Ella Baker

       

In 1953 Ella Baker anticipated the Brown decision just as Highlander did. A long time civil rights activist Ms. Baker had been the NAACP National Director of Branches during the 1940’s and was now president of the New York City branch. She was also as part of “Parents in Action” with a personal reason for improving schools. Her niece Jackie, whom Ella had just adopted, was in elementary school, about the same age as the children in Topeka (Ransby 145-153)

Ella Baker had begun her civil rights activism in the 1930’s, soon after college, when she migrated from North Carolina to New York City soon joining the Young Negroes Cooperative League. The group’s vision of a changed society entranced her, a society that they themselves could build. A League response to the Great Depression was formation of New York City cooperatives with Baker instrumental in organizing them in Harlem. During World War II she became the NAACP Director of Branches where she was singularly responsible for the growth in membership (Carson). A March 1945 leadership conference she hosted with her friend and colleague, attorney Thurgood Marshall, in March 1945 was entitled “Give People Light and They Will Find the Way”. Attending this conference from Montgomery Alabama were E. D. Nixon of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and NAACP member Rosa Parks (Ransby 127, 141-142).


Coming to the table at the home of Kenneth and Mamie Clark to strategize for the pending school desegregation she was an experienced activist and a concerned parent. The Clarks were the psychologists whose work on the impact of segregation on black children was described in the Brown case. Earlier they had testified in the South Carolina case, one of the five cases consolidated in the Supreme Court Brown case. The Clark’s and Ella Baker’s vision of successful school desegregation was, of course, racial integration, but also parent and community involvement in the schools (Ransby 152).

By the early 1950’s, Ella Baker was convinced that social action depended on grassroots efforts in the community, by the people who cared most. She had been raised in a North Carolina community of strong, hardworking, deeply religious black people with a sense of community (Ransby 14). Organizing the cooperatives in Harlem had affirmed the goal of empowering the people. Conversely, her time at the National NAACP office with Director Walter White convinced her that a hierarchical organization was not as effective. In White’s opinion his job was to lobby Congress and the White House and the sole responsibility of the NAACP membership was to send in their dues. This disagreement was the impetus for her move to the New York NAACP branch eventually becoming president in 1952 (Carson).


Consequently Baker was personally committed to the work of civil rights, she had a grass roots organizing philosophy, she was experienced and respected when Rosa Parks decided to stay seated and Martin Luther King became the head of the Montgomery Improvement Association. Rosa Parks, in an interview with author Barbara Ransby, acknowledged Ella Baker’s influence on her (Ransby 142). To Baker, the Montgomery Bus Boycott was a result of local activism and she was ready to support it. She, along with Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levinson, formed In Friendship to aid the Montgomery Improvement Organization headed by the young minister Martin Luther King. Traveling to Montgomery Rustin and Levinson convinced King to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to build on the Montgomery success. Baker was volunteered in absentia for the organization activities. The founding meeting of the SCLC was held in King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on January 10, 1957 (Ransby 172-174). In 1958 Baker became SCLC’s first full time staff member (Ransby 180).

From the beginning Baker was concerned that the SCLC was not as inclusive as she would like. The destitute sharecroppers of the Deep South, those that would not have bus fare or money for the Woolworth’s counter were not included. Right after the first SCLC meeting she took time to visit Mississippi scouting for ways In Friendship could assist. From her time as Director of Branches for the NAACP and from her other visits to Mississippi she had a comprehensive network of contacts. In Cleveland Mississippi she stayed with her friends Amzie and Ruth Moore. Amzie was the head of the Cleveland Mississippi NAACP chapter. She collected the stories of the people, their names and their children’s names, to take back to New York for aid from In Friendship (Ransby 176, 301-303).


At the time of the February, 1960 Greensboro sit-in Baker was in Atlanta, largely responsible for the operation of the SCLC. Seeing the potential in the young people she cobbled together some money to bring them to an organizing meeting at her alma mater, Rusk College in Raleigh North Carolina. This Easter weekend 1960 meeting was just two weeks after many of them had been at the “New Generations” workshop at the Highlander Folk School. This was the beginning of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Under her tutelage the students decided on an independent organizing committee, not a bureaucratic organization or a youth arm of the SCLC or NAACP. Although Baker was in her late fifties, certainly old enough to be their mother, the students learned from her and took her guidance. More than any other person she influenced SNCC, helping them strategically and ideologically, passing on her grassroots philosophy (Ransby 245).

       

By the end of 1960 Baker had left SCLC, again displeased with top down structure and dependence on strong leaders (Ransby 261). She used her extensive contacts as she worked with SNCC leading up to the 1964 Mississippi Project led by Bob Moses that would become known as Freedom Summer. According to Ransby “Baker was a militant egalitarian” believed “most oppressed sectors of society” were the ones who had to lead themselves out of their oppression i.e. the sharecroppers, tenant farmers, manual laborers, not the middle class of the teachers and ministers who were dependent for positions on white people who in fact were their oppressors (Ransby 170-195, 261).


Continuing to influence civil right activist throughout her life, Baker died in 1986 at age 83. The pall bearers and speakers at her Harlem funeral spoke to her influence. Included were Stokely Carmichael, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Julian Bond, Vincent Harding, Bayard Rustin, Howard Zinn, Ralph Abernathy, and Bob Moses.


Her legacy continues at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, California. In the following 1974 video Baker instructs us to empower voters, invest in young leaders and get to know your neighbors.

Ransby, Barbara. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Print.

Mueller, Carol. “Ella Baker and the Origins of “Participatory Democracy”.” The Black Studies Reader. Ed. Jaqueline Bobo et al. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

Carson, Clayborne. “Ella Baker Inspires the Student Movement.” African-American History: The Modern Freedom Struggle. Stanford Univ. History Dept. 18 Oct. 2007. iTunesU.