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Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision
One of the most important African American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement, Ella Baker (1903-1986) was an activist whose remarkable career spanned fifty years and touched thousands of lives.
A gifted grassroots organizer, Baker shunned the spotlight in favor of vital behind-the-scenes work that helped power the black freedom struggle. She was a national officer and key figure in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and a prime mover in the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Baker made a place for herself in predominantly male political circles that included W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, and Martin Luther King Jr., all the while maintaining relationships with a vibrant group of women, students, and activists both black and white.
In this deeply researched biography, Barbara Ransby chronicles Baker's long and rich political career as an organizer, an intellectual, and a teacher, from her early experiences in depression-era Harlem to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Ransby shows Baker to be a complex figure whose radical, democratic worldview, commitment to empowering the black poor, and emphasis on group-centered, grassroots leadership set her apart from most of her political contemporaries. Beyond documenting an extraordinary life, the book paints a vivid picture of the African American fight for justice and its intersections with other progressive struggles worldwide across the twentieth century.
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One of the most important African American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement, Ella Baker (1903-1986) was an activist whose remarkable career spanned fifty years and touched thousands of lives. In this deeply researched biography, Barbara Ransby chronicles Baker's long and rich political career as an organizer, an intellectual, and a teacher, from her early experiences in depression-era Harlem to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Ransby paints a vivid picture of the African American fight for justice and its intersections with other progressive struggles worldwide across the twentieth century.
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A gifted grassroots organizer, Baker shunned the spotlight in favor of vital behind-the-scenes work that helped power the black freedom struggle. She was a national officer and key figure in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and a prime mover in the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Baker made a place for herself in predominantly male political circles that included W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, and Martin Luther King Jr., all the while maintaining relationships with a vibrant group of women, students, and activists both black and white.
In this deeply researched biography, Barbara Ransby chronicles Baker's long and rich political career as an organizer, an intellectual, and a teacher, from her early experiences in depression-era Harlem to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Ransby shows Baker to be a complex figure whose radical, democratic worldview, commitment to empowering the black poor, and emphasis on group-centered, grassroots leadership set her apart from most of her political contemporaries. Beyond documenting an extraordinary life, the book paints a vivid picture of the African American fight for justice and its intersections with other progressive struggles worldwide across the twentieth century.
<!--copy for pb
One of the most important African American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement, Ella Baker (1903-1986) was an activist whose remarkable career spanned fifty years and touched thousands of lives. In this deeply researched biography, Barbara Ransby chronicles Baker's long and rich political career as an organizer, an intellectual, and a teacher, from her early experiences in depression-era Harlem to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Ransby paints a vivid picture of the African American fight for justice and its intersections with other progressive struggles worldwide across the twentieth century.
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544 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2003
153 people are currently reading
6026 people want to read
About the author
Barbara Ransby
13 books79 followersBarbara Ransby is an historian, writer and longtime activist. She is a Professor of African American Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) where she directs both the campus-wide Social Justice Initiative and the Gender and Women’s Studies Program. She previously served as Interim Vice Provost for Planning and Programs (2011 -2012) at UIC. Prof. Ransby is author of the highly acclaimed biography, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. The book received eight national awards and recognitions including: Lillian Smith Book Award, Southern Regional Council; Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, American Historical Association; Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize, Association of Black Women Historians; Liberty Legacy Foundation Award (co-winner), Organization of American Historians; James A. Rawley Prize, Organization of American Historians; Honorable Mention, 2004 Berkshire Conference First Book Prize, Berkshire Conference of Women Historians; Honor Book, Black Caucus of the American Library Association; Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America.
(from http://barbararansby.com/about-2/)
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 115 reviews
June 18, 2012
For decades, the name of Ella Baker has lingered along the margins of my thinking about the intersection of popular education disposition and political organizing processes. When the question of an radical democratic practice indigenous to the United States, I would consistently cite Myles Horton, Grace Lee Boggs, Ella Baker and the numerous radical pedagogy practices in the Black Freedom Movement. Call it a prejudice of theory, I never took the time to actually research Baker's life in much detail due to the simple fact that unlike most radical pedagogues, Baker never wrote a book to codify her ideas. A search of the library index will reveal many books about the civil rights movement and SNCC in particular that have a dedicated chapter on Baker. But with the exception of Joanne Grant's "Ella Baker: Freedom Bound" from 1998, there's been no thorough and exhaustive study of Baker's life and thought. This fact is all the more startling considering how many generations of organizers, educators, and radical intellectuals have attributed to Baker the status of architect (or master weaver) of the civil rights movement and participatory democracy in the United States. Barbara Ransby's 2003 intellectual biography of Baker seeks to correct that omission.
As I read Ransby's book I consistently confronted my own prejudices about what constitutes political theory. For better or for worse, I feel like I have been trained to only recognize political thought when it is presented as a set of abstract political theoretical propositions. Of course, as has been argued for decades, this model of knowledge invariable privileges very specific experiences and histories, specifically a European male perspective. But more than that, such models of political thought reproduce the prioritizing of thought and ideas over experience and practice -- in other words, the Eurological model of political thought breaks the dialectic inherent to praxis. Ransby treads the fine line between providing a detailed account of Ella Baker's life and drawing from that life the lessons of a lived radical democracy.
I say all of this because it occurs to be that in an age where radical thought grows increasingly sterile, "Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement" is probably one of the most important books on political theory I have ever read. The fact that it in everyway departs from the model of contemporary radical philosophy demonstrates the urgency of its argument; that theory and lived experience need to be in dialogue if our ideas are to have any meaningful consequence in the world.
A central theme of Ransby's book is the profound dissymmetry between Baker's vision of democratic action and the orientations of the mainstream civil rights leadership. Here Ransby is able to fully develop the now-famous philosophical opposition between Martin Luther King Jr. and Ella Baker. Based on the notion of "racial uplift", King and the civil rights leadership were convinced that the protagonist of the movement needed to be the black middle class. Accepting the American ideology of petite bourgeois respectability, organizations like the NAACP and SCLC presented an image of black middle class demanding their rights. The voice of that demand, therefore, would come from the clergy; a strata of black society that tended to have greater access to education and middle class opportunity. It was no accident that a leadership based the clergy would also equate civil rights struggle with patriarchy. Baker, however, argued for a different model of protagonism.
Ransby locates Baker's early life as deeply informed by the role of women missionaries in the black church. While often middle class themselves, these women functioned entirely differently from the male clergy. For these women, the work of the church bound together the personal social circles of women, providing for the needs of poor in the community, and advocating for the poor within the power structures of the community. As Baker matured in the fulcrum of the Harlem Renaissance and the subsequent Great Depression, her own worldview moved further away from a notion of charity to a radical understanding of the poor as protagonists in their own struggles. Never confused about her own identifications, Baker then saw her role as an organizer and educator as one who identified and nurtured the fighting spirit and democratic possibilities within the lives of the poor. As a consequence of this position, solidarity assumes a different structure from that of "racial uplift." Seen as rich in experience and political analysis, the poor no longer need the middle class to speak for them. The organizer, instead, learns to be silence, to ask questions, to listen, and to bring resources and networks to the communities in the closest proximity to the violence of racial and economic exploitation.
As Ransby demonstrates over and again, a politics built upon the protagonism of the poor has implications beyond a class analysis of racism. It demands a different practice and analysis of gender from middle class normativity. Here we see how Baker's life exemplified this fact. It is no accident that in the context of SNCC, the organization where Baker had the most influence institutionally, the leadership role of women was unparalleled by any other national civil rights organization.
Ransby's biography of Baker contains many other thematic gems useful for a theory of political organizing. But beyond theory, perhaps the book makes its greatest impact in how it suggests a different way of being in the world. Over and again Ransby stresses how for Baker a movement exists as a web of personal social relationships. Those relationships span decades as ever changing constellations of organizations and resources consistently return to the same networks of friends and tender comrades. Baker eschewed partisanship in the midst of cold war terror (sometimes with more or less consistency). For her, the only partisanship worth adhering to was the movement itself. And here, the movement for Baker was always a class-based understanding of racism and struggle. The liberation of the poor meant the liberation of all. The aim of the struggle, as Ransby argues, was to understand the historical basis of exclusion. Organizing did not mean simple halting those exclusions but to reverse them. Such a reversal suggested not only the destruction of the white power structure. It also meant the end of middle class privilege and arrogance.
As I read Ransby's book I consistently confronted my own prejudices about what constitutes political theory. For better or for worse, I feel like I have been trained to only recognize political thought when it is presented as a set of abstract political theoretical propositions. Of course, as has been argued for decades, this model of knowledge invariable privileges very specific experiences and histories, specifically a European male perspective. But more than that, such models of political thought reproduce the prioritizing of thought and ideas over experience and practice -- in other words, the Eurological model of political thought breaks the dialectic inherent to praxis. Ransby treads the fine line between providing a detailed account of Ella Baker's life and drawing from that life the lessons of a lived radical democracy.
I say all of this because it occurs to be that in an age where radical thought grows increasingly sterile, "Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement" is probably one of the most important books on political theory I have ever read. The fact that it in everyway departs from the model of contemporary radical philosophy demonstrates the urgency of its argument; that theory and lived experience need to be in dialogue if our ideas are to have any meaningful consequence in the world.
A central theme of Ransby's book is the profound dissymmetry between Baker's vision of democratic action and the orientations of the mainstream civil rights leadership. Here Ransby is able to fully develop the now-famous philosophical opposition between Martin Luther King Jr. and Ella Baker. Based on the notion of "racial uplift", King and the civil rights leadership were convinced that the protagonist of the movement needed to be the black middle class. Accepting the American ideology of petite bourgeois respectability, organizations like the NAACP and SCLC presented an image of black middle class demanding their rights. The voice of that demand, therefore, would come from the clergy; a strata of black society that tended to have greater access to education and middle class opportunity. It was no accident that a leadership based the clergy would also equate civil rights struggle with patriarchy. Baker, however, argued for a different model of protagonism.
