Grassroots Organizing and Freedom!
These times feel vaguely reminiscent. Reminiscent of evil, injustices, struggle and community action. This is a dark time in our history, but there is hope. We have been in similar places before and maybe the horror we are experiencing today will help facilitate a better understanding of what many of our brothers and sisters have experienced to a much greater degree. Though I feel we’ve never faced such severity, illegality, and cruelty, at least personally in my lifetime, we the people have always risen to fight injustice and fight for freedom. I found inspiration in Ella Baker’s story. I hope you do as well.
She has been called “One of the most important American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement.” Barbara Ransby, biographer.
Ella Josephine Baker was born on December 13, 1903, in Norfolk, Virginia. Her father was often away as he worked on a steamship line that sailed out of Norfolk. To help make ends meet, her mother took in borders.
When Ella was seven, there was a race riot in Norfolk, where whites attacked Black workers from the shipyard. When African American boxer Johnson defeated Jim Jeffries, the riot began. White mobs pulled Black citizens from streetcars and beat them; they killed two Black servicemen. This was the beginning of a period of racial violence known as “Red Summer.” The violence was most often sparked by the assertion of Black agency and full citizenship. President Woodrow Wilson ordered troops to restore law and order. Ella’s mother moved the family back to Littleton, North Carolina, near her rural hometown. Ella’s father continued his work with the steamship company.
As a young child, Ella grew up with few family members, but her grandmother, Josephine Elizabeth “Bet” Ross, took her under her wing and told her many stories. As she listened to her grandmother’s stories about slavery and leaving the south to escape violence and oppression, she understood the many injustices Black people faced. Her grandmother’s stories described the beatings and whippings she endured for refusing to marry the enslaved man her owner selected. Ella understood that a myriad of injustices still affected Black people, and as she grew into adulthood, people knew her as “the whirlwind.”
1918 Ella began attending the high school academy of Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, then attended Shaw University, graduating as valedictorian, with honors. She became a tireless civil rights and human rights activist, often as a behind-the-scenes organizer with a career that spanned five decades. She mentored many emerging activists such as Diane Nash Stokely Carmichael and Bob Moses, who were leader in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) which Ella helped to establish. Ella worked with some of the most noted civil rights leaders of the 20th century, including W.E.B. DuBois, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King, Jr. promoting grass roots organizing and radical democracy. Her critiques of racism in American culture and sexism in the civil rights movement are also well known. Ella was also there when Fannie Lou Hamer and other activists spoke out about racial inequality in the political system.
Ella worked in many capacities, first as editorial assistant at the Negro National News, director of the Young Negroes Cooperative League, as its Director, the workers Education Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), taught courses in labor history, African history and consumer education, and founded the Negro History Club at the Harlem Library.
The Harlem Renaissance influenced Ella’s teachings as she advocated for widespread local action as a means of social change. Her focus on the grassroots approach to the struggle for equal rights heavily influenced the growth and success of the civil rights movement in the mid-20th century.
In 1957, Ella went to Atlanta, Georgia, to attend a conference that was focused on developing a new regional organization that would build on the success of the Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama. Leaders formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in February. The following year, Ella was the Associate Director of the Crusade for citizenship, a voter registration campaign designed to increase the number of registered African American voters for the elections of 1958 and 1960. Ella also helped designed meetings with sit-in leaders to help identify struggles and explore possibilities for future actions. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was formed.
SNCC became the most influential and active organization in the deeply troubled and oppressed Mississippi Delta. It was here that Ella witnessed widespread sexism and misogynistic teaching, which resulted in the suppression of women activists. She resigned from the SCLC but began a long and fruitful with SNCC. Ella and Howard Zinn were two of the most highly revered adult advisors, and Ella earned the title of “Godmother of SNCC.”
In 1961, Ella persuaded the SNCC to form two wings: one for direction and the second for voter registration. They coordinated the Freedom Rides with the help of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Ella Baker insisted that “strong people don’t need strong leaders”, and criticized the notion of a single charismatic leader of movements for social change. In keeping the idea of “participatory democracy”, Baker wanted each person to get involved. She also argued that “people under the heel”, the most oppressed members of any community, “had to be the ones to decide what action they were going to take to get (out) from under their oppression.”
Ella had the idea that group-centered leadership and radical democratic social change was what they needed. This idea grew wings during the 1960s with groups like Students for a Democratic Society rising. In 1964, Ella helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) which was an alternative to the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party.
During the mid to late sixties, Ella worked as a staff member of the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF) whose goal was to assist Black and white people to work together for mutual goals; social justice, interracial desecration, and implementing President John F. Kennedy’s civil rights proposals, and education for southern whites about the evils of racism.
In 1972, Ella graveled across the country supporting the “Free Angela” campaign, which was demanding the release of activist and author Angela Davis. Angela had been impassioned on charges of kidnapping and murder in the Marin County Civic Center attacks. Angela Davis was eventually found not guilty.
Ella Baker supported the Puerto Rican independence movement and often spoke out against apartheid in South Africa. She allied with and supported several women’s groups, such as the World Women’s Alliance and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Ella remained an activist until her peaceful death in her sleep, on December 13, 1986, her 83rd birthday.
Ella spent her entire career working to bring people together in the fight for freedom: poor and middle class; Christian and secular; northern and southern; men and women; and Black and white.
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