There is a saying in our communities that implies we can’t see where we are unless we know something about where we have been.
By
Rev. Dr. L. Rita Dixon
History can provide light for the present. I experienced the light of history as I watched Oprah’s Detroit Campaign Event for Vice President Kamala Harris on YouTube in September 2024. I thought of how much the Vice President’s speech echoed Ella Baker (12/13/03- 12/13/86). I imagined the spirit of Ella circling over the large multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-aged, and multi-gendered audience as they engaged deeply in conversation about freedom for all and a fair American Democracy. Ella would have loved that conversation. She had spent the greater part of her 83 years on earth in the struggle for Civil Rights for all. She worked to eradicate hatred, racism, violence, sexism, and other forms of elitism that made some people second-class citizens.
I first met Miss Ella Josephine Baker in the Spring of 1960 when a small group (3-4 students) from my Atlanta University Mathematics class met with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr at his Atlanta Southern Christian Leadership (SCLC) Office on Auburn Avenue. We were looking for financial support for picket signs for a Civil Rights demonstration we were planning. After listening to us he called in Ella, the only other staff member in the small office.
She had come to Atlanta in 1958 to establish the Office and became its first woman executive director. She had a long history in organizing in the Civil Rights struggle. Her history included leadership in: the establishment of the SCLC organization which grew out of the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56, NAACP (1940-46), various New York Agencies (1927-40), and many other Civil Rights Organizations. After engaging us in some sharing she gave us what we needed.
During our initial meeting I discovered that she lived on the same floor in the same apartment hotel as I did. At that time, I was a 26-year-old graduate student on a one-year scholarship to Atlanta University and a one-year leave of absence from my job as a Mathematics teacher at Archer High School in Atlanta, Georgia. I had lived in Georgia all of my twenty-six years. She got my attention from the beginning of our relationship by insisting that we call her “Ella” rather “Mrs. Baker,” the customary southern norm for younger adults addressing an older woman.
She had a soft, warm, dignified, and commanding presence. Soft and confident, you knew she was her own person. When she spoke to man or woman, one listened. She was not the ingratiating or insulting kind. She was serious but not offensive. She was inviting but not a people pleaser. She said what she meant in a well-modulated clarity and meant what she said with confidence. I had never met a woman like her.
I enjoyed a close relationship with Ella for over many years. I moved away from Atlanta in August of 1961 and she left in 1962 or 63. Over the years I learned that her early life was in Virginia, she had moved to New York after finishing college and had maintained that location as her primary home. She saw herself as a New Yorker with southern roots. Our relationship continued mostly by phone and occasional visits.
I have a vivid memory of one of Ella’s visits when I lived in Washington, D. C. It was a hot afternoon in late August of 1964. She was with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which was challenging the Democratic convention for seats. After the MFDP leaders left town, she dropped by for a catch-up visit. I had cooked peas, corn bread and probably some greens. As we were sharing experiences and food, Ella stopped, looked at me and said something like “What am I doing sitting here eating peas when I could be at the Hilton eating steak? I am on an expense account!” We enjoyed a good laugh because it was “so Ella”. She had a great sense of humor and I remember laughing a lot with her.
One of Ella’s core organizing principles was to give the people light and to allow them to make the best decisions for themselves. She felt strongly that in order to have an equitable democracy people must be allowed, and taught, if necessary, to think their own thoughts, define their own problems, ask their own questions and find their own solutions. This was the task of organizing. In other words, she felt that people must participate in their own liberation, especially grassroots people, no matter how poor and uneducated they were.
Ella was a great listener and had an unshakeable belief that everyone deserved to be heard. She held deep convictions about the worth and dignity of human beings, even children and young people. She doubled down on this conviction for poor people and those who were considered outcasts or looked-down on for any reason. She was a Movement, Human Rights, Cause person par excellent and had many leadership roles for these values before and after SCLC .