Ransby locates Baker's early life as deeply informed by the role of women missionaries in the black church. While often middle class themselves, these women functioned entirely differently from the male clergy. For these women, the work of the church bound together the personal social circles of women, providing for the needs of poor in the community, and advocating for the poor within the power structures of the community. As Baker matured in the fulcrum of the Harlem Renaissance and the subsequent Great Depression, her own worldview moved further away from a notion of charity to a radical understanding of the poor as protagonists in their own struggles. Never confused about her own identifications, Baker then saw her role as an organizer and educator as one who identified and nurtured the fighting spirit and democratic possibilities within the lives of the poor. As a consequence of this position, solidarity assumes a different structure from that of "racial uplift." Seen as rich in experience and political analysis, the poor no longer need the middle class to speak for them. The organizer, instead, learns to be silence, to ask questions, to listen, and to bring resources and networks to the communities in the closest proximity to the violence of racial and economic exploitation.
As Ransby demonstrates over and again, a politics built upon the protagonism of the poor has implications beyond a class analysis of racism. It demands a different practice and analysis of gender from middle class normativity. Here we see how Baker's life exemplified this fact. It is no accident that in the context of SNCC, the organization where Baker had the most influence institutionally, the leadership role of women was unparalleled by any other national civil rights organization.
Ransby's biography of Baker contains many other thematic gems useful for a theory of political organizing. But beyond theory, perhaps the book makes its greatest impact in how it suggests a different way of being in the world. Over and again Ransby stresses how for Baker a movement exists as a web of personal social relationships. Those relationships span decades as ever changing constellations of organizations and resources consistently return to the same networks of friends and tender comrades. Baker eschewed partisanship in the midst of cold war terror (sometimes with more or less consistency). For her, the only partisanship worth adhering to was the movement itself. And here, the movement for Baker was always a class-based understanding of racism and struggle. The liberation of the poor meant the liberation of all. The aim of the struggle, as Ransby argues, was to understand the historical basis of exclusion. Organizing did not mean simple halting those exclusions but to reverse them. Such a reversal suggested not only the destruction of the white power structure. It also meant the end of middle class privilege and arrogance.
September 19, 2007
I loved this book. The writing wasn't my favorite ever - I think the book is geared towards academic use and a lot of points get repeated over and over - but Ella Baker was an amazing woman. Baker's career spanned from the 1930's to the 1970's. I haven't read many books that talk about the older people who made contributions to the liberation movements of the 60's or that show in such detail some of foundation building that occurred in the decades before.
I not only learned a lot from reading the book, but I was thoroughly inspired. She was an activist and organizer who continued to make meaningful and valuable contributions as she got older, and Ransby's depiction of her political development and evolution is certainly thought-provoking. Ransby also manages to place her within larger contexts which add to the story and to better understanding the many elements that are part of radical political culture in the US and Baker's role within that.
Baker moved through many organizations throughout her career, and found ways to shape her paying jobs to work for her larger political goals. Seeing an example of this meant a lot to me. It was so great to read about someone who held and maintained a vision and community that is outside of doctrines yet very firmly rooted, and was able to make it real too.
I not only learned a lot from reading the book, but I was thoroughly inspired. She was an activist and organizer who continued to make meaningful and valuable contributions as she got older, and Ransby's depiction of her political development and evolution is certainly thought-provoking. Ransby also manages to place her within larger contexts which add to the story and to better understanding the many elements that are part of radical political culture in the US and Baker's role within that.
Baker moved through many organizations throughout her career, and found ways to shape her paying jobs to work for her larger political goals. Seeing an example of this meant a lot to me. It was so great to read about someone who held and maintained a vision and community that is outside of doctrines yet very firmly rooted, and was able to make it real too.
November 7, 2018
A thorough and complete history of a civil rights Hidden Figure
I started reading this while in Norfolk VA over the summer, not realizing it was Ella Baker’s birthplace and after reading Barbara Ransby’s latest book, Making All Black Lives Matter. Ransby’s command of history and narrative fills an important gap in the story of an iconic activist and freedom fighter who disrupted gender roles and expectations, transgressed respectability lines as delineated by blacks and whites and created, as Ransby notes, a magnificent and unique legacy.
I started reading this while in Norfolk VA over the summer, not realizing it was Ella Baker’s birthplace and after reading Barbara Ransby’s latest book, Making All Black Lives Matter. Ransby’s command of history and narrative fills an important gap in the story of an iconic activist and freedom fighter who disrupted gender roles and expectations, transgressed respectability lines as delineated by blacks and whites and created, as Ransby notes, a magnificent and unique legacy.
April 1, 2020
I wish there was more emphasis and research into Ella's political development and explanation of who she was influenced by. There was an overabundance of biographical details.
July 24, 2023
Barbara Ransby’s biography of Ella Jo Baker provides a tremendous account of the life of one of the most prolific and consequential Black political organizers of the 20th Century. As Ransby makes clear, Ms. Baker’s fingerprints are all over the development and evolution of the 20th Century Black Liberation Movement—from the early Civil Rights struggles of 1920s and 1930s, to the rise of the Black Power movement.
Ms. Baker was a radical humanist who truly embodied democratic principles and militant egalitarianism. She sought to incorporate bottom-up, community-led, democratic organizing in every organization she took part in during her six decade career. In doing so, she brushed shoulders with other Civil Rights titans during the era, often criticizing them for their inflated egos and self-centered organizing styles.
Ransby expertly traces Ms. Baker’s early life, entry into politics, and the intricate roles she played in the many Black political organizations over the years, including the Young Negro Cooperatives League, Workers Education Program, the NAACP, In-Friendship, the SCLC, and SNCC. In each of these organizations, Ms. Baker prioritized a combination of Black self-determination via cooperative (poor and working class-centered) organization, along with militant multi-racial coalition building. She also stressed internationalism in her efforts to support the Puerto Rican independence movement and South African anti-Apartheid struggle.
Ransby’s biography also did a great job detailing how Ms. Baker incorporated her personal relationships in her organizing. She had a profound respect for local autonomy, and was able to build long-lasting relationships with activists and organizers across the South due to her commitment to radical democratic cooperation. This book—and Ms. Baker’s life—is truly a “how-to” on how to organize a versatile and radical political movement. Highly recommended!
Ms. Baker was a radical humanist who truly embodied democratic principles and militant egalitarianism. She sought to incorporate bottom-up, community-led, democratic organizing in every organization she took part in during her six decade career. In doing so, she brushed shoulders with other Civil Rights titans during the era, often criticizing them for their inflated egos and self-centered organizing styles.
Ransby expertly traces Ms. Baker’s early life, entry into politics, and the intricate roles she played in the many Black political organizations over the years, including the Young Negro Cooperatives League, Workers Education Program, the NAACP, In-Friendship, the SCLC, and SNCC. In each of these organizations, Ms. Baker prioritized a combination of Black self-determination via cooperative (poor and working class-centered) organization, along with militant multi-racial coalition building. She also stressed internationalism in her efforts to support the Puerto Rican independence movement and South African anti-Apartheid struggle.
Ransby’s biography also did a great job detailing how Ms. Baker incorporated her personal relationships in her organizing. She had a profound respect for local autonomy, and was able to build long-lasting relationships with activists and organizers across the South due to her commitment to radical democratic cooperation. This book—and Ms. Baker’s life—is truly a “how-to” on how to organize a versatile and radical political movement. Highly recommended!
February 18, 2013
One of the best histories of an American Civil Rights leader I've read. The importance of Ella Baker to the Civil Rights Movement, compounded with her dedication to a democratic bottom up leadership strategy that empowered the dispossessed to take revolutionary leadership of their liberation is unparalleled. Not only a great biography, but a great history of the Civil Rights Movement.
December 31, 2024
This is the best book I read in 2024. I learned about Ella baker in “I’ve got the light of freedom”, but did not fully know her or her story. Barbara Ransby does a beautiful job telling and teaching the story and works about Ella Baker. Ella had a profound impact on American society and her story mainly goes untold
February 15, 2024
After reading this book I am convinced that Ella Baker is one of the most exciting feminists of the civil rights era, certainly one of the greatest humans to organize in in Turtle Island(US)!
March 16, 2024
Though Baker left us no blueprint, belonged to no tendency in the American left, and rejected organisational ties, her desire for a revolutionary process is revealed here - at the intersection of biography and intellectual history. Her personal philosophy emerges from a complex web of experience. From her mother’s involvement in the Black Baptist missionary movement and her own education at Shaw, a college responsible for producing the Talented Tenth, to the intellectual melting pot of Harlem and interactions with sharecroppers in Mississippi, Baker’s political development is rooted in close social bonds. It seems she understood better than anyone what John Berger meant when he wrote “Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.” Positioning herself at the grassroots, Baker was afforded a new perspective. Adamant that the oppressed should define their own freedom, she would first listen. This broke with the movement’s tendency towards momentous figures and external leadership, encouraging local cultivation instead. As James C. Scott warns, to restrict the political to single outbursts, “is to miss the immense political terrain that lies between quiescence and revolt and that, for better or worse, is the political environment of subject classes. It is to focus on the visible coastline of politics and miss the continent that lies beyond.” A reflective listener might uncover the ‘hidden transcript’, finding nascent political consciousness in humour, music, or slang. Working for the NAACP, Baker would take extended trips, rather than leave the day after her speech as was customary. Her aim was not simply to mobilise, but to organise. Her long conversations with Papa Tight, whose status as town drunk and lack of higher education excluded him from the respectable image many Civil Rights campaigns intended to project, privileged her to new insights. Though some might not be able to articulate all the points of an organisation’s programme, what was important was the depth of feeling. In a favourite example of hers, Baker told the story of a woman coming up to her after a meeting to say they were wearing the same dress. While some might have taken this as a petty slight, Baker was thrilled, considering it an alternate recognition of commonality in what she had said.
