Ella Baker

Introduction

            Ella Baker was a phenomenal woman who helped in the liberation of people of color in the early and mid-twentieth century. In collaboration with other leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker was able to mobilize movements that made a difference. This paper aims at deciphering Ella Baker as a person, her thoughts on social work, and her relationships with different movements and prominent people in her push for a just America.

Who was Ella Baker?

Having lived between December 13, 1903, and December 13, 1986, Ella Baker became a vehement African-American civil and human rights activist. In her 5-decade career, Ella managed to work alongside other great civil leaders of the 20^th century, such as Martin Luther King Jr., Philip Randolph, Du Bois, and Thurgood Marshall among others. According to the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights (1), Ella Baker was a brilliant black American hero who took up the challenge of inspiring and guiding many emerging leaders of her time. She built on the power of black, brown, and the poor by fighting for their rights in conjunction with other Black Freedom Movement leaders.

The life of Ella Baker was full of ups and downs. For instance, she was born in Norfolk, Virginia and grew up in North Carolina. Her grandmother motivated her with her stories about the life she (the grandmother) and others who were there during her time, lived under slavery. The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights (1) mentions that the grandmother, as a slave used to get whippings for her constant refusal to marry a man who had been chosen and forwarded to her by her slave owner. As a result, Baker’s grandmother was punished severely for insubordination by being whipped and working in the fallow fields as a plower. Her grandmother did not attend any parties organized in the farm and often chose to wake-up the following morning to continue with her punishment of plowing fields as captured by James (10). The kind of resilience that her grandmother portrayed even in the face of brutal racism and outright slavery, provided an important source of inspiration for Ella as she weaved and waded through her life and an illustrious 5-decade career.

Baker realized the value and role of education early enough and worked hard until she joined Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. During her stint at the university as a student, she challenged the university’s policies and the unfairness they possed, such as the conservative dress code, the way religion was taught, and paternalism and racism of its president among others. In 1927, she graduated as a class valedictorian and later moved to New York to start her career. During this time, a great migration was taking place as a majority of the blacks moved north from the south to escape the blatant oppression that met them in the southern states. She then started joining social activist organizations.

Baker’s Thoughts on how to Carry out Social Work

Social work, a concept that Baker made her career, should be carried out along the tenets of democracy. James (889) explains that Baker was a political vanguard who had a democratic vision. She had a vision of strong social change that would be determined and shaped by the ordinary people with political movements. She believed that strong people did not need strong leaders. Due to her belief systems, she was capable of forging strong political perspectives that were able to identify with African American laborers and workers. She believed that social justice would only be realized through such mass leadership provided by citizens through their political movements as described by James (886). Due to her approach, she did not become very popular but her work did. During her time, it was also difficult to take seriously a black woman as a political leader.

Payne (885) evaluated the models of social change adopted by Baker and started by acknowledging that she was an advocate of both individual growth and individual empowerment. In her stint at the Harlem Newspaper, where she worked alongside George Samuel Schuyler, a famous black writer, Baker and Schuler started a black people’s cooperative that would give hard evidence to the black people that economic empowerment was real and achievable.

Baker was a critical connector during the organization of events and processes that would advocate for the development of the extraordinary potential of the ordinary masses. Payne (885) claims that Baker was, therefore, associated with whatever organization she would get on her way that focused on the struggle of the Black people. For instance, Payne (888) explains that she urged and helped the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to have a base of more than 400,000 people through an otherwise unorthodox means of getting people to join the movement. Ella Baker as the then director of branches of NAACP advocated for the recruitment of more people from low-income cadres by sending organizers to poolrooms and taverns where they would meet up such people. She argued that the most basic part of the movement was the very power of the junior members. Such beliefs are what catapulted her to other movements such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Baker’s Relationship with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

In 1957, Baker attended the inaugural conference of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which she had helped organize. When the organization was officiated, Baker was the very first official to be hired and she was the then community organizer. Later, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) absorbed her. In this organization, she became critical in guiding students to form a large movement. She is heavily credited with the formation of the SNCC, which she founded through the assistance of Martin Luther King Jr. She had recognized the potential of the students who were heavily involved in the sit-in movement. As such, Baker made it her priority to help bring in the leaders of the movement together for the purposes of future planning. Martin Luther had seen the formation of SNCC potentially taking up the direction of becoming SCLC something that Baker did not take up but preferred that students form their own organization. She wanted the students to empower themselves.

