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

by Barbara Ransby

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.