From early on, she insisted that “the Negro must quit looking for a savior and work to save himself.” Rather than take the spotlight and disappear, she made sure that people going to jail had toothbrushes and hair combs. And rather than give answers, she asked questions. As one SNCC activist observed, “Miss Ella would ask key questions, and through the asking of the questions, certain things became revealed.” Her radical pedagogy inspired a new generation of activists, giving them the tools to carry on the struggle, believing it to be eternal. Barbara Ransby allows space for the voices of those she touched, thereby elucidating the reciprocal relationship of learning Baker held so dear. With complete compassion and elegance, Ransby gives life to Baker’s philosophy. And, though it is hard, even nearly 4 decades since her passing, not to feel the loss of so great a woman, the spark she nurtured is still burning. No where is this clearer than with Ransby, in whose exceptionally graceful writing we are told a story, and taught how to listen.
From early on, she insisted that “the Negro must quit looking for a savior and work to save himself.” Rather than take the spotlight and disappear, she made sure that people going to jail had toothbrushes and hair combs. And rather than give answers, she asked questions. As one SNCC activist observed, “Miss Ella would ask key questions, and through the asking of the questions, certain things became revealed.” Her radical pedagogy inspired a new generation of activists, giving them the tools to carry on the struggle, believing it to be eternal. Barbara Ransby allows space for the voices of those she touched, thereby elucidating the reciprocal relationship of learning Baker held so dear. With complete compassion and elegance, Ransby gives life to Baker’s philosophy. And, though it is hard, even nearly 4 decades since her passing, not to feel the loss of so great a woman, the spark she nurtured is still burning. No where is this clearer than with Ransby, in whose exceptionally graceful writing we are told a story, and taught how to listen.
April 22, 2017
I wanted very much so to love this book. An exhaustive look at Ella Baker's life and story of an organizer who carved her own space out to do good work in the black freedom movement, her story needs to be told. However, this bio is written like a textbook, beating you over the head with so much info and so much redundancy, you have to push through to finish it. The volume of info Ransby uncovered is astounding, but does not make for a good biography.
June 29, 2017
Wow. I knew she was supercool and did lots of behind the scenes work while men like Martin Luther King Jr and NAACP Walter White took all the credit, but I did not now how much influence she had on SNCC. She played a huge role in guiding individuals in SNCC towards more inclusive discussion and debate, towards direct action instead of legislative or electoral tactics, and she was always firmly for a big picture victory... it was never about just integrating lunch counters or small reformist struggles. She was working for a whole new world built on inclusion and fairness. I also did not know that she was one of the main instigators in setting up SNCC in the first place or later the broad movement to free Angela Davis.
Not only is the subject of this book exciting and amazing, but it is also fun to read. The concluding chapter has names like Gramsci and Freire in the title, and I was like, uh oh, here comes the impenetrable academic analysis... but no, that chapter was also awesome. I got to get more books about the women in SNCC, man. And about these smaller, whiter groups that she was down with who did fund raising and other support work.
But it isn't just the 1960s stuff that makes this book so great. Baker is active from the 1920s on. And looking at these struggles from her perspective is fascinating. Early in the book and her political life, Baker had an alliance with George Schuyler. They were working on building a network of African American consumer cooperatives... like Black food coops... He doesn't play a big role in the book, but I think his influence on Baker is there and that is another "wow" thing for me. Up til reading this book, I mainly knew Schuyler from an excerpt of his Black No More that appeared in Dark Matter: Reading the Bones and some mention of him in On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy... so more his literary work, the stuff that gets him compared to Mencken. The Internet considers him a Conservative, but that doesn't seem quite right. Anyway, he's a very small part of this book and now a significant part of this review and that also doesn't seem fair. The point is, that Baker was very active with a lot of amazing groups and even if SNCC is for me the jewel in the crown, there is a lot more to her even than that.
Not only is the subject of this book exciting and amazing, but it is also fun to read. The concluding chapter has names like Gramsci and Freire in the title, and I was like, uh oh, here comes the impenetrable academic analysis... but no, that chapter was also awesome. I got to get more books about the women in SNCC, man. And about these smaller, whiter groups that she was down with who did fund raising and other support work.
But it isn't just the 1960s stuff that makes this book so great. Baker is active from the 1920s on. And looking at these struggles from her perspective is fascinating. Early in the book and her political life, Baker had an alliance with George Schuyler. They were working on building a network of African American consumer cooperatives... like Black food coops... He doesn't play a big role in the book, but I think his influence on Baker is there and that is another "wow" thing for me. Up til reading this book, I mainly knew Schuyler from an excerpt of his Black No More that appeared in Dark Matter: Reading the Bones and some mention of him in On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy... so more his literary work, the stuff that gets him compared to Mencken. The Internet considers him a Conservative, but that doesn't seem quite right. Anyway, he's a very small part of this book and now a significant part of this review and that also doesn't seem fair. The point is, that Baker was very active with a lot of amazing groups and even if SNCC is for me the jewel in the crown, there is a lot more to her even than that.
March 31, 2021
This was a fantastic biography, with some excellent theory tied in during key moments. The writing was smooth, accessible, detailed, emphatic where appropriate, and well organized. Dr. Ransby did a phenomenal job situating Ella Baker among the many organizations and ideological strains that proliferated across her political life. It's so unusual for someone to thrive amongst so many contradictions and even maintain relationships despite conflict. This only makes me respect Ella Baker even more (didn't know that was possible!). Additionally, I appreciated when Dr. Ransby interjected her well-researched opinion on when Ella Baker may have been mistaken or overly influenced by personality disputes (ie her relationship with Dr. King). I'm giving the book 4 stars instead of 5 because (1) I think the book would have been improved with an expanded theory section about the implications of the Black Freedom Movement as an organizing frame; and (2) the gender sections of the book felt weak and a little bit cursory; and (3) this isn't a true criticism of the book because it succeeds with flying colors as a biography, but I selfishly wanted more content about Ella Baker's organization systems because of my research pursuits, and there were almost no references to her day-to-day administrative and clerical efforts.
September 15, 2007
just kept getting better as it went on. the writing style was not my favorite, the author seemed overly interested in teasing out categories or labels to apply to baker's life, rather than telling the bare facts. a more serious complaint is that the book spends hundreds of pages in baker's early life and upbringing, only to speed through the most politically interesting part of her life, in the black freedom movement of the 50s and 60s. i'm sorry, but i can never get enough information about SNCC.
nevertheless, it's a good book, makes very useful points about radical democratic movement-building and education (that the role of the organizer is to bring people together and ask tough questions, but leave people to determine their own actions and strategy), and shows that ella baker above all others was the true mentor and parent of our grassroots organizing struggles today.
nevertheless, it's a good book, makes very useful points about radical democratic movement-building and education (that the role of the organizer is to bring people together and ask tough questions, but leave people to determine their own actions and strategy), and shows that ella baker above all others was the true mentor and parent of our grassroots organizing struggles today.
December 11, 2020
Ransby has clearly done her research. She writes a compelling biography of Ella Baker and her role in the Black Freedom Movement. Her perspective on Baker's leadership in contrast to some of the male stars of the civil rights movement was woven throughout the book. As someone who has done a good bit of my own research on the movement, I found several points that I had not considered before.
February 25, 2014
Full of great information, but very long-winded, dry, and hard to get through in several places. Ella Baker was an amazing woman, and I'm so glad I learned about her. I only wish her story had been told to me by a better author.
August 26, 2017
Being a respected academic book, it's a bit of a slog. But with persistence you can get into it, and there's so much to be inspired by in Ella Baker's life.
May 30, 2019
So grateful for this book, and the work of Ella Baker. Inspiring!
August 29, 2020
I knew so little about Ella Baker when I picked this up, and I'm so glad I did. What a woman.
December 28, 2018
Wish I had read this years ago. Really compelling, thoughtful writing/framing by Ransby. And Bakers politics, her radical democratic humanism , as I think it was called in here once, is really inspiring to learn about.
September 8, 2014
ELLA BAKER AND THE BLACK FREEDOM MOVEMENT
NOVEMBER 22, 2013
What, exactly, was democratic about Baker and the many hundreds that she worked with?
A democracy, as John Dewey says, is having faith in other people to do the right thing at the right time. Ella Baker and the various organizations and organizers she worked with had this faith not just in African Americans, but in all the people of any race. There is simply no other reason for their efforts to equalize economically and politically across racial and class lines. They had faith that the poor could do great things if they had fair and just opportunities to do so. They had faith that African Americans were capable of leading the country in a better direction, if they were given a chance on equal footing. But they also had faith in the elite aristocracy’s ability to lead the nation, given in that their cause did not consistently advocate complete anarchy or move towards communism. Democracy was not the enemy, those who failed to practice it were. White supremacy, Jim Crowe, and the apartheid south were the enemy, not the founding principles of democracy.
Ella was raised by her mother to know and understand class and race did not dictate overall intelligence and ability (pg.19). She spent time learning about democracy in Harlem against a backdrop of the Great Depression, and she advocated democracy and worked to break up the enemies of democracy by visiting the members of the NAACP people directly, spending time with them rather than just leading meetings in the town center. This indicates a true sincerity towards making change happen, not for herself, but for the people she worked so hard for. She worked for the betterment of race relations to make a better democratic republic.