Baker encouraged the students to organize themselves in such a way that they could develop further. She came to the realization that “the young people were the hope of any movement…They were the people who kept the spirit going” as captured by the SNCC Digital (1). This kind of a perception shows that Baker was interested in the empowerment of the individuals who were in the movement. Ransby (318) explains that she helped the SNCC organize itself by rooting its traditions into building personal relationships that could easily be converted into political ones. As a result, members of the SNCC first forged interpersonal relationships and built on this to form a movement. 

Mueller (12) recognizes Baker’s approach as participatory democracy as it blended traditional democracy with broader participation in an innovative manner. To achieve this, Mueller (12) recognizes three implications, first, an appeal for grass root involvement, two, minimization of hierarchy, and three, a call for direct action as an answer to fear, intellectual detachment, and alienation. By rooting the SNCC on these principles, she was able to capture the interest of the students and this made the movement to flourish. Her expertise in social movement helped catapult SNCC to maneuver through the many roadblocks they encountered. Her knowledge helped to inform the student movement and make it relevant even in the face of diversionary tactics employed by the opponents of such movements.

Baker’s Relationship with Leaders like Martin Luther King

It is apparent that Baker did appreciate the role of other leaders, such as Martin Luther King Jr. In the very first days of her career, Baker was working with George Samuel Schuyler who was a writer for Harlem Newspaper. She was able to forge a positive relationship with Schuyler with whom they both started a cooperative that helped the black people develop economic opportunities. This activity was consistent with Bakers belief of empowering individuals. Baker formed associations with leaders who provided support to her, as well as, those who identified with her ideologies.

With Martin Luther King Jr. Baker was able to draw a lot of inspiration and positivism. The two worked professionally for the first time in 1957 when Ella moved to Atlanta to help Luther and Bayard Rustin organized a conference for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Due to her abilities to organize people, Baker was given the responsibility of founding the Atlanta office. She was the social architect of the organization. At the same time, Baker was able to run the voter registration campaign for NAACP.

Baker, though a fan and admirer of Martin Luther, she was worried about his style of leadership, which she found difficult to work with. Martin Luther, in the view of Baker, had a leadership style that was competing, abrasive, and authoritative. To her, this was frustrating and counterproductive. Martin Luther, as Baker found out, was rather very controlling and did not empower enough. As noted by Professor William Chafe, Baker compared leaders such as Luther with “prophets with feet of clay” (Duke University n.p). She intended to mean that such leaders did not bring the movement far enough through providing enough inspiration.

Conclusion

Through the above discussion, it has been demonstrated that Baker was a free thinker who did not evaluate a person based on their standing in the society, but by their character. She, as a civil and human rights activist, was able to develop a respectable social model that respected the opinions, views, and positions of the very “small” person in the society. As a result, she was able to deliver a model for participatory leadership, which empowered people at the individual level. Drawing inspiration from her grandmother, Baker was able to trounce major hardships that waylaid her as an informed black woman. She understood with its entirety the need for a united people with visionary leadership. As such, she aimed to unite people through movements that had a clearly defined sense of direction.

Works Cited

Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. “Who Was Ella Baker?” 2018. Ella Baker Center for Human Rights Website. https://ellabakercenter.org/about/who-was-ella-baker. December 2018.

Duke University. Ella Baker: The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement [Video] (2010) Retrieved from https://youtu.be/a1I6n9EGM5Y

James, Joy. “Ella Baker,‘Black Women’s Work’and Activist Intellectuals.” The Black Scholar 24.4 (1994): 8-15.

Mueller, Carol. “Ella Baker and the origins of “participatory democracy”.” The black studies reader. Routledge, 2004. 91-102.

Payne, Charles. “Ella Baker and models of social change.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14.4 (1989): 885-899.

Ransby, Barbara. Ella Baker and the Black freedom movement: A radical democratic vision. Univ of North Carolina Press, 2003.

SNCC Digital. “Ella Baker.” 2017. SNCC Digital Website. https://snccdigital.org/people/ella-baker/. December 2018.