Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement

A Radical Democratic Vision

Barbara Ransby

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780807862704
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Droits civiques en politique

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. Making her way in predominantly male circles while maintaining relationships with a vibrant group of women, students, and activists, Baker was a national officer and key figure in the NAACP, a founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and a prime mover in the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In this definitive biography, Barbara Ransby chronicles Baker's long and rich career, revealing her complexity, radical democratic worldview, and enduring influence on group-centered, grassroots activism. Beyond documenting an extraordinary life, Ransby paints a vivid picture of the African American fight for justice and its intersections with other progressive struggles worldwide throughout the twentieth century.

1 NOW, WHO ARE YOUR PEOPLE?

NORFOLK, VIRGINIA, AND LITTLETON, NORTH CAROLINA, 1903–1918

I was young when I became active in things and I became active in things largely because my mother was very active in the field of religion.

Ella Baker, 1979

Black Baptist women encouraged an aggressive womanhood that felt personal responsibility to labor, no less than men, for the salvation of the world.

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, 1993

In the early 1980s Paula Giddings, the writer and historian, went to Ella Baker's modest Harlem apartment to interview the legendary activist for a book Giddings was writing on African American women's history. At that meeting Giddings had hoped to learn more about the half century of history Ella Baker had witnessed and helped shape: her role in the Works Progress Administration and the cooperative movement in Harlem during the 1930s; her dangerous organizing work for the NAACP in the South during the 1940s; her collaboration with and criticisms of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1950s; and her pivotal role in the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s. A few minutes into the visit, Giddings realized that the exchange she had hoped for was not to be. Instead of responding to Giddings's questions about the past, Baker kept asking her a single question: “Now, who are your people?” Giddings regretfully concluded that, after all the battles Ella Baker had fought and won over the course of her fifty-year political career, she was losing the fight with Alzheimer's and was no longer able to provide the information and insights she sought. To Giddings, it seemed as if Baker were groping for a cognitive anchor in the conversation.¹ Yet Baker's desire to know and place her visitor was characteristic of what had been important to her throughout her life. The question “Now, who are your people?” symbolizes Baker's approach to life-history as well. Who one's people were was important to Ella Baker, not to establish an elite pedigree, but to locate an individual as a part of a family, a community, a region, a culture, and a historical period. Baker recognized that none of us are self-made men or women; rather, we forge our identities within kinship networks, local communities, and organizations.

Ella Baker's family, her childhood experiences in Norfolk, Virginia, and Littleton, North Carolina, and her secondary and college education at Shaw University in Raleigh and her transformative political encounters in Harlem during the Great Depression all contributed to her evolving identity as a woman, an activist, and an intellectual, and set the stage for the years of political activism that would follow.

So, who were Ella Baker's people? She was born on December 13, 1903, in Norfolk, Virginia, and grew up from the age of seven in the small town of Littleton, North Carolina. Ella Jo was the middle of three surviving children; she had an older brother, Blake Curtis, and a younger sister, Maggie. Her parents, Georgianna (Anna) Ross Baker and Blake Baker, raised their children to be upstanding members of the rural community where they themselves had grown up. Her maternal grandparents, Mitchell and Josephine Elizabeth Ross, owned their own farm, and her grandfather was a noted Baptist clergyman. Her paternal grandparents, Teema and Margaret Baker, were landless tenant farmers.² Both sets of grandparents had grown up under slavery, and their differing educational and economic positions reflected both the obstacles that faced freedmen and freedwomen and the achievements of black families in the rural South after Reconstruction. Baker's parents attended secondary school and sought to better their position, moving to the city of Norfolk in search of opportunity and then returning to Littleton in search of security. Blake's job as a waiter on a Norfolk steamer line required him to travel, while Anna presided at home and played a prominent role in the Baptist church.

During her childhood in Littleton, Ella Baker was nurtured, educated, and challenged by a community of strong, hard-working, deeply religious black people—most of them women—who celebrated their accomplishments and recognized their class advantage, but who also pledged themselves to serve and uplift those less fortunate. Anna Ross Baker was the single most influential force in Ella's early life. Ella described her mother as a stern and pious woman who believed in discipline almost as much as she believed in God: “My mother was a . . . very positive and sort of aggressive woman.”³ Ella grew up in a female-centered household, surrounded by a community of Christian women actively engaged in uplifting their families and communities. These women were as much concerned with enlightening the mind as they were with saving the soul. At a statewide convention of Baptist women, the local group to which Anna belonged urged members to “do all in our power to foster education.”⁴ Trained as a teacher herself, Anna instructed all three of her own children in grammar, writing, and speech before they entered school.