What unique contributions did Baker make to the burgeoning and diverse Black Freedom Movement?
Baker had a unique background that allowed her to continue to practice what she preached when she obtained higher levels of status within the NAACP. Many leaders coming from poor or lower class roots changed once they were put in charge or obtained a leadership position. But because Baker was raised in a substantial middle-class black neighborhood (and would routinely outreach to poorer black neighborhoods) she was taught at an early age that a life of service is never completed. On page 209, a perfect Baker quote is cited, “I never worked for an organization but for a cause.” This speaks volumes about her true commitment to the organizations she worked with and for. Baker left the NAACP because she felt it was “falling short of its present possibilities” and “the full capacities of the staff have not been used” and “there is little chance of mine being utilized in the immediate future”. (pg.146) It was a resignation based on lack of focus on the true meaning of the organization, not one due to lack of advancement towards leadership.
Can we call Baker a populist?
Baker was a populist by proxy, because she didn’t advocate for all the poor all the time, but instead the African American poor most of the time, she was not advocating on behalf of the people. Populist beliefs are popular, and she was not in favor of pursuing the popular ideals at the time, such as the belief in white supremacy. As unjust and evil as the pursuits of racist ideals are, they were during her time popular. Baker did not need to be populist, Baker needed to be an advocate of an oppressed race of people in a democratic country. Baker perhaps, could not be a populist as it would undermine her efforts to bring justice and equal rights to a race of people who needed her. Baker’s life was a series of desperate situations brought on by years and decades – millennia even, of ignorance and wanton hate. Baker was not a populist because it was more important for her to focus on African Americans and equal rights.
NOVEMBER 22, 2013
What, exactly, was democratic about Baker and the many hundreds that she worked with?
A democracy, as John Dewey says, is having faith in other people to do the right thing at the right time. Ella Baker and the various organizations and organizers she worked with had this faith not just in African Americans, but in all the people of any race. There is simply no other reason for their efforts to equalize economically and politically across racial and class lines. They had faith that the poor could do great things if they had fair and just opportunities to do so. They had faith that African Americans were capable of leading the country in a better direction, if they were given a chance on equal footing. But they also had faith in the elite aristocracy’s ability to lead the nation, given in that their cause did not consistently advocate complete anarchy or move towards communism. Democracy was not the enemy, those who failed to practice it were. White supremacy, Jim Crowe, and the apartheid south were the enemy, not the founding principles of democracy.
Ella was raised by her mother to know and understand class and race did not dictate overall intelligence and ability (pg.19). She spent time learning about democracy in Harlem against a backdrop of the Great Depression, and she advocated democracy and worked to break up the enemies of democracy by visiting the members of the NAACP people directly, spending time with them rather than just leading meetings in the town center. This indicates a true sincerity towards making change happen, not for herself, but for the people she worked so hard for. She worked for the betterment of race relations to make a better democratic republic.
What unique contributions did Baker make to the burgeoning and diverse Black Freedom Movement?
Baker had a unique background that allowed her to continue to practice what she preached when she obtained higher levels of status within the NAACP. Many leaders coming from poor or lower class roots changed once they were put in charge or obtained a leadership position. But because Baker was raised in a substantial middle-class black neighborhood (and would routinely outreach to poorer black neighborhoods) she was taught at an early age that a life of service is never completed. On page 209, a perfect Baker quote is cited, “I never worked for an organization but for a cause.” This speaks volumes about her true commitment to the organizations she worked with and for. Baker left the NAACP because she felt it was “falling short of its present possibilities” and “the full capacities of the staff have not been used” and “there is little chance of mine being utilized in the immediate future”. (pg.146) It was a resignation based on lack of focus on the true meaning of the organization, not one due to lack of advancement towards leadership.
Can we call Baker a populist?
Baker was a populist by proxy, because she didn’t advocate for all the poor all the time, but instead the African American poor most of the time, she was not advocating on behalf of the people. Populist beliefs are popular, and she was not in favor of pursuing the popular ideals at the time, such as the belief in white supremacy. As unjust and evil as the pursuits of racist ideals are, they were during her time popular. Baker did not need to be populist, Baker needed to be an advocate of an oppressed race of people in a democratic country. Baker perhaps, could not be a populist as it would undermine her efforts to bring justice and equal rights to a race of people who needed her. Baker’s life was a series of desperate situations brought on by years and decades – millennia even, of ignorance and wanton hate. Baker was not a populist because it was more important for her to focus on African Americans and equal rights.
February 24, 2020
Ella Baker was an amazing, intelligent, driven, complex, and beautiful woman This superbly researched and exceedingly thorough biography does powerful justice to her as that woman, and as probably THE most influential woman of the Civil Rights era and the struggle for social justice.
I found it interesting that Ransby so quickly admits, reluctantly, that Baker's privacy made her a difficult, nay impossible at times, individual to write about. Hard to fathom how such an influential and widely respected woman could be so unknown, but she chose to make her life her work, or maybe it was to make her work her life.
Regardless, if you know anything about Harlem in the 30's, the Civil Rights Movement of the 40'-60's, and the resultant social and political upheavals of the 70's and 80's, then rest assured Baker was involved somehow, some way, and to some great ends. Name a person of renown in those places, at those times, and they knew Baker, though likely not as well as she knew them.
Having read quite a bit about the lives and times of those who spearheaded and supported the Civil Rights Movement, much of this book is merely a refresher course in the scholarship of that social justice movement. Baker is an exemplary figure, albeit not entirely visible - partly of her own choosing, partly due to the underlying sexism of the Black Civil Rights Movement specifically, and American society in general - and the work she performed surely advanced the cause immensely.
I am not overly interested in the personal life of most people, and Baker for me is not much different. Surely, where she came from "matters", but I am always more interested in what someone does, and how they do it, than I am in their specific background. One could argue those things are inseparable, but then how to explain the fact Baker herself is so extraordinary but so many others from similar backgrounds are so extraordinarily less similar?
Baker was a radical revolutionary, no doubt about that. Her strong family ties, her religious background, her immense educational success, all played major parts in her development. But I found her unrelenting fighting spirit to be her greatest asset. Never one to shy away from any challenge, Baker used her talents to change the world. She never wavered in the struggle to break the systems that enslaved Black America, and in many ways actually enslave nearly all of humanity, whether most people want to recognize that or not. She understood that the systems of enslavement and oppression were not broken systems, but fully-functioning and successful systems. Their goals were being met, and how. She advocated new systems, better systems, more inclusive and humane systems. Her fight still rages even as she no longer carries the banner.
I found this book exhilarating and sobering and unsettling. So much of what Baker fought for has yet to be brought to bear. America is still violently racist, I would argue even more insidiously so because the stories of the oppressed are ever more available and known, and yet White Supremacist America still refuses to change, or even acknowledge their complicity. But this reality in no way diminishes the unbelievable life and work of Ella Baker, and we would be less of a people without her accomplishments and continued influence.
Essential reading for those interested in amazing Black Feminists, amazing Civil Rights warriors, amazing Black Women, and amazing women in general. We need more Ella Bakers, now more than ever.
I found it interesting that Ransby so quickly admits, reluctantly, that Baker's privacy made her a difficult, nay impossible at times, individual to write about. Hard to fathom how such an influential and widely respected woman could be so unknown, but she chose to make her life her work, or maybe it was to make her work her life.
Regardless, if you know anything about Harlem in the 30's, the Civil Rights Movement of the 40'-60's, and the resultant social and political upheavals of the 70's and 80's, then rest assured Baker was involved somehow, some way, and to some great ends. Name a person of renown in those places, at those times, and they knew Baker, though likely not as well as she knew them.
Having read quite a bit about the lives and times of those who spearheaded and supported the Civil Rights Movement, much of this book is merely a refresher course in the scholarship of that social justice movement. Baker is an exemplary figure, albeit not entirely visible - partly of her own choosing, partly due to the underlying sexism of the Black Civil Rights Movement specifically, and American society in general - and the work she performed surely advanced the cause immensely.
I am not overly interested in the personal life of most people, and Baker for me is not much different. Surely, where she came from "matters", but I am always more interested in what someone does, and how they do it, than I am in their specific background. One could argue those things are inseparable, but then how to explain the fact Baker herself is so extraordinary but so many others from similar backgrounds are so extraordinarily less similar?
Baker was a radical revolutionary, no doubt about that. Her strong family ties, her religious background, her immense educational success, all played major parts in her development. But I found her unrelenting fighting spirit to be her greatest asset. Never one to shy away from any challenge, Baker used her talents to change the world. She never wavered in the struggle to break the systems that enslaved Black America, and in many ways actually enslave nearly all of humanity, whether most people want to recognize that or not. She understood that the systems of enslavement and oppression were not broken systems, but fully-functioning and successful systems. Their goals were being met, and how. She advocated new systems, better systems, more inclusive and humane systems. Her fight still rages even as she no longer carries the banner.
I found this book exhilarating and sobering and unsettling. So much of what Baker fought for has yet to be brought to bear. America is still violently racist, I would argue even more insidiously so because the stories of the oppressed are ever more available and known, and yet White Supremacist America still refuses to change, or even acknowledge their complicity. But this reality in no way diminishes the unbelievable life and work of Ella Baker, and we would be less of a people without her accomplishments and continued influence.
Essential reading for those interested in amazing Black Feminists, amazing Civil Rights warriors, amazing Black Women, and amazing women in general. We need more Ella Bakers, now more than ever.
September 14, 2022
Summary: An excellent biography of a woman who is underappreciated but vitally important to the Civil Rights Movement.
I want to mention Alissa Wilkerson's book Salty, which finally got me to reading Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement. Salty was framed as mini-biographies of women that Wilkerson would like to have around a dinner table for the most fabulous dinner party ever. I was vaguely aware of Ella Baker but did not know the extent of her involvement in all aspects of the civil rights era.
