Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement

In February 1960 students from a local black college sat down in the “whites only” section at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, NC, and refused to move. They returned day after day until the store finally gave in and served them as patrons. This event sparked a movement across the South, where students performed sit-in protests at diners and restaurants in their cities. The movement spread like fire, and by Easter Weekend of that same year Baker (who was still at SCLC at the time) took the initiative to help the students organize into a regional group, which was initially called the Southwide Student Leadership Conference. This conference eventually grew into the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee, or SNCC.

SNCC and SCLC were two of the most powerful organizing conferences in the 1960s South. SNCC, composed largely of college students—both black and white anti-racist allies—was committed to nonviolent protest, just as SCLC was, but sought to hold larger, region-wide protests that were coordinated between students. During this time, Baker left SCLC but was not yet in Louisiana and Alabama. She took a job organizing and teaching activists at the YWCA in Atlanta, which allowed her to continue organizing with SNCC, ushering them into prominence.

One important role that Baker didn’t consciously take on was as a model of black womanhood for young black women involved in SNCC. They saw an unmarried (divorced by that point) woman who carried herself confidently and who was prepared to forget her manners for the sake of a larger political point. Though it’s unclear if Baker saw herself as a feminist, it was clear that she did not think of womanhood as a barrier to action. She encouraged young women like Diane Nash, a student leader at Fisk, to break the barriers men put before them.

Following the sit-ins, SNCC turned its attention to Freedom Rides. Interracial teams of students from SNCC took buses from the North to the South and deliberately used the wrong “colored” or “whites only” bathroom as a way to fight segregation. The protests were met with heavy violence from white segregationists, and the Kennedy administration failed to respond quickly or adequately, making many southern blacks nervous about his administration and distrusting of the government. Indeed, the “protections” government offered involved putting the activists in jail for violating local ordinances—a prospect hardly better than the violence of the white mob.

What was truly radical about SNCC, however, was Baker’s influence on organizing strategy. Rather than centering itself around a charismatic leadership, SNCC concentrated on one-to-one persuasion, depending on individual conversations and community action to galvanize communities, not placing hope in a leader who would drop in and visit. This philosophy led SNCC to butt heads with Martin Luther King Jr. and SCLC, and Baker repeatedly found herself at the center of such disagreements.

Baker continued on her way, organizing as she saw fit—with humility and deference to local community leaders. This was the heart of her skill. Working with SNCC, she built ties with rural and working-class poor and pulled them into the movement. In one particular instance, SNCC focused its organizing on Fayette County, TN, where black sharecroppers were being pushed out in racist retaliation from their landlords, because the black residents had the gall to register to vote. Sharecroppers would lose the land they were renting when white landlords found out they had registered, and SNCC worked to make the struggle a national story, the publicity of which helped bolster the local movement.

Here, Baker solidified her philosophy of prioritizing the poor and the working class—those who had already lost so much to the struggle against Jim Crow and