Politics

black history month: the story of ella baker, the mentor of the people

February 20, 2015

“Strong people don’t need strong leaders.” The organizers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) called Ella Baker “Fundi.” It’s a Swahili word meaning an artisan who has mastered their craft and shares their knowledge freely with the community. Though she wrote only a few articles in her lifetime, and gave only a handful of major speeches, Ella Baker was one of the core activists working tirelessly behind the scenes in the Civil Rights Movement to ensure the movement’s future. Revered by many leaders within the movement, Ella Baker preferred to encourage the strength of the people, rather than be seen as a leader herself.

By Nathan Leigh, AFROPUNK Contributor

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 While it’s tempting to view the Civil Rights Movement, and really any social movement, through the lens of its charismatic and messianic leaders, Ella Baker was a believer in the genius of the ordinary person and the power of true democracy. The granddaughter of a former slave, she took to heart her grandmothers stories about slave uprisings, and the power of ordinary people to create a better world. Throughout her long career, Ella Baker organized and facilitated community meetings throughout the country to encourage people to work together for a change.


In 1927, she graduated as valedictorian from Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina and headed north to Harlem, with the goal of getting a masters in sociology. With the Depression in full swing, Ella Baker became an organizer for housing rights. She joined the Young Negroes Cooperative League, which helped build black economic power through collective partnerships. She became National Director of the YNCL by 1931, and worked tirelessly to improve access to quality food and housing.


By the late 30’s, Ella Baker had begun working actively with the NAACP, helping to inform people of their voting rights, and working to desegregate the New York school system. For 6 months out of the year, she was on the road, giving talks at community meetings. Her focus was introducing communities to democratic practices. She had no interest in charismatic leaders and cults of personalities. Rather, she wanted to give people the tools to advance themselves and strengthen their own communities. Though she would never have identified as an anarchist, her distrust of hierarchies and the patriarchy, and her emphasis on direct democracy, made her an ally of many early black anarchists, including George Schuyler, though in later years he became a staunch conservative.


In Black Prophetic Fire, Cornel West describes Ella Baker’s philosophy:

 

“I do see similarities between Ella Baker’s position and the council Communist tradition that called for Soviets without Bolsheviks, that called for workers’ councils without a revolutionary vanguard party that served as managerial manipulators of the people in the councils, so that the self-organization of working people was the kind of radical organizing among everyday people without any managers, experts, or party members telling them what to do. And there is some overlap between Herman Gorter and Anton Pannekoek and some of the early council Communists that mean much to someone like myself coming out of a deep democratic tradition.  And so, ironically, Ella Baker, the very figure who one would think would be marginal vis-à-vis these male-type titans, ends up being the most relevant in light of our present dark times of political breakdown, economic decline, and cultural decay.”

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As a lifelong backstage activist, it’s no wonder that Ella Baker found a kindred spirit in Bayard Rustin. The two worked together to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957. While Rustin was keen to enlist the young Martin Luther King Jr., Baker’s interest was creating the infrastructure of the SCLC so that it could be more than just a platform for King. She worked to put together the core membership that would be its backbone. The SCLC ultimately catapulted King from a local leader to a national icon, but it did so because Ella Baker kept it running.

 

After 2 years, dissatisfied with the SCLC’s focus on strong central leadership, Ella Baker found herself back at her alma mater, once again building an organization from the wings. In February 1960, a small sit-in at a Woolworths cafe counter in nearby Greensboro had grown over 4 days from 4 young men to over 300 students. By March, the student-led sit-ins protesting segregation had spread to 55 cities. Hundreds of students were arrested for their actions, and the movement was growing. Ella Baker came down to Raleigh in April to organize a gathering of student activists. Though she and other older activists were present, she was determined to make sure it was a movement for and by young people. She was 57 at the time, and understood well the value of a youth movement.


They expected 100 participants, but 300 showed up. The result became known as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Between 1960 and 1966, the SNCC was a powerful voice for youth freedom fighters. With Ella Baker working to coordinate the efforts of the various cities, the SNCC organized voter registration campaigns, and was instrumental in the Freedom Summer of 1964 that culminated in Fannie Lou Hamer’s legendary speech at the Atlantic City DNC. When the investigation into the murders of 3 SNCC activists returned evidence of murders of young black men and women that had gone uninvestigated for decades, Ella Baker famously declared “The unfortunate thing is that it took this…to make the rest of the country turn its eyes on the fact that there were other bodies lying in the swamps of Mississippi. Until the killing of a black mother’s son becomes as important as the killing of a white mother’s son, we who believe in freedom cannot rest.”

Those words “we who believe in freedom cannot rest” were immortalized in activist acapella group Sweet Honey In The Rock’s “Ella’s Song.” By 1966, the SNCC began to fracture, and Ella Baker shifted her focus to freedom struggles in Africa and Puerto Rico, as well as feminist causes in the States. She campaigned heavily for the release of Angela Davis in 1972, and became an outspoken proponent of socialism. Her final years were spent organizing with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She continued to organize for racial and social justice until her death on her 83rd birthday in 1986.

 

The legacy of Ella Baker is hard to overstate. Though she left few records of her thoughts, no memoirs, no collections of essays, her actions speak volumes. She had a unique ability to make everyone around her feel like their opinions were valued, and to find the value in everyone’s opinions. SNCC chair Charles McDew said of her, “Somebody may have spoken for 8 hours, and 7 hours and 53 minutes [of it] was utter bullshit, but 7 minutes was good. She taught us to glean out the 7 minutes.” She mentored many of the major players in the Civil Rights Movement, and never sought out the limelight. She lived the now ubiquitous activist mantra “step up, step back” better than anyone.


In 2015, Ella Baker’s vision and ideals are as necessary as ever. Where media personalities continue to criticize the resurgent Civil Rights Movement for lacking a strong central leadership, Ella Baker would have been proud that the movement has been so successful without a charismatic leader at its center. Though she is often unfairly omitted when talking about the Civil Rights Movement of the 50’s and 60’s, it is maybe fitting with her vision of social justice that she is not deified. Ella Baker was merely someone who believed in freedom and could not rest.

 

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