One of the points of The Dark End of the Street was that organizers started the work of what we think of as the civil rights era in the 1930s, which were motivated by organizational movements at the turn of the 20th century, which was a response to the end of the Reconstruction Era, and so on. All movements have historical antecedents that tend to be forgotten as we tell their story. Ella Baker is a generation older than most well-known figures in the Civil Rights era. She is in the same generation as Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King Sr.
Born in 1903, Baker grew up in Norfolk, VA, until 7. In 1910, there was a white race riot in Norfolk, and Baker's mother moved herself and the children back to her parent's home in Littleton, NC. Her father continued to work out of Norfolk on steamships. In addition, her grandfather had died, and her mother moved home to help care for her mother and the land. Both sets of Ella Baker's grandparents were born into slavery. Baker's father's parents were sharecroppers, but her mother's parents were literate landowners. And her grandfather was a pastor as well as a farmer. Ella Baker's parents completed high school, and her mother worked as a teacher before she was married and then again as a teacher after her husband died.
Ella Baker started Shaw's high school boarding school at 15 and continued until she graduated college in 1927. That college education was a sign of her middle-class background. Although it was also a sign of her educational aptitude. Her sister did not complete high school, and her brother did not enter college. After college, she moved to New York City, where she started a series of short-term jobs that would characterize her work for the rest of her life. She worked as a journalist and then for the Young Negroes Cooperative League as an organizer of buying cooperatives for local black-owned stores around the country. The funding for many of the organizing jobs that she would have for the rest of her life was tenuous, and she often worked without pay as an organizer and supplemented her income through other jobs. Over the next several years, she worked for the New York Public library, organizing lectures and adult education, the YWCA, and a worker's education project for the Works Progress Administration.
In 1938 she started volunteering for the NAACP. Hired as a secretary in 1940, she quickly moved to work as a field secretary. By 1943 she was the national coordinator for organizing and had the title of Director of Branches. This was the highest ranking job by a woman up until this point in the NAACP. In 1946 she resigned partly due to conflicts with the autocratic Executive Director of the NAACP, Walter White, and her need to stop traveling as frequently because she effectively adopted her niece. Baker then took on the volunteer role of president of the NYC chapter of the NAACP and took on school desegregation and police brutality as a local organizer. She ran for city council in 1953 but was unsuccessful.
From NYC, she was connected to many radical movements and well connected within the Harlem Renaissance arts and political scene. Because of her work with the NAACP, she was well connected through the south and maintained many of those relationships after leaving her national role. She helped to form an organization to funnel money to Montgomery, and other nascent civil rights protest movements and was involved in the conference that eventually became the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Pastors primarily led the SCLC, and there was a level of sexism within the group. Ella Baker became the Assistant Executive Director; it's only full-time staff. Her organizing abilities were the root of much of the early success of the SCLC. She worked for over a year as the interim executive director but was never given the title. After Wyatt Walker was officially named the new Executive Director of the SCLC, Baker started to move out of her work with the SCLC and helped to organize SNCC (Student Non-violent Coordinating Campaign.
By 1960, Baker was in her late 50s and had decades of community organizing experience, contacts around the nation, and had held senior-level positions in many high-profile organizations. But she was frequently frustrated with sexism and the authoritarian methodology of organizations like the NAACP and the SCLC. As she helped organize SNCC and mentored its leadership, she instilled a much more egalitarian and grassroots style into the organization's culture. SNCC focused less on high-profile leaders and more on local organizing over time instead of short-term projects. SNCC concentrated on voting rights and direct action for public access (the sit-in movement). Baker also was significantly involved in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the alternative to the Mississippi Democratic Party. Before MFDP, the Mississippi Democratic Party held segregated primaries that only allowed white voters to choose candidates. The MFDP went to the national Democratic convention in 1964 to protest its segregation and sought to deny recognition of the Mississippi Democratic Party delegates until it desegregated. The MFDP was not successful at unseating the Mississippi delegates but did result in a rule change that eventually was effective and was a significant contributor to party realignment.
By 1967, Ella Baker mainly had moved back to NYC and organized from there. Her health slowed her, but she was still an activist, maybe even more radical than earlier. She was involved in the Free Angela Davis movement, the Puerto Rican Independence movement, and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. She never traveled outside the US, but she was involved in many global movements in her later years.
Ella Baker is arguably one of the most important figures of the 20th century. She was involved in the senior leadership of most prominent civil rights organizations at one point or another and pushed them toward more egalitarian (both in gender and class) positions. Her vision for local organizing as the root for national change was less successful than she hoped, but much of the strength of the civil rights era was built on her work of empowering local movements. Rosa Parks' first trip outside of the Montgomery area was to a training conference in Atlanta organized by Ella Baker. Many of the relatively unknown leaders that work to build local movements were identified, trained, and supported by Ella Baker. Baker's decentralized approach has influenced the ideological rooting of the modern civil rights movement.
This is not a short book. The main text is nearly 400 pages, and the audiobook is almost 22 hours. But in many ways, I wanted more detail and more context. You can see about fifty highlights and notes here.
I want to mention Alissa Wilkerson's book Salty, which finally got me to reading Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement. Salty was framed as mini-biographies of women that Wilkerson would like to have around a dinner table for the most fabulous dinner party ever. I was vaguely aware of Ella Baker but did not know the extent of her involvement in all aspects of the civil rights era.
One of the points of The Dark End of the Street was that organizers started the work of what we think of as the civil rights era in the 1930s, which were motivated by organizational movements at the turn of the 20th century, which was a response to the end of the Reconstruction Era, and so on. All movements have historical antecedents that tend to be forgotten as we tell their story. Ella Baker is a generation older than most well-known figures in the Civil Rights era. She is in the same generation as Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King Sr.
Born in 1903, Baker grew up in Norfolk, VA, until 7. In 1910, there was a white race riot in Norfolk, and Baker's mother moved herself and the children back to her parent's home in Littleton, NC. Her father continued to work out of Norfolk on steamships. In addition, her grandfather had died, and her mother moved home to help care for her mother and the land. Both sets of Ella Baker's grandparents were born into slavery. Baker's father's parents were sharecroppers, but her mother's parents were literate landowners. And her grandfather was a pastor as well as a farmer. Ella Baker's parents completed high school, and her mother worked as a teacher before she was married and then again as a teacher after her husband died.
Ella Baker started Shaw's high school boarding school at 15 and continued until she graduated college in 1927. That college education was a sign of her middle-class background. Although it was also a sign of her educational aptitude. Her sister did not complete high school, and her brother did not enter college. After college, she moved to New York City, where she started a series of short-term jobs that would characterize her work for the rest of her life. She worked as a journalist and then for the Young Negroes Cooperative League as an organizer of buying cooperatives for local black-owned stores around the country. The funding for many of the organizing jobs that she would have for the rest of her life was tenuous, and she often worked without pay as an organizer and supplemented her income through other jobs. Over the next several years, she worked for the New York Public library, organizing lectures and adult education, the YWCA, and a worker's education project for the Works Progress Administration.
In 1938 she started volunteering for the NAACP. Hired as a secretary in 1940, she quickly moved to work as a field secretary. By 1943 she was the national coordinator for organizing and had the title of Director of Branches. This was the highest ranking job by a woman up until this point in the NAACP. In 1946 she resigned partly due to conflicts with the autocratic Executive Director of the NAACP, Walter White, and her need to stop traveling as frequently because she effectively adopted her niece. Baker then took on the volunteer role of president of the NYC chapter of the NAACP and took on school desegregation and police brutality as a local organizer. She ran for city council in 1953 but was unsuccessful.
From NYC, she was connected to many radical movements and well connected within the Harlem Renaissance arts and political scene. Because of her work with the NAACP, she was well connected through the south and maintained many of those relationships after leaving her national role. She helped to form an organization to funnel money to Montgomery, and other nascent civil rights protest movements and was involved in the conference that eventually became the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Pastors primarily led the SCLC, and there was a level of sexism within the group. Ella Baker became the Assistant Executive Director; it's only full-time staff. Her organizing abilities were the root of much of the early success of the SCLC. She worked for over a year as the interim executive director but was never given the title. After Wyatt Walker was officially named the new Executive Director of the SCLC, Baker started to move out of her work with the SCLC and helped to organize SNCC (Student Non-violent Coordinating Campaign.
By 1960, Baker was in her late 50s and had decades of community organizing experience, contacts around the nation, and had held senior-level positions in many high-profile organizations. But she was frequently frustrated with sexism and the authoritarian methodology of organizations like the NAACP and the SCLC. As she helped organize SNCC and mentored its leadership, she instilled a much more egalitarian and grassroots style into the organization's culture. SNCC focused less on high-profile leaders and more on local organizing over time instead of short-term projects. SNCC concentrated on voting rights and direct action for public access (the sit-in movement). Baker also was significantly involved in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the alternative to the Mississippi Democratic Party. Before MFDP, the Mississippi Democratic Party held segregated primaries that only allowed white voters to choose candidates. The MFDP went to the national Democratic convention in 1964 to protest its segregation and sought to deny recognition of the Mississippi Democratic Party delegates until it desegregated. The MFDP was not successful at unseating the Mississippi delegates but did result in a rule change that eventually was effective and was a significant contributor to party realignment.
By 1967, Ella Baker mainly had moved back to NYC and organized from there. Her health slowed her, but she was still an activist, maybe even more radical than earlier. She was involved in the Free Angela Davis movement, the Puerto Rican Independence movement, and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. She never traveled outside the US, but she was involved in many global movements in her later years.