She is best known as the mother of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC pronounced “Snick”), for which she was the lead organizer of its founding conference in October of 1960. She fought fiercely for the independence of SNCC from other, more seasoned organizations. She sat through many smoke-filled long meetings with a mask over her nose (because of a respiratory problem) while the young leaders struggled to make decisions. In her unique style Ella would ask strategic questions or make comments to provide clarity and direction to the discussion when asked. SNCC became the cutting edge of the of the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement.
Who can forget John Lewis, a SNCC leader and the Pettis Bridge massacre in Alabama? Do you remember John Lewis as the youngest speaker at the 1960’s Washington March? The Mississippi Freedom Summer? Can you still see the police setting dogs and fire hoses full force on children? The beatings, murders, and church bombings because people were trying to vote? The current form of Democracy that we enjoy now, while not perfect, is the gift that came from their sacrifices and those of many other people. They all gave so much and we are the benefactors.
I could try to recall some of the meetings I attended with her, the people I met who were engaged in civil rights work, some of the stories she shared about her life, her birth family, growing up in North Carolina, her college life at Shaw University as well as her experiences of living with families in rural southern counties who had meager resources but the courage to vote in hostile situations. Instead of trying to remember meaningful incidents from a relationship that began sixty-four years ago, I highly recommend Joanne Grant’s book, ELLA BAKER, Freedom Bound, for further reading. I resonate with her excellent detailed account of Ella’s life.
Joanne met Ella at the 1960 founding conference of SNCC. In the Introduction, she says, “our association as coworkers and friends lasted until her death in December 1986”. Joanne made a film about her in 1981, Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker. I used this excellent film in training events for church leaders during the 80’s. It is now hard to find. The film was not enough for Joanne so she further honored Ella and us with this book in 1998. As Julian Bond, a SNCC leader says about Ella in the Foreword to the book
She was what she appeared to be--a middle-age black woman about whom we knew nothing but who had an amazing store of experiences and contacts to guide the young militants of the Student Nonviolent Committee (SNCC).
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But she did manage to touch the lives of thousands, ingraining in them her suspicion of hierarchies and her faith in democracy---always with a lower case “d”.
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For my generation, she was a mentor and a model---she set a high standard for commitment to the movement.
Julian Bond says about the book,
This book is part of a welcoming new trend in civil rights historiography: history from the bottom up rather than the top down, history about the people who made the movements that made great men rather than simply about great men themselves.
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Through it all, Joanne Grant reminds us that Baker sought to help ordinary people rise to extraordinary heights and to make their own decisions.
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In these pages, Joanne Grant sets a high standard for exploring the life and contributions of a remarkable figure of twentieth-century American history.
While working on this pillar of democracy, I was made aware of another book on Ella Baker. This book, Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement, A Radical Democratic Vision by Barbara Ransby was published in 2003. It is a scholar’s dream and promises to be a rewarding read. The Introduction begins with a statement that Ella Baker spent her entire adult life trying to change a racist, classist, and sexist system with a theory of social change and political organizing that was embedded in her practice. Her ideas were written in her work: a coherent body of lived text spanning nearly sixty years.
Barbara Ransby seeks to read that text in this biography, which is profoundly personal and is excellent historical scholarship. She says:
As biographers, we ask questions about lives that the subjects themselves may never have asked outright and certainly did not consciously answer. Answers are always elusive. We search for them by carefully reading and interpreting the fragmented messages left behind. Feminist biographers and scholar-activists like myself face particular challenges. It is imperative that we be ever cautious of the dangers inherent in our work: imposing our contemporary dilemmas and expectations on a generation of women who spoke a different language, moved at a different rhythm, and juggled a different set of issues and concerns.
….
In this book, I have I have tried to tell Ella Baker’s story partly as she would have told it and partly the way I –- a historian and an activist of a different time and place---felt it had to be told.
You can purchase both books and several more on Ella Baker from bookstores of your choice.
Bibliography:
Grant, Joanne. 1998, Ella Baker, Freedom Bound, published by John Wiley & Sons Inc. Pages xv-xvi, 4
Ransby, Barbara. 2003, Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement, A Radical Democratic Vision pages 1-2
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