Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement

Summary: An excellent biography of a woman who is underappreciated but vitally important to the Civil Rights Movement. 

I want to mention Alissa Wilkerson's book Salty, which finally got me to reading Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement. Salty was framed as mini-biographies of women that Wilkerson would like to have around a dinner table for the most fabulous dinner party ever. I was vaguely aware of Ella Baker but did not know the extent of her involvement in all aspects of the civil rights era.

One of the points of The Dark End of the Street was that organizers started the work of what we think of as the civil rights era in the 1930s, which were motivated by organizational movements at the turn of the 20th century, which was a response to the end of the Reconstruction Era, and so on. All movements have historical antecedents that tend to be forgotten as we tell their story. Ella Baker is a generation older than most well-known figures in the Civil Rights era. She is in the same generation as Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King Sr.

Born in 1903, Baker grew up in Norfolk, VA, until 7. In 1910, there was a white race riot in Norfolk, and Baker's mother moved herself and the children back to her parent's home in Littleton, NC. Her father continued to work out of Norfolk on steamships. In addition, her grandfather had died, and her mother moved home to help care for her mother and the land. Both sets of Ella Baker's grandparents were born into slavery. Baker's father's parents were sharecroppers, but her mother's parents were literate landowners. And her grandfather was a pastor as well as a farmer. Ella Baker's parents completed high school, and her mother worked as a teacher before she was married and then again as a teacher after her husband died.

Ella Baker started Shaw's high school boarding school at 15 and continued until she graduated college in 1927. That college education was a sign of her middle-class background. Although it was also a sign of her educational aptitude. Her sister did not complete high school, and her brother did not enter college. After college, she moved to New York City, where she started a series of short-term jobs that would characterize her work for the rest of her life. She worked as a journalist and then for the Young Negroes Cooperative League as an organizer of buying cooperatives for local black-owned stores around the country. The funding for many of the organizing jobs that she would have for the rest of her life was tenuous, and she often worked without pay as an organizer and supplemented her income through other jobs. Over the next several years, she worked for the New York Public library, organizing lectures and adult education, the YWCA, and a worker's education project for the Works Progress Administration.

In 1938 she started volunteering for the NAACP. Hired as a secretary in 1940, she quickly moved to work as a field secretary. By 1943 she was the national coordinator for organizing and had the title of Director of Branches. This was the highest ranking job by a woman up until this point in the NAACP. In 1946 she resigned partly due to conflicts with the autocratic Executive Director of the NAACP, Walter White, and her need to stop traveling as frequently because she effectively adopted her niece. Baker then took on the volunteer role of president of the NYC chapter of the NAACP and took on school desegregation and police brutality as a local organizer. She ran for city council in 1953 but was unsuccessful.

From NYC, she was connected to many radical movements and well connected within the Harlem Renaissance arts and political scene. Because of her work with the NAACP, she was well connected through the south and maintained many of those relationships after leaving her national role. She helped to form an organization to funnel money to Montgomery, and other nascent civil rights protest movements and was involved in the conference that eventually became the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Pastors primarily led the SCLC, and there was a level of sexism within the group. Ella Baker became the Assistant Executive Director; it's only full-time staff. Her organizing abilities were the root of much of the early success of the SCLC. She worked for over a year as the interim executive director but was never given the title. After Wyatt Walker was officially named the new Executive Director of the SCLC, Baker started to move out of her work with the SCLC and helped to organize SNCC (Student Non-violent Coordinating Campaign.

By 1960, Baker was in her late 50s and had decades of community organizing experience, contacts around the nation, and had held senior-level positions in many high-profile organizations. But she was frequently frustrated with sexism and the authoritarian methodology of organizations like the NAACP and the SCLC. As she helped organize SNCC and mentored its leadership, she instilled a much more egalitarian and grassroots style into the organization's culture. SNCC focused less on high-profile leaders and more on local organizing over time instead of short-term projects. SNCC concentrated on voting rights and direct action for public access (the sit-in movement). Baker also was significantly involved in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the alternative to the Mississippi Democratic Party. Before MFDP, the Mississippi Democratic Party held segregated primaries that only allowed white voters to choose candidates. The MFDP went to the national Democratic convention in 1964 to protest its segregation and sought to deny recognition of the Mississippi Democratic Party delegates until it desegregated. The MFDP was not successful at unseating the Mississippi delegates but did result in a rule change that eventually was effective and was a significant contributor to party realignment.

By 1967, Ella Baker mainly had moved back to NYC and organized from there. Her health slowed her, but she was still an activist, maybe even more radical than earlier. She was involved in the Free Angela Davis movement, the Puerto Rican Independence movement, and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. She never traveled outside the US, but she was involved in many global movements in her later years.

Ella Baker is arguably one of the most important figures of the 20th century. She was involved in the senior leadership of most prominent civil rights organizations at one point or another and pushed them toward more egalitarian (both in gender and class) positions. Her vision for local organizing as the root for national change was less successful than she hoped, but much of the strength of the civil rights era was built on her work of empowering local movements. Rosa Parks' first trip outside of the Montgomery area was to a training conference in Atlanta organized by Ella Baker. Many of the relatively unknown leaders that work to build local movements were identified, trained, and supported by Ella Baker. Baker's decentralized approach has influenced the ideological rooting of the modern civil rights movement.

This is not a short book. The main text is nearly 400 pages, and the audiobook is almost 22 hours. But in many ways, I wanted more detail and more context. You can see about fifty highlights and notes here.