Ella Baker is arguably one of the most important figures of the 20th century. She was involved in the senior leadership of most prominent civil rights organizations at one point or another and pushed them toward more egalitarian (both in gender and class) positions. Her vision for local organizing as the root for national change was less successful than she hoped, but much of the strength of the civil rights era was built on her work of empowering local movements. Rosa Parks' first trip outside of the Montgomery area was to a training conference in Atlanta organized by Ella Baker. Many of the relatively unknown leaders that work to build local movements were identified, trained, and supported by Ella Baker. Baker's decentralized approach has influenced the ideological rooting of the modern civil rights movement.
This is not a short book. The main text is nearly 400 pages, and the audiobook is almost 22 hours. But in many ways, I wanted more detail and more context. You can see about fifty highlights and notes here.
April 13, 2020
Ella Baker’s description of herself as somebody focused on being one of the many can easily be misunderstood. As a powerful revolutionary organizer, Baker was committed to upending the culture of individualism and hierarchy, replacing it with real meaningful democratic participation that moves oppressed people from the margin to the center. As a professional woman who had to assert herself in the male dominated mid-century civil rights organizations of the NAACP and Southern Christian Leadership Council, she developed a quiet disdain for male egos and top-down organization. She worked in the civil rights struggle her entire life but never ceased to connect the struggle against white supremacy to the struggles against capitalism and imperialism and the organizational forms that perpetuated oppression and exploitation.
Ella Baker’s family and upbringing in Jim Crow Norfolk, Virginia and Littleton, South Carolina provided a formative foundation from which she developed into a legendary organizer who had tight relationships with a vast network of activists all across the south and east coast as well as a younger generation of activists that looked to her for strategic wisdom and counsel.
As Barbara Ransby points out in her biography of Ella Baker, her mother came from a family of literate landowners and was active in the National (Black Baptist) Women’s convention missionary work, providing for less fortunate black families in the community and advancing the race. Baker’s mother was also trained as a teacher and had a sober and serious demeanor. Ella Josephine Baker frequently told the story of how her maternal grandmother (her namesake, Josephine Elizabeth) refused the command of her slavemaster, who was also her father, to marry a light-skinned slave in the plantation house. Instead she chose Mitchell Ross, a dark-skinned slave who worked in the fields. As a result she was banished from the house and put to work in the fields. Her family’s spirit of resistance and sense of deep connection and obligation to the community and the race was foundational for Baker.
But Ella Baker didn’t stick around her small community of Littleton after graduating from college, instead moving to Harlem in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance. There she met socialists, communists, anarchists and other radicals. Although Ella Baker would always dress conservatively (but with an occasional pillbox hat) and was, like her mother, temperamentally serious, her years in Harlem seemed to help her expand her notion of what was “respectable” from missionary work to savvy revolutionary organizing. At the same time, Baker never ceased to tirelessly provide for those in need in the civil rights movement.
During the 1930s, Ella Baker worked for the Young Negro Cooperative League (YNCL) and the WPA’s Worker’s Education Project (WEP). Working with George Schuyler, an iconoclastic anarchist who later became a conservative, Baker traveled across the United States, helping create black cooperative startups. The YNCL was unique at that time in insisting on women’s equal participation, full participation of rank and file in decision making, and young people’s primacy at the forefront of social change. As Jessica Nembhard Gordon points out in Collective Courage, these would be core organizing principles throughout Baker’s life and would culminate in her work with the Southern Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
While working at the WEP, Ella Baker developed an educational method that was liberatory and constructionist, approaching literacy from the lived reality of student workers and helping them develop critical consciousness about the large societal forces impacting their lives. Of course this pedagogical approach, similarly developed by Paulo Freire in Brazil, would form the basis of the Freedom Schools that SNCC launched during Freedom Summer in 1964.
Ella Baker spent the 1940’s traveling the south working for the NAACP, helping coordinate local chapters’ activity. Her work ethic was daunting; she traveled to four or five communities a week, helping organize and speak to large gatherings and staying up past midnight getting to know the people involved in the struggle. It was in this job that she honed her relational style and developed strong ties with committed leaders in communities throughout the south, people she would later introduce as elders to the young college students who were leading the lunch counter sit-ins and interstate freedom bus rides. Baker later moved on from the NAACP, frustrated with its legalistic approach and leadership’s lack of appreciation for the incredible organizing going on at the grassroots level among its chapters.
After the Montgomery bus boycott, Dr. King and Reverend Ralph Abernathy wanted to spread the movement throughout the south, and they chose Ella Baker as the organizer. Baker stood her ground as a seasoned female organizer in the midst of the ministers’ egos and the patriarchal inclinations of that group. It was while Baker was at SCLC that Dr. King called the young activists together, hoping to absorb them into the SCLC. Baker was tasked with organizing the conference which she brought to Shaw University, her alma mater. Of course she had something else in mind, and SNCC was born.
As Barbara Ransby points out in Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, Baker played a dual role for the young organizers of SNCC, working tirelessly to coordinate logistics and accommodations and functioning as the movement philosopher and Socratic teacher. She asked penetrating questions that helped the young organizers develop issues as well as prioritize and plan strategies and tactics. She also instilled organizational values that she carried with her – a radical organizational inclusiveness that worked against patriarchal sidelining of women (SNCC operated by consensus) and a thorough grounding in a grassroots approach (SNCC organizers deferred to residents of the community. For example, the idea of registering voters came from Amzie Moore, one of Baker’s comrades from her days with the NAACP).
During this time, Ella Baker also worked with the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party as Fannie Lou Hamer and others, fed up with blatant racist exclusion from the state political party, planned to get seated at the Democratic convention in Atlantic City. Baker connected MDFP organizers with movement and union leaders in the Democratic Party who were sympathetic to the organizing against white supremacy. They lined up votes in preparation for the convention. Ultimately, their organizing was not enough, and LBJ was able to push through a meaningless observer role for the MDFP participants who rejected his offer. Baker, who suspected this would be the outcome, also knew that the experience would help reveal the true nature of the Democratic Party at the time.
Years later, SNCC organizer Bob Moses used the term Fundi for Ella Baker, a Swahili word for somebody who is a master of a craft and teaches and passes the torch. Baker’s influence in organizing continues to this day. It was there in the passage of the recent NYS Tenants Protection Act which was won after a decade of savvy organizing by young people and residents in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn, organizing around the principles that Baker encoded into the community organizing profession.
Ella Baker’s family and upbringing in Jim Crow Norfolk, Virginia and Littleton, South Carolina provided a formative foundation from which she developed into a legendary organizer who had tight relationships with a vast network of activists all across the south and east coast as well as a younger generation of activists that looked to her for strategic wisdom and counsel.
As Barbara Ransby points out in her biography of Ella Baker, her mother came from a family of literate landowners and was active in the National (Black Baptist) Women’s convention missionary work, providing for less fortunate black families in the community and advancing the race. Baker’s mother was also trained as a teacher and had a sober and serious demeanor. Ella Josephine Baker frequently told the story of how her maternal grandmother (her namesake, Josephine Elizabeth) refused the command of her slavemaster, who was also her father, to marry a light-skinned slave in the plantation house. Instead she chose Mitchell Ross, a dark-skinned slave who worked in the fields. As a result she was banished from the house and put to work in the fields. Her family’s spirit of resistance and sense of deep connection and obligation to the community and the race was foundational for Baker.
But Ella Baker didn’t stick around her small community of Littleton after graduating from college, instead moving to Harlem in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance. There she met socialists, communists, anarchists and other radicals. Although Ella Baker would always dress conservatively (but with an occasional pillbox hat) and was, like her mother, temperamentally serious, her years in Harlem seemed to help her expand her notion of what was “respectable” from missionary work to savvy revolutionary organizing. At the same time, Baker never ceased to tirelessly provide for those in need in the civil rights movement.
During the 1930s, Ella Baker worked for the Young Negro Cooperative League (YNCL) and the WPA’s Worker’s Education Project (WEP). Working with George Schuyler, an iconoclastic anarchist who later became a conservative, Baker traveled across the United States, helping create black cooperative startups. The YNCL was unique at that time in insisting on women’s equal participation, full participation of rank and file in decision making, and young people’s primacy at the forefront of social change. As Jessica Nembhard Gordon points out in Collective Courage, these would be core organizing principles throughout Baker’s life and would culminate in her work with the Southern Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
While working at the WEP, Ella Baker developed an educational method that was liberatory and constructionist, approaching literacy from the lived reality of student workers and helping them develop critical consciousness about the large societal forces impacting their lives. Of course this pedagogical approach, similarly developed by Paulo Freire in Brazil, would form the basis of the Freedom Schools that SNCC launched during Freedom Summer in 1964.
Ella Baker spent the 1940’s traveling the south working for the NAACP, helping coordinate local chapters’ activity. Her work ethic was daunting; she traveled to four or five communities a week, helping organize and speak to large gatherings and staying up past midnight getting to know the people involved in the struggle. It was in this job that she honed her relational style and developed strong ties with committed leaders in communities throughout the south, people she would later introduce as elders to the young college students who were leading the lunch counter sit-ins and interstate freedom bus rides. Baker later moved on from the NAACP, frustrated with its legalistic approach and leadership’s lack of appreciation for the incredible organizing going on at the grassroots level among its chapters.
After the Montgomery bus boycott, Dr. King and Reverend Ralph Abernathy wanted to spread the movement throughout the south, and they chose Ella Baker as the organizer. Baker stood her ground as a seasoned female organizer in the midst of the ministers’ egos and the patriarchal inclinations of that group. It was while Baker was at SCLC that Dr. King called the young activists together, hoping to absorb them into the SCLC. Baker was tasked with organizing the conference which she brought to Shaw University, her alma mater. Of course she had something else in mind, and SNCC was born.
