Ella Baker: Freedom Bound

Born in Norfolk, Virginia in 1903, Ella Josephine Baker died 83 years to the day of her birth. Despite the fact that as a woman, she was expected by black ministers and community leaders to remain quietly in the shadows, Baker refused to sit idly by while the "men with clay feet" led the civil rights movement. No doubt, the significance of the day of her passing would not be lost on a firebrand such as Baker, who was never content to simply sit back in the shadows.

As a young child, Ella and her family moved from Norfolk to rural North Carolina where she spent a great deal of time with her grandmother, who related to her the tales of the horrible life on the plantation she grew up on. It was not so much the brutality or horrid treatment that moved Ella so. Rather, it was her grandmother's recounting of the severe beating received at the hands of her master when she refused to marry a man the master tried to force upon her. As such a young girl, Ella was confused and hurt at hearing the tale, but deep within her belly a fire began to burn.

Hearing her grandmother's story would play a formative role in Baker's life, and thrust her into what would eventually become not only a prominent role in the nascent civil rights movement, but would also earn her a place in history amongst the likes of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and W.E.B. du Bois. For many years, the story of Ella Baker would falsely characterize her as a domineering, out-of-control woman. However, "Miss Baker," as those who respected her referred to her, would help to shape, mentor, and take as her protégés many of the very same men who would go on to be recognized as the leaders of the civil rights movement. For that role she is rightfully known as the "Mother of the Civil Rights Movement."

Baker believed in a type of familial collectivism; the community group exists, she said, without a social hierarchy, and yet everyone shares food, housing, child rearing and tools to help provide for all of their neighbors around them. She carried this into her first role with the NAACP in 1938, where she immediately challenged the presumptuousness of the all-male, black clergymen who were certainly not keen on females in leadership roles. When Baker graduated valedictorian from Shaw College in Raleigh, North Carolina, it was the normative standard that young black women were either housemaids; or else, with a college degree, school teachers. She opted instead to head to New York City, as was characteristic of her hard-charging spirit, and.

Consequently, Baker fashioned her mentorship style around encouraging a group-centered leadership, rather than grooming a single individual to lead. This characterized her radical, democratic vision, which rejected hierarchical constructs that would relegate women to subservient positions. Later on through the years, critics would decry her for this, claiming that it was her way of speaking pejoratively of Dr. King and his leadership style. As the quintessential organizer, she promulgated her collectivist beliefs at each and every organization she worked for or helped to found, arousing the ire of more than a few people.

Nonetheless, her audaciousness and tenacity led her to become, in 1943, the first female regional executive for the NAACP. Just a few short years later, Ella Jo Baker would go on in 1957 to help Dr. King found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, better known as SCLC. In 1960, she was the impetus behind the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Commission (SNCC).

For Ella Baker, the truly catalyzing moment in her life began with the "year-long bus boycott in Montgomery, in which she saw the potential for the mass movement that had always been her dream." And again, Baker would incite conflict with the male ministerial set, who found it difficult to deal with a powerful woman such as she. Moreover, individuals such as Dr. King took affront to Ella Baker's mantra of "group-centered leadership rather than leader-centered group." Baker worried a great deal that a "cult of personality" was forming around Dr. Martin Luther King, which at times put the two of them at loggerheads. One such example was Baker's grassroots appeal to send people out door-to-door, and attempt to bring as many people into the fold as possible. Baker "urged the organization to recruit more low-income members by, for example, sending organizers into pool rooms and taverns; her experience had been that some would join up just out of sheer surprise."

It was her formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that was her signature achievement. SNCC was an offshoot organization for students who were organizing at the grassroots, local level, protesting with sit-in's at lunch counters and small, peaceful protests. Under Baker's tutelage, she infused her brand of molding and forming a democratic organization. Realizing that many of the energetic and eager college students she was organizing did not have much in the way of training or leadership experience, Baker took this opportunity to start with a tabula rasa, instilling her brand of collectivist ideology into this new organization.

Nevertheless, Ella Baker utilized her preferred style of participatory democracy, with everyone assuming group leadership, rather than a single leader in the top role. Baker also made it a point to keep SNCC firmly a student-run organization, out of the grasp of SCLC and the NAACP's dictums. Regardless of any of her past affiliations or employment with those two organizations, Baker was palpably displeased with them and was determined not to let the male clergymen subvert the new group from the broader and more ambitious goals she was guiding it towards.


Article Source: James A Molnar