and to use public facilities like any other citizen, these goals alone were not enough. She challenged her listeners to consider the importance of economic and systemic changes, insisting that “even if segregation is gone, we will still need to be free; we will still have to see that everyone has a job. Even if we can all vote, but if people are still hungry, we will not be free … Singing alone is not enough; we need schools and learning … Remember, we are not fighting for the freedom of the Negro alone, but for the freedom of the human spirit, a larger freedom that encompasses all of mankind.”

For many people, the movement was about the ballot and defeating Jim Crow, but in Hattiesburg and elsewhere Baker pushed repeatedly, passionately, and irrepressibly against those cramped ambitions to draw people toward a more comprehensive vision. Reiterating the sentiments expressed at the SNCC retreat a month before, she stressed the importance of linking economic justice to racial justice: “People cannot be free until there is enough work in this land to give everybody a job.” We are not free, she continued, because “in this country, in a land of great plenty and great wealth, there are millions of people who go to bed hungry every night.”68 As SNCC embarked on another leg of its historic crusade into Mississippi, Ella Baker reminded both young organizers and veteran activists alike that poverty and class inequality and racism were intimately and inextricably bound up together and had to be a part of any truly liberatory freedom agenda.

To some, it already seemed a bit of an oxymoron to call the movement nonviolent when it was under violent assault almost daily.

As a grassroots organizing strategy, the MFDP was a real success. It politicized many poor black Mississippians, developed new grassroots leaders, and even brought the dire situation of black people in the state to national attention. But the MFDP delegation's experience at the Atlantic City convention was frustrating. Because considerations of partisan politics outweighed those of justice and democracy, even the leaders of national civil rights organizations defected from the MFDP's cause. Ella Baker was not surprised to discover that politicians and the civil rights leaders who looked to them to produce change were reluctant to embrace a grassroots organization when it took an uncompromising stance.

Baker cringed at the duplicitous nature of his appeal, which called on black people's “demonstrated … capacity for forgiveness and understanding.” A fuming Ella Baker replied with a sharp impatience uncharacteristic of her usual manner of speech, “to call upon us to be understanding of Mr. Humphrey's desire to win, was saying, forget your need, your winning, and support his winning.”21 Baker resented this attempt to manipulate the good will of the delegates and persuade them that someone else's interests were more important than their own.

Although they never met, and there is no evidence that she was familiar with his writings, Baker's teaching style very much resembled that of the Latin American educator and activist Paulo Freire. Within the circle of inexperienced but courageous young activists who became Baker's students, she challenged the conventional meanings of both education and leadership. Building on the progressive philosophy of education she had embraced during her time as a teacher for the Workers' Education Project, and augmented by her own political experiences and personal sensibilities, Baker concluded that curricula had to be socially relevant and that learning needed to be based on a fluid and interactive relationship between student and teacher.10

Baker's feeling was that even though “I had the oratorical chords, I resented oratory. You should be able to have some speech making that has some purpose,” rather than simply dazzling an audience to boost your ego.21 Again, Baker's views on social action and the formulation and exchange of ideas were consistent with Gramsci's. He wrote: “The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organizer, ‘permanent persuader’ not just a simple orator.”22 Baker expanded on this notion, insisting that one's words are important “only as they help people to do things that are of value to themselves. And we've had too much of the mesmerizing type of talking.”23