As Barbara Ransby points out in Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, Baker played a dual role for the young organizers of SNCC, working tirelessly to coordinate logistics and accommodations and functioning as the movement philosopher and Socratic teacher. She asked penetrating questions that helped the young organizers develop issues as well as prioritize and plan strategies and tactics. She also instilled organizational values that she carried with her – a radical organizational inclusiveness that worked against patriarchal sidelining of women (SNCC operated by consensus) and a thorough grounding in a grassroots approach (SNCC organizers deferred to residents of the community. For example, the idea of registering voters came from Amzie Moore, one of Baker’s comrades from her days with the NAACP).
During this time, Ella Baker also worked with the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party as Fannie Lou Hamer and others, fed up with blatant racist exclusion from the state political party, planned to get seated at the Democratic convention in Atlantic City. Baker connected MDFP organizers with movement and union leaders in the Democratic Party who were sympathetic to the organizing against white supremacy. They lined up votes in preparation for the convention. Ultimately, their organizing was not enough, and LBJ was able to push through a meaningless observer role for the MDFP participants who rejected his offer. Baker, who suspected this would be the outcome, also knew that the experience would help reveal the true nature of the Democratic Party at the time.
Years later, SNCC organizer Bob Moses used the term Fundi for Ella Baker, a Swahili word for somebody who is a master of a craft and teaches and passes the torch. Baker’s influence in organizing continues to this day. It was there in the passage of the recent NYS Tenants Protection Act which was won after a decade of savvy organizing by young people and residents in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn, organizing around the principles that Baker encoded into the community organizing profession.
December 5, 2014
One of the reasons we read biographies in part to find mentors from the past who can shed light on our present, and provide guidance through their lives and words. This book on the life and career of Ella Baker chronicles the life of an amazing woman who lived through and participated in some of the most dynamic moments and movements for racial justice of the 20th century. Her life brought her in contact with some of most well known civil rights leaders of the time – Dubois, Garvey, King, Malcolm, Rosa Parks, and Stokely Carmichael – yet her name and her work is less known. For those who have only a cursory view of the history of the Civil Rights Movement, this book will provide you with insights into the complexity and internal tensions in a movement that has far more idolized than seriously analyzed.
In this well written book, we learn about this amazing Civil Rights leader who only reluctantly took a front stage role and yet whose approach to political organizing, teaching and leadership inspired and guided many of the significant figures in the Civil Rights Movement. There are many aspects of the story I found compelling but two that stand out is her stormy relationship with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the impact on the young activists who founded SNCC. Also particularly interesting to me was her close and long term relationship with Anne Braden, a White Civil Rights activist and a personal hero of mine.
This book is so inspiring. Yet at the end Barbara Ransby confesses that despite her best efforts she has failed to fully capture this woman's whose story was "lived outside categories and labels." Even so this book achieves the goal of elevating Ella Baker to a status she was often denied while she was alive.
In this well written book, we learn about this amazing Civil Rights leader who only reluctantly took a front stage role and yet whose approach to political organizing, teaching and leadership inspired and guided many of the significant figures in the Civil Rights Movement. There are many aspects of the story I found compelling but two that stand out is her stormy relationship with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the impact on the young activists who founded SNCC. Also particularly interesting to me was her close and long term relationship with Anne Braden, a White Civil Rights activist and a personal hero of mine.
This book is so inspiring. Yet at the end Barbara Ransby confesses that despite her best efforts she has failed to fully capture this woman's whose story was "lived outside categories and labels." Even so this book achieves the goal of elevating Ella Baker to a status she was often denied while she was alive.
June 1, 2017
17. by Barbara Ransby
Finish date: April 12, 2017
So, tell me. What do you know about Ella Baker? Have you even heard her name? Probably not. And that's too bad because she was flat-out amazing. Born in 1903 in North Carolina and gaining an education unusual for black women of her time, she lived into the 1980s and was involved in virtually every step of the black freedom and civil rights movements. She worked in the national office of the NAACP beginning in the late 1920s. She traveled the country doing grass roots organizing in the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. She was involved in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She was a founder and guiding hand of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and continued to work for civil rights up to her death.
There are probably two reasons you haven't heard of her. First, she was a strong organizer who didn't grandstand, working in the background and encouraging local people in cities and towns around the country to be the leaders their community needed. Second, she was a woman, and even as blacks fought for civil rights for all, black men were just as chauvinistic about women's roles as their white counterparts. The leaders believed that it was right for the men to be leaders and women to be followers. They weren't likely to give her, or any of the other women involved in the movement, any more credit than necessary.
Ella Baker fought this, won some battles, but more importantly, went about her tasks in the best way she knew how and advanced the movement immeasurably. She wasn't perfect, but she was impressive. This is an excellent story of her life.
Finish date: April 12, 2017
So, tell me. What do you know about Ella Baker? Have you even heard her name? Probably not. And that's too bad because she was flat-out amazing. Born in 1903 in North Carolina and gaining an education unusual for black women of her time, she lived into the 1980s and was involved in virtually every step of the black freedom and civil rights movements. She worked in the national office of the NAACP beginning in the late 1920s. She traveled the country doing grass roots organizing in the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. She was involved in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She was a founder and guiding hand of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and continued to work for civil rights up to her death.
There are probably two reasons you haven't heard of her. First, she was a strong organizer who didn't grandstand, working in the background and encouraging local people in cities and towns around the country to be the leaders their community needed. Second, she was a woman, and even as blacks fought for civil rights for all, black men were just as chauvinistic about women's roles as their white counterparts. The leaders believed that it was right for the men to be leaders and women to be followers. They weren't likely to give her, or any of the other women involved in the movement, any more credit than necessary.
Ella Baker fought this, won some battles, but more importantly, went about her tasks in the best way she knew how and advanced the movement immeasurably. She wasn't perfect, but she was impressive. This is an excellent story of her life.
March 25, 2011
I think I first heard of Ella Baker in the late 70s, when I heard Sweet Honey in the Rock's "Ella's Song": "We who believe in freedom cannot rest". And this sister didn't spend a lot of time resting. Her activist life moved through decade after decade of the 20th century, confronting racism, sexism, and the tendency of far too many civil rights activists to fall in love with their own fame. She stayed humble, built leadership, and left a legacy of young activist who are now our own elders, pushed and inspired by her to analyse, strategize, and to step up into a style of leadership that is more ally than director. Her respect for poor people, for the people of the South she grew up in, was crucial to the style of organizing in SNCC, which birthed a generation of anti-war, women's rights and other social justice activists.
And I loved reading about the sister's ability to maintain relationships with colleagues and comrades and sisters and brothers, and to maintain her own privacy. Now in addition to envisioning her telling the SNCC folks they needed to be their own leaders and organizers, I have the vision of her sitting on a porch after a day of meetings, kicking back, telling stories, and laughing in the face of the oppression she spent her life fighting.
And I loved reading about the sister's ability to maintain relationships with colleagues and comrades and sisters and brothers, and to maintain her own privacy. Now in addition to envisioning her telling the SNCC folks they needed to be their own leaders and organizers, I have the vision of her sitting on a porch after a day of meetings, kicking back, telling stories, and laughing in the face of the oppression she spent her life fighting.
November 4, 2015
I started reading a biography of Alice Paul immediately following this, which is perhaps not the greatest idea. The freedoms American women had - especially upper-middle class American women - compared to blacks even after they got the vote is astonishing and infuriating and mind-boggling.
What I liked best about this book is the both how ordinary and extraordinary Ella Baker was. She graduated from college after being raised by effectively a single mother, moved herself to New York, and, with only her brains and passion, consistently found work that was - if not always exciting - important. That would be an amazing story today, but for a woman to do this who was born in 1903 is inspiring.
What was useful to read was how she made all of this happen over the course of her long and fruitful life. It was a slog. But still she came back, year after year, to do the copying, arrange the meetings, write the thank you notes, visit folks in the real world and make sure they get whatever financial compensation they can when they fight the system. It was often thankless, but all of it was necessary. It made me rethink how revolutions happen.
What I liked best about this book is the both how ordinary and extraordinary Ella Baker was. She graduated from college after being raised by effectively a single mother, moved herself to New York, and, with only her brains and passion, consistently found work that was - if not always exciting - important. That would be an amazing story today, but for a woman to do this who was born in 1903 is inspiring.
What was useful to read was how she made all of this happen over the course of her long and fruitful life. It was a slog. But still she came back, year after year, to do the copying, arrange the meetings, write the thank you notes, visit folks in the real world and make sure they get whatever financial compensation they can when they fight the system. It was often thankless, but all of it was necessary. It made me rethink how revolutions happen.
March 7, 2016
Ransby admirably does the impossible job of biography in her examination of civil rights activist Ella Baker's overarching motivations and progressive strategies for social reform. Biography isn't a genre with which I'm very familiar, so I don't have a point of reference for the forced transitions in the work. Many sections conclude in the following formula:
1) Specific reference to the event or situation examined, usually in the form of primary material like quotations from interviews;
2) Analysis of the event or situation against the perspective of major civil rights figures of the time; and
3) Conclusion about Baker's democratic, grassroots style of leadership (not based on a figurehead, not centralized).
This pattern is worthwhile but boring, so the narrative depreciates Baker's unique influence and modes of interaction with politicians, civil rights leaders, and regular people. Ransby's syntax leaves room for improvement, and so does her grammar.
I give the book four stars because Ella Baker was a goddamn powerhouse, and I'm grateful for any book that allows me to spend 12 or 14 hours with her.
1) Specific reference to the event or situation examined, usually in the form of primary material like quotations from interviews;
2) Analysis of the event or situation against the perspective of major civil rights figures of the time; and
3) Conclusion about Baker's democratic, grassroots style of leadership (not based on a figurehead, not centralized).
