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

by Barbara Ransby

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