Ella Baker (December 13, 1903 – December 13, 1986)

Ella ‘Jo’ (Josephine) Baker was born on this date in 1903 (and died on this date in 1986). She was one of the most influential women in the civil rights movement and one of the leading African American activists and organizers on the Left in the twentieth century. In a remarkable biography of Baker, Barbara Ransby characterizes her as “a Freirian teacher, a Gramscian intellectual, and a radical humanist.” It is of course notoriously difficult for biographies to do justice a person’s life, but I suspect Ransby has come damn close in Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (University of North Carolina Press, 2003):

“In much of her adult political life, Ella Baker was a socialist without a party or a party line. As a friend of hers, the author and filmmaker Joanne Grant, observed, Baker was not often explicit about her socialist beliefs, but there were times when she was as straightforward as one could be. ‘The only society that can serve the needs of the large masses of poor people is a Socialist society,’ she declared in a 1977 interview. She was a harsh critic of capitalism, but resisted any hints of sectarianism or ideological orthodoxy. She loathed dogma of any kind and was openly critical when she observed this kind of rigid thinking on the part of friends and colleagues. Her own worldview was constructed from an amalgam of different ideologies and traditions, combining the black Baptist missionary values of charity, humility, and service with the economic theories of Marxists and socialists of various stripes who advocated a redistribution of wealth. She also embraced the militant self-defense tradition of the black South. Here affiliation with the openly Mass Party Organizing Committee (MPOC) and her defense of Communist Party member Angela Davis are further indicators of her unequivocal identification with the left by the 1970s. She had become her own unique kind of revolutionary.”

By way of illuminating some features of her political activism in the in the civil rights struggle, we need first to introduce the Highlander Folk School. The Highlander Folk School (HFS) is an exemplum of what Aldon Morris memorably termed a “movement halfway house” in his classic study, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (Free Press, 1984). Morris defines a movement halfway house as

“an established group or organization that is only partially integrated into the larger society because its participants are actively involved in efforts to bring about a desired change in society. The American Friends Service Committee, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the War Resisters League, and the Highlander Folk School are examples of modern movement halfway houses.”[1]

Importantly, Morris proceeds to add the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF) to this list. As Clayborne Carson points out in his definitive examination of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC; pronounced as if an acronym, with an added vowel sound: ‘snick’): “SNCC’s relations with SCEF illustrated a growing willingness of SNCC workers to associate with leftist groups,”[2] in this instance, a comparatively small—in the sense of lacking a mass base—and predominantly white organization with goals close to, when not identical with, the civil rights movement. Although communists helped found this formally interracial organization in the 1930s, its ranks and supporters included non-communists as well. SCEF, for better and worse, attracted disproportionate attention given its fairly small size, while the steadfast and courageous efforts of its most active members speak to its equally disproportionate impact on other individuals and groups in the civil rights movement:

“During the late 1950s SCEF became a target of the southern press when one of its representatives, Carl Braden, refused to answer questions before HUAC [House Committee on Un-American Activities] and was later sentenced to a year in prison. Despite the controversy, SNCC leaders as early as the fall of 1960 developed close ties with Braden and his wife Anne. SCEF’s newspaper, The Southern Patriot, devoted considerable coverage to SNCC activists at a time when the organization received little attention elsewhere, and during 1960 and 1961 the paper contained essays written by Ella Baker and James Lawson.

The Bradens had gained the trust of SNCC workers because they understood better than most white leftists the militant mood of black activists, and they respected the desire of those in SNCC to remain independent of all outside control.”[3]

Both Anne Braden and Ella Baker attended Highlander Folk School workshops (in particular for our purposes, its ‘college workshops’). In fact, it was shortly after the HFS’s seventh annual college workshop on April 1, 1960 that sit-in leaders from the college ranks met to form SNCC under the initiative of Ella Baker, then serving as executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The formal structure for SNCC was created in October 1960.

HFS, like other movement halfway houses, provided an array of “social change resources such as skilled activists, tactical knowledge, media contacts, workshops, knowledge of past movements, and a vision of a future society”[4] for existing and future SNCC activists. The pedagogical, epistemic, and political functions performed so ably by HFS for SNCC and the civil rights movement generally, were strategically significant in (1) the coalescing and coordination of young black leaders, men and women; (2) in the provision of a mass education program that “was revolutionary from an educational, political, and social standpoint,” this being directly linked to mobilization outcomes; and (3) through its partial but no less exemplary instantiation of a “visible and successful model of a future integrated society.”[5] The second and third strategic functions illustrate dimensions of what Wini Breines describes as “prefigurative politics,”[6] at least insofar as we detect belief in and reliance on the theory and methods of participatory and deliberative democracy, as part of the greater attempt to embody here-and-now the future—socially integrated—society.