For Anna Ross Baker's daughters, it was important to be ladylike as well as to be learned. Female respectability was coveted and cultivated by middle-class black women of her generation. Ella and her sister, Maggie, were tutored in etiquette, proper grooming, and deportment. They were expected to conform to conventional standards of female respectability as they pursued their studies and practiced their religion. At the same time that Baker was encouraged to strive to be exceptional, she was also constantly reminded that humility and service to others were Christian virtues incumbent upon those who enjoyed academic opportunities and middle-class status. In the early-twentieth-century South, women like Anna and Ella were imbued with the conviction that their relative privilege carried with it a fundamental obligation to work for the improvement of their race and, especially, to better the condition of the many women and children who were denied such advantages.

The Ross-Baker family belonged to that stratum of black people who saw themselves as representatives of the race to the white world and as role models for those less fortunate within the black community. To borrow the historian Glenda Gilmore's term, they were the “best men” and “best women.”⁵ Many black people who occupied positions of some class advantage received what the historian Stephanie Shaw has called a “mixed message—rendering a person part of and apart from the group.”⁶ Ella Jo Baker's life is marked by the working-out of this paradoxical position: she drew on the strengths of her childhood community, rejected the strictures of middle-class womanhood and the dominant ideologies of her society, and affiliated herself with the poor black people whom she saw as the most oppressed and the most able to transform the world through collective action. Formed by who her people were when she was a child, Ella Baker ultimately chose her own people. In the years after she left North Carolina, Ella Baker embraced some aspects of her early socialization and rejected others, yet she carried vivid memories of her childhood with her and reinterpreted their meaning as she grew and changed. To understand the complex social environment that nurtured Baker's early social conscience and her evolving identity as a woman, an intellectual, and a political activist, this chapter and the next explore central themes in her childhood and education. These themes include the central role of religion in women's sense of self and in their mission in the world; intraregional southern migration in search of economic opportunity and to escape Jim Crow in its most virulent, urban form; the importance of language and education; and the multiple meanings of family and community. The chapter takes up these themes that Ella Jo Baker encountered and interprets them in relation to her development, but it does not present them entirely from her point of view. Rather, the facts of her life are set in historical context, and the way in which Baker remembered the past is sometimes juxtaposed with my own historical perspective.

SPREADING THE FAITH AND UPLIFTING THE RACE

Religion, specifically black southern Baptist religion, was a major force in Anna Ross Baker's life, and consequently it became a major force in Ella Baker's life. “I was young when I became active in things and I became active in things largely because my mother was very active in the field of religion,” Baker reflected at the age of seventy-five.⁷ Anna's strong belief in God went hand in hand with her conviction that faith must be translated into deeds. At a statewide convention of her Baptist women's group, she admonished others to “let Christ take the first place in your vocation and life. Inquire of the Lord what he would have us do. Let us stay on the job for Christ.”⁸ In a more general sense, the church was one of the social and ideological bedrocks of the rural southern black community in which Ella Baker grew up. Religion was important to her family in particular, and it was a defining feature of the community and culture of which they were a part. According to Eric Anderson, a historian of North Carolina, in the Second Congressional District, which included Littleton, “Protestant Christianity . . . permeated the district, touching people's lives more steadily than any other institution. . . . The very pervasiveness of religion obscured its boundaries with politics, society, and work.”⁹

The Baker children were deeply immersed in the black Baptist tradition. Although Ella and her two siblings were never required to attend church services more than once a week, as many other devout southern Baptist families were accustomed to doing, they were drawn into the wider religious world in which the Ross family played an active leadership role.¹⁰ Anna's family was so religious that all of her six brothers were named after Christ's disciples: Luke, Mark, John, Peter, Paul, and Matthew.¹¹ Ella's uncle Luke was president of the Warren County Sunday School Association, and her maternal grandfather, Mitchell Ross, served as a minister.¹²

Ella and her siblings frequently accompanied their mother to local and regional missionary meetings. “My mother was an ardent church worker . . . and the women had developed a state conference and [they] had regular meetings, and I had been to all these kinds of things,” Baker recalled.¹³ Ella actually participated in the programs on several occasions, reciting poems and reading from biblical texts. These auxiliary associations had been formed, Baker explained, in order for “the women … to be able to have some identity of their own.”¹⁴ At these meetings she observed not simply ritualistic expressions of faith but also the business of applying religious principles, particularly the principle of Christian charity, in the real world. The missionary association sponsored an orphanage, aided the sick and elderly, funded scholarships for black college students, and provided aid to local, church-affiliated grammar schools.¹⁵ Ella witnessed this important work being organized and carried out by confident, competent, and committed African American women. These women's groups operated with a considerable amount of autonomy. Women conducted their own meetings, managed their finances, and made policy decisions. Many members drew their daughters into these activities, Baker recalled; “they also would carry their young who could articulate.”¹⁶ These women's collective example of strength and activism had a profound effect on Ella Baker.

