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

by Barbara Ransby

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