This society is not so much evidenced in direct action tactics and protests (although these are largely parasitic on the virtues of prefigurative community), but in the blurring and transcending of public and private boundaries that serve to privatize moral life on the one hand, and leave the work of politics to elites (politicians, bureaucrats, corporate lobbyists, professional experts…) on the other. This makes for the propitious emergence of moral if not “spiritual” communities whose members have devoted much of their lives to discerning—through thought and deed—the lineaments of the “good society,” of psychologically meaningful yet elusive notions of “happiness,” of the terms and conditions of human fulfillment. The interpersonal nature of these intimate communities is grounded in intrapersonal values, commitments, hopes and the like of self-defining and self-actualizing individuals who practice a revolutionary and eudaimonistic “politics of virtue.”[7] Such communities are not “communitarian” if by that one means individuals are constitutionally deferent to existing traditions and social norms but rather emblematic of a eudaimonistic individualism in which communities serve as fora for interdependent values realization of persons who have come to feel a compelling and urgent obligation (from the outside looking in, this may appear as supererogatory) to realize objective values in the world, each individual serving as a unique locus for such values realization. In the words of the late David L. Norton,

“For eudaimonism the common good is no more and no less than the particular good of individuals in complementary interrelationship. The requirement for complementary interrelationship is implicit in the fact that the good to be actualized, conserved, and defended—the good that represents the individual’s achieved identity—is an objective good, that is, it is of value to others no less than to the individual who realizes it. [….] [E]very well-lived life must utilize values produced by (some) other well-lived lives. And that is to say that within a society, every person has a legitimate interest in the personhood of every other. [….] In this form of community individual self-determination, self-direction and self-fulfillment are not sacrificed to the ‘common good’ but nurtured as the foundation of the common good.”[8]

The prefigurative politics of virtue in the moral and spiritual communities nurtured by HFS and SNCC was revolutionary or radical to the degree that it went beyond the goals of the mainstream civil rights organizations and the conventional politics of constitutional Liberalism in seeking societal wide systemic change involving socio-cultural and economic spheres and institutions heretofore structurally resistant to the imperatives of egalitarian distributive justice and the extension of the principles and practices of participatory and deliberative democracy. This revolutionary politics involves the struggle to generalize the welfare and individual well-being of all members of society so as to collectively supply as a moral and political entitlement grounded in human dignity, the conditions and opportunities of moral and psychological individuation and self-determination insofar as these cannot be self-supplied by individuals (alone or in community). SNCC’s Mississippi Summer Project of 1964 was a vivid and inspiring demonstration of the germination of seeds sown by earlier traditions of radical black activism (especially communists, and both here and abroad), civil rights organizations (e.g., NAACP, CORE, and SCLC), and movement halfway houses like HFS. It is no exaggeration to characterize HFS’s pivotal halfway house role here as “the educational center of the civil rights movement during the 1950s and early 1960s” (emphasis added) and, “until 1961…in the forefront of the drive to end racial segregation in the South.”[9]

Among the remarkable men and women in the civil rights movement who spent time at the Highlander Folk School, we find Rosa Parks, Septima Clark, and Ella Baker. Parks believed that the

“only black female leader … compar[able] to Clark was Ella Baker, who was emerging as one of civil rights movement’s boldest and most versatile leaders. She had taken charge of all the NAACP branches in the 1940s, would coordinate Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference [SCLC] in the late 1950s, and later gained renown as the founding mother and guiding spirit of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC] in the early 1960s. Baker inspired groups to recognize that leadership works best when shared widely and cooperatively.

[Rosa] Parks had met Baker when she delivered keynote addresses at two different NAACP leadership conferences in the mid-1940s. Calling Baker ‘beautiful in every way,’ Parks opened up her home to Baker whenever she visited Montgomery. Baker’s approach to community leadership, which closely paralleled Highlander’s method, called to Parks. People didn’t really need to be led, Parks recalled Baker insisting. They needed to be given the skills, information, and opportunity to lead themselves.

Now, thanks to [a] Highlander workshop on civil rights, Septima Clark joined Baker in Parks’s exclusive club of outstanding leaders. The fact that they both led fearlessly and powerfully mattered a great deal to Parks. But just as important, they exemplified the caring, dignified, unshakeable person Parks aspired to become. [….]