Anna Ross Baker and her sisters in the church preached and practiced an activist, woman-centered faith, which was similar to the Social Gospel doctrine being espoused by white Protestant denominations around the same time.¹⁷ Although they were predominately middle class and imbued with a maternalist, missionary objective to “Christianize” their less fortunate brethren and sistren, these devout black Baptist women were more than elitist charity workers. Through home visits and reading groups called “Bible bands,” they forged personal, cross-class relationships with the poor and illiterate members of their communities. They did not confine their work to prayerful study and community service; they extended their mission to secular affairs, advocating antilynching legislation, crusading for temperance, and challenging segregation. Theirs was an activist religion that urged women to act as positive agents for change in the world.¹⁸

Ella Baker's mother was a part of a generation of educated southern black women who, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, began actively to assert themselves as a group to be reckoned with inside the black Baptist Church. The National (Black Baptist) Woman's Convention, formed in 1900, reflected the consolidation of local and regional efforts by black Baptist women, many of them missionaries, to play a more active role in the life of their church and community. The North Carolina Convention, to which Anna Ross Baker belonged, was affiliated with the Woman's National Convention and sent two delegates to its annual meetings.¹⁹ According to the historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, their collective mission and worldview constituted a type of feminist theology, one that “challenged the ‘silent helpmate’ image of women's church work and set out to convince the men that women were equally obliged to advance not only their race and denomination, but themselves… . Within a female-centered context, they accentuated the image of woman as saving force, rather than woman as victim. They rejected a model of womanhood that was fragile and passive, just as they deplored a type preoccupied with fashion, gossip, or self-indulgence. They argued that women held the key to social transformation.”²⁰ This description fits Anna Ross Baker perfectly.

Ella Baker's mother was intimately involved in this movement; she identified with its activist, woman-centered philosophy and strove to instill in her daughters the desire to mold themselves in the images of strong, intelligent, and socially engaged black women. Ella deeply admired her mother's fortitude and compassion. Years later, in the secular context of the political and civil rights organizations with which she worked, she emulated her mother's example of zealous and selfless service on behalf of those victimized by injustice and social inequity, albeit in a different language and with expanded political objectives.

The southern black Baptist women's missionary movement embodied the “lift as we climb” approach to community service, as did the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs founded in 1896.²¹ As some members of the race excelled and progressed, it was their duty to help others along and to contribute to the welfare of those less able and fortunate than themselves. This responsibility to serve the community was derived as much from a sense of class distinction as from a sense of moral duty. Yet for African American women the relationship between class status and moral obligation was a reciprocal one; indeed, staunch religious faith and selfless service to others was one way in which a woman and her family could attain a respectable, even elevated position within the community. Embedded in uplift ideology was a certain degree of elitism, along with a sense of class prerogative on the part of middle-class blacks who felt they should act as race ambassadors toward white society and as moral police and social workers inside the black community.²²

Elitism coexisted with a commitment to equality, so black women's organizations could support cross-class relationships as well as reinforce class distinctions. While Anna Ross Baker's sisters in the church saw themselves as distinct from ordinary black folk, they rejected elitism in their rhetoric.²³ Leaders of the black Baptist women's movement often railed against individuals for whom charity work was an avocation rather than a vocation. Nannie Helen Burroughs, a leader of the black women's convention movement, condemned the socialite who “smoothes her well-gloved hand while she studies the ‘wonderfully interesting slum problem’ as a diversion.”²⁴ Instead, they embraced the masses of less fortunate black people and made sacrifices, both material and personal, in order to provide assistance. Missionary women who were advocates of temperance, modesty, and propriety also embraced the principle of providing aid to the downtrodden, irrespective of their status, their sins, or their inadequacies. This was a concept that Ella Baker accepted, internalized, and carried with her for the rest of her life.

The women's missionary movement stressed the importance of hands-on service to tho...