This pattern is worthwhile but boring, so the narrative depreciates Baker's unique influence and modes of interaction with politicians, civil rights leaders, and regular people. Ransby's syntax leaves room for improvement, and so does her grammar.
I give the book four stars because Ella Baker was a goddamn powerhouse, and I'm grateful for any book that allows me to spend 12 or 14 hours with her.
June 20, 2014
There isn't much to say that hasn't already been said in this list of reviews. I will say however, is on the importance Ella Baker played in sustaining the Civil Rights Movement down in Dixie. Baker's strong preference to "build upon the work others are doing," is the fundamental creed of SNCC and how voter registration and direct action protests were made successful; through building upon leadership within the community and simply providing the means for success. A lot of academic attention has been given to the "big boys" of the SCLC, but a grassroots history shows us something contrary to pop history. Sure, movements need charismatic leaders, but without a base, without the community, the movement would have sputtered and failed to gain the traction it needed during the 50's and 60's. Building upon the community is a large part of Baker's story and historian Barbara Ransby has done a superb job bringing the Ella Baker's light to a larger audience.
March 8, 2024
Page 281 – my book, Ella Baker
“I was never working for an organization. I always tried to work for a cause. And that cause was bigger than any organization.”
Ella Baker was born in 1903 and died in 1986. She started to participate in the Civil Rights movement in the 1930s. She was brought up in a religious household (Baptist) and given a good education, but her early life was limited by Jim Crow. This was during an era when white America, more so in the South, put up many barriers to prevent Black people from obtaining any kind of education.
Her family had to leave Norfolk, Virginia when she was young to avoid racial persecution and possible violence. They settled in her mother’s hometown of Littleton, North Carolina, which, needless to say, was totally segregated. Her mother wanted her to become a teacher, but Ella was intent on a more progressive lifestyle.
She moved to Harlem in New York City, and one can only imagine how different that was from North Carolina in the late 1920s. She became involved in several activist organizations. This set the pattern for the rest of her life. She intersected with various progressive groups, many of them racially integrated, to determine the best method for obtaining racial equality.
Page 97 in the 1930s
Anyone concerned with social and economic equality, civil rights, and human progress was a potential ally… Baker was a catalyst for bringing people together.
Ella Baker joined the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in the 1940s. Although she remained with them for several years, she could never adjust to the top-down structure. She was not one to show reverence for the “boss”. Her ideas were bordering on socialism, and she knew several communists – a dangerous place to be in the America of the late 1940s. In all the organizations she participated in she had to contend with a male patriarchy that felt entitled to its leadership.
Part of her job with the NAACP was touring the South to recruit members and push the cause of racial equality. She became very good at networking, forming friendships and alliances, plus she was never hesitant about approaching other progressive groups. Many of the leaders in the NAACP saw other activist groups as competitors; this was not Ella Baler’s way of operating. She would build on these connections after she left the NAACP.
Ella was in a constant state of conflict with the leaders of the NAACP because she would not tow a subservient line. She was never reticent to challenge authority.
Over the years she came to know an extensive diversity of people - ranging from Pauli Murray (a religious and feminist activist). Walter White (leader of the NAACP), Bayard Rustin (a behind the scenes person and pacifist), Fred Shuttleworth (an outspoken Baptist preacher in Birmingham, Alabama), Bob Moses (of SNCC – Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), and of course Martin Luther King Jr.
She became involved with SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) and Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1950s during the Montgomery bus boycott. She also came to have her issues with SCLC and was ambivalent about King. Ella did not like the leadership cult that was growing around him. And perhaps, as the author suggests, it was her growing rejection of her religious upbringing and her secular approach that made her suspicious of King. She also did not like the charismatic appeal that was an essential aspect of Baptist preachers.
Ella Baker wanted an organization that was not hierarchical and top-down. She found some of this in SNCC in the early 1960s, during the height of the Civil Rights movement in the South. SNCC was more democratic and egalitarian than either the NAACP or SCLC, but it was certainly not without its problems. There was a lot of bickering and endless discussion groups. But SNCC was working more with the people – going into poor Black oppressed areas of Alabama, Georgia, and especially in Mississippi. It was not there to just help, but to listen and get the poor to form their own activist groups. Bob Moses was part of this process, and like Ella Baker, wanted leadership to start at the grassroots level.
Page 188
Ella Baker believed that all their lives poor Black people had been spoon-fed the notion that the key to their emancipation was something external to their lives: ostensibly benevolent masters, enlightened legislators, or skilled and highly educated lawyers…In Baker’s view oppressed people did not need a messiah to deliver them from oppression; all they needed was themselves, one another, and the will to persevere… As Baker put it [King and SCLC] saw themselves as the new “saviors”.
People in the community had to feel they were taking an active role in their emancipation.
Ella Baker was a woman who could not be held back by racial and gender prejudices. She broke through this. She was an articulate and forthright speaker – but she would also listen and refrain from preaching, making all feel comfortable regardless of their social, educational, and economic status.
Page 297
[Ella Baker] in effect widened the space of leadership, so that those most marginalized or excluded from the centers of power in society and in civil rights politics could stand up and be heard.
Towards the end of the book, we lose site of Ella Baker as the author recounts the history of SNCC and its eventual downfall. She mentions that Ella Baker was weary of her role and this was affecting her health, but no details are provided. There is very little on the last years of her life.
Ella Baker was an extraordinarily devoted humanitarian. She participated in several organizations, never made much money, and gave uplift to many lives.
“I was never working for an organization. I always tried to work for a cause. And that cause was bigger than any organization.”
Ella Baker was born in 1903 and died in 1986. She started to participate in the Civil Rights movement in the 1930s. She was brought up in a religious household (Baptist) and given a good education, but her early life was limited by Jim Crow. This was during an era when white America, more so in the South, put up many barriers to prevent Black people from obtaining any kind of education.
Her family had to leave Norfolk, Virginia when she was young to avoid racial persecution and possible violence. They settled in her mother’s hometown of Littleton, North Carolina, which, needless to say, was totally segregated. Her mother wanted her to become a teacher, but Ella was intent on a more progressive lifestyle.
She moved to Harlem in New York City, and one can only imagine how different that was from North Carolina in the late 1920s. She became involved in several activist organizations. This set the pattern for the rest of her life. She intersected with various progressive groups, many of them racially integrated, to determine the best method for obtaining racial equality.
Page 97 in the 1930s
Anyone concerned with social and economic equality, civil rights, and human progress was a potential ally… Baker was a catalyst for bringing people together.
Ella Baker joined the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in the 1940s. Although she remained with them for several years, she could never adjust to the top-down structure. She was not one to show reverence for the “boss”. Her ideas were bordering on socialism, and she knew several communists – a dangerous place to be in the America of the late 1940s. In all the organizations she participated in she had to contend with a male patriarchy that felt entitled to its leadership.
Part of her job with the NAACP was touring the South to recruit members and push the cause of racial equality. She became very good at networking, forming friendships and alliances, plus she was never hesitant about approaching other progressive groups. Many of the leaders in the NAACP saw other activist groups as competitors; this was not Ella Baler’s way of operating. She would build on these connections after she left the NAACP.
Ella was in a constant state of conflict with the leaders of the NAACP because she would not tow a subservient line. She was never reticent to challenge authority.
Over the years she came to know an extensive diversity of people - ranging from Pauli Murray (a religious and feminist activist). Walter White (leader of the NAACP), Bayard Rustin (a behind the scenes person and pacifist), Fred Shuttleworth (an outspoken Baptist preacher in Birmingham, Alabama), Bob Moses (of SNCC – Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), and of course Martin Luther King Jr.
She became involved with SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) and Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1950s during the Montgomery bus boycott. She also came to have her issues with SCLC and was ambivalent about King. Ella did not like the leadership cult that was growing around him. And perhaps, as the author suggests, it was her growing rejection of her religious upbringing and her secular approach that made her suspicious of King. She also did not like the charismatic appeal that was an essential aspect of Baptist preachers.
Ella Baker wanted an organization that was not hierarchical and top-down. She found some of this in SNCC in the early 1960s, during the height of the Civil Rights movement in the South. SNCC was more democratic and egalitarian than either the NAACP or SCLC, but it was certainly not without its problems. There was a lot of bickering and endless discussion groups. But SNCC was working more with the people – going into poor Black oppressed areas of Alabama, Georgia, and especially in Mississippi. It was not there to just help, but to listen and get the poor to form their own activist groups. Bob Moses was part of this process, and like Ella Baker, wanted leadership to start at the grassroots level.
Page 188
Ella Baker believed that all their lives poor Black people had been spoon-fed the notion that the key to their emancipation was something external to their lives: ostensibly benevolent masters, enlightened legislators, or skilled and highly educated lawyers…In Baker’s view oppressed people did not need a messiah to deliver them from oppression; all they needed was themselves, one another, and the will to persevere… As Baker put it [King and SCLC] saw themselves as the new “saviors”.
People in the community had to feel they were taking an active role in their emancipation.
Ella Baker was a woman who could not be held back by racial and gender prejudices. She broke through this. She was an articulate and forthright speaker – but she would also listen and refrain from preaching, making all feel comfortable regardless of their social, educational, and economic status.
Page 297
[Ella Baker] in effect widened the space of leadership, so that those most marginalized or excluded from the centers of power in society and in civil rights politics could stand up and be heard.
Towards the end of the book, we lose site of Ella Baker as the author recounts the history of SNCC and its eventual downfall. She mentions that Ella Baker was weary of her role and this was affecting her health, but no details are provided. There is very little on the last years of her life.
Ella Baker was an extraordinarily devoted humanitarian. She participated in several organizations, never made much money, and gave uplift to many lives.
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