Late on the afternoon of December 1, 1955, less than four months after attending the Highlander workshop, Rosa Parks absentmindedly boarded a Montgomery bus …. [I’m assuming our readers know the rest of this fateful event, one in which her act of civil disobedience in violating Alabama segregation laws … ‘helped inspire the black community to boycott the Montgomery buses for over a year,’ and soon led to a successful federal lawsuit, Browder v. Gayle, 142 F. Supp. 707 (1956), challenging the City of Montgomery and Alabama bus segregation laws.] [….]

On Easter weekend 1960, just two weeks after the sit-in protesters met at Highlander, Ella Baker convened a meeting that she called the Southwest Student Leadership Conference on Nonviolent Resistance to Segregation. Many of the same students, joined by scores of others, converged on Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, the historically black university where Baker herself had been valedictorian. The avowed purpose was to conceptualize a new, independent, student-focused civil rights organization. Widely regarded as one of the African American community’s most effective organizers, Baker, like [Myles] Horton, recognized the untapped potential of young people. She lamented the lack of racial progress made since the Montgomery bus boycott and saw in student leadership an opportunity to electrify the civil rights movement by bringing youth and adults together into a stronger, more unified movement. At the same time, she rejected efforts by Dr. King and other members of the SCLC ‘to capture the youth movement.’ She believed that students’ strength would come from their independence, which would also empower them to become more constructive partners of groups like the SCLC and the NAACP. Inspired by her confidence and vision, students emerged from the Raleigh conference as members of a new organization—the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), with Ella Baker serving as the group’s primary adult adviser.

Baker was not only a great organizer but also renowned for her first-rate skills as an educator and developer of grassroots leaders. She often argued, as least as insistently as Horton, that strong, that strong charismatic leadership in a movement for participatory democracy was self-defeating. A different kind of leadership worked better, she contended—more humble, caring, and behind the scenes. For Baker, leadership had little to do with filling a position and almost everything to do with collaborating with others to support a group’s collective development. Her response in 1970 to historian Gerda Lerner’s question about community leadership directly aligned he with Horton when she said, ‘I have always thought what is needed is the development of people who are interested not in being leaders as much as in developing leadership in others.’

Like Horton, Baker believed that one principal way activists exerted leadership was through carefully crafted questions. Prathia Hall, a SNCC member and Baker admirer, praised her for her nondirective and question-centered teach style: ‘Raising a question and then raising another question and then helping us to see what was being revealed through the answer was her mode of leadership.’ Another activist, Lenora Taitt-Magubane, commented that Baker’s inclination to rely on ‘key questions’ frequently wasn’t recognized or appreciated as leadership. She delayed intervening, Taitt-Magubane pointed out, ‘because she wanted the decision to come out of the group and not be hers.’ Still another SNCC activist, Mary King, observed that Baker maintained a ‘Socratic presence’ by asking questions that brought the focus of discussions back to purpose and intent. ‘Now let me ask this again, what is our purpose here? What are we trying to accomplish? Again and again she would force us to articulate our assumptions.’ As biographer Barbara Ransby notes, Baker acted on the belief that ‘people had many of the answers within themselves; teachers and leaders simply had to facilitate the process of tapping and framing that knowledge, of drawing it out.’ As at Highlander, ‘debate and the open exchange of ideas became critically important.’ [….]

Ella Baker’s most important contribution as a teacher and a leader was probably her notion of group-centered leadership. One of the educational assumptions that united Baker and Horton, as well as the world-renowned educator Paulo Freire, was this notion that learning is ‘a collective and creative enterprise requiring collaboration and exchange at every stage.’ For Baker, this especially meant creating a space for everyone to speak and contribute. Learning to be silent had real value, as did learning to interrupt ‘to make sure that others were allowed to speak and that the more confident speakers were made to listen.’ In order for group-centered leadership to work, no single person could be designated as the leader or the official spokesperson all the time. Rather, as many participants as possible had to assume multiple leadership roles so that the contribution of individuals more accurately reflected the broad range of viewpoints and feelings represented in the group.

