Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement

Despite her philosophical disagreements with NAACP leaders, Baker was elected president of the NYC branch in 1952. World War II had ended six years before, and the Cold War was well in swing. Numerous organizations sought to eliminate any hint of communism from within their ranks, and the NAACP was no exception. During her time as president of the NYC chapter, Baker joined a committee built to root out communists within their midst. While Baker did not consider herself anti-communist, she felt it expedient for the NAACP to show that it was not politically subversive. She later regretted that role as McCarthyism came into greater swing on the national level.

During that time as chapter president, she also felt the NAACP was moving too slowly to react to the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, which decreed separate-but-equal schooling unconstitutional and ordered integration. In response, Baker developed the Parents in Action Against Educational Discrimination group, which successfully protested enough to get meetings with the mayor about integration. She also ran a campaign against police brutality in response to the savage beating of two black men by white police officers in the West 54th Station House. The police union responded to the campaign by calling it a “communist plot”—which was ironic considering Baker’s involvement in the NAACP’s anti-communist committee activities.

Baker attempted to run for office in NYC, unsuccessfully. She ran for city council on the Liberal Party ticket, a nascent party focused on labor rights and unionization. This failed campaign corresponded with the flashfire that was the Montgomery Bus Boycotts, sparked by Baker’s friend and former activist student Rosa Parks. Baker used her position within the NAACP and her connections from her time as a field secretary to organize support for the boycotts, helping to turn them into a yearlong movement—which also brought a young Atlanta preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. to the national forefront.

The 1950s didn’t end well for Baker. She and Bob Roberts divorced in 1958, and she increasingly relied on her political family. She threw herself into a new coalition called In Friendship alongside two allies and friends: Stanley Levison, a Jewish lawyer in NYC, and Bayard Rustin, a gay black Quaker from Pennsylvania. In Friendship was built to help fund local efforts to protest Jim Crow and segregation, and Baker’s work with the organization eventually took her to the next chapter of her life: Atlanta and the Southern Christian Leadership Coalition.

The South in the 1950s was marked by racial tension and unrest among black people regarding the Jim Crow restrictions on their rights and the ongoing lynchings of young black men and women. Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, marking a flashpoint in southern black activism. Two years after Till’s brutal murder, Baker traveled to Atlanta, where she would live for the next few decades, to aid in the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). It was here that Baker met Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a charismatic leader from Atlanta who was quickly becoming a central figure in the black freedom movement.

The SCLC developed because the nascent civil rights movement in the South consisted of numerous local struggles that lacked greater regional organizing. The SCLC was one of many attempts to organize this activism into a coordinated effort. It consisted of black preachers from across the South, positioning the church as a central organizational space in the struggle. As Baker found and struggled against, this kind of leadership came with some regressive views about the role of women in the movement. Despite sexist treatment from much of the leadership, Baker found an important role as an organizer with a mass of connections throughout the South.

One of her first and biggest projects was the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, a demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, in 1957, on the third anniversary of the Brown vs. Board decision. The final crowd count at the event—organized largely by Baker and her colleague Rustin—was around 30,000 people. Her next big project was the Crusade for Citizenship, a mass voter registration effort with the goal of doubling the number of registered black voters across the South. Baker rescued SCLC from extended disorganization and worked without an office in Atlanta for a feverish few weeks, having joined just a month before the registration effort was set.

Despite Baker’s hard work and success at pulling together the Crusade, many of SCLC’s black male leaders objected to the idea of her as a leader, so John Tilley was brought in as executive director. Tilley stretched himself far too thin by attempting to maintain his church in Baltimore while also working for SCLC. As a result, the organization struggled, and Baker chafed at the thought that all her ideas had to be approved by Dr. King. Fundamentally, Baker had a different vision of organization. While King and his fellow preachers viewed themselves as shepherds of a flock, Baker viewed her role as an organizer as one of missional empowerment—giving people the tools to organize for themselves rather than passing down instruction from charismatic celebrity leadership.

Baker also questioned SCLC’s commitment to nonviolence. As she traveled in the South, she struggled with the idea that black people should not defend themselves. She knew many rural blacks who carried guns for self-defense against violent whites and privately agreed that this was a good idea. This and other philosophical disagreements led her to leave SCLC in 1960.