Ella Baker, like Septima Clark, ‘functioned as an organic intellectual for groups’ because ‘she validated and relied on the collective wisdom that resided in poor and oppressed communities. She had enormous respect for the everyday experience of marginalized populations and believed they possessed the thoughtfulness and social intelligence to generate discerning critiques and take informed actions. Although she personally received a rigorous forma education, she reserved her greatest admiration for people with street smarts, for the learning that took place ‘in the meeting places and unions hall of New York City, as well at rural and urban churches, barber shops and kitchen tables throughout the South.’ She recognized that retreat centers like Highlander proved a central location where the everyday wisdom of ordinary people could be brought to bear on the most difficult problems, while also diminishing the barriers of race, class, sexism, and elitism that so often derailed productive dialogue.”[10]

Notes:

1. Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984): 39.
2. Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995 ed.): 51.
3. Ibid., 51-52.
4. Morris, 139-140.
5. Ibid., 141.
6. “Prefigurative politics” is discussed in the chapters 1 and (especially) 4 in Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962-1968: The Great Refusal (New Brunswick, NJ” Rutgers University Press, 1989).
7. See David L. Norton, Democracy and Moral Development: A Politics of Virtue (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991). On “community” in SNCC, consider what James Forman wrote at the time of SNCC’s fourth general conference in April 1963. After first noting the group’s achievement of organizational security, in the sense that it was no longer insecure about its survival, he says, “The meeting was permeated by an intense comradeship, born out of sacrifice and suffering and a commitment to the future, and out of knowledge that we were indeed challenging the political structure of the country, and out of a feeling that our basic strength rested in the energy, love, and warmth of the group. The band of sisters and brothers, in a circle of trust, felt complete at last.” Quoted in Carson, 82.
8. Ibid., 124.
9. John M. Glen, Highlander: No Ordinary School (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2nd ed., 1996): 3 and 154 respectively.
10. Stephen Preskill, Education in Black and White: Myles Horton and the Highlander Center’s Vision for Social Justice (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2012): 161-164 and 211-214 respectively.
    

References and Recommended Reading

• Adams, Frank (with Myles Horton). Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The Idea of Highlander. Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, Publisher, 1975.
• Asch, Chris Myers. The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer. New York: The New Press, 2008.
• Berman, Ari. Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
• Blain, Keisha N. Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2021.
• Bledsoe, Thomas. Or We’ll All Hang Separately: The Highlander Idea. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969.
• Braden, Anne. The Wall Between. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2^nd ed., 1999.
• Brooks, Maegan Parker. Fannie Lou Hamer: America’s Freedom Fighting Woman. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020.
• Brooks, Maegan Parker and Davis W. Houck, eds. The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2011.
• Carawan, Guy and Candie Carawan. Ain’t You Got a Right to the Tree of Life: The People of Johns Island, South Carolina. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989.
• Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995 ed. (1981).
• Charron, Katherine Mellen. Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
• Clark, Septima (Cynthia Stokes Brown, ed.) Ready from Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement: A First Person Narrative. Navarro, CA: Wild Trees Press, 1986.
• Cotton, Dorothy. If Your Back’s Not Bent: The Role of the Citizenship Education Program in the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Atria, 2012.
• Fosl, Catherine. Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
• Glen, John M. Highlander: Nor Ordinary School. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1996.
• Holsaert, Faith S., et al., eds. Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010.
• Horton, Myles and Paulo Freire (Brenda Bell, John Gaventa, and John Peters, eds.) We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1990.
• Jacobs, Dale, ed. The Myles Horton Reader: Education for Social Change. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2003.
• Lee, Chana Kai. For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
• Morris, Aldon D. The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change. New York: Free Press, 1984.
• Moye, J. Todd. Ella Baker: Organizer for the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013.
• Parks, Rosa. Rosa Parks: My Story. New York: Puffin, 1999.
• Payne, Charles M. I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995.
• Preskill, Stephen. Education in Black and White: Myles Horton and the Highlander Center’s Vision for Social Justice. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021.
• Ransby, Barbara. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
• Reed, David (Preface by Anne Braden). Education for Building a People’s Movement. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1981.
• Stefani, Anne. Unlikely Dissenters: White Southern Women and the Fight for Racial Justice, 1920-1970. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2015.
• Theoharis, Jeanne. The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2013.

Miscellaneous

• The Wikipedia entry on Baker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_Baker
• Baker’s page from the Zinn Education Project: https://zinnedproject.org/materials/baker-ella/
• My alma mater, the University of California, Santa Barbara, established in 2014 a visiting professorship in her honor: https://www.jbhe.com/2014/10/shana-redmonds-named-to-professorship-honoring-civil-rights-activist-ella-baker/
• The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights is in Oakland, California: https://ellabakercenter.org/contact-us/
• Ella Baker at the SNCC Digital Gateway: https://snccdigital.org/people/ella-baker/

Relevant Bibliographies at my Academia page:

• After Slavery and Reconstruction: The Black Struggle in the U.S. for Freedom, Equality, and Self-Realization
• The Black Panther Party
• Blacks on the (radical) Left
• Conflict Resolution and Nonviolence
• Democratic Theory and Praxis
• Elections and Voting
• The History, Theory and Praxis of the Left in the 1960s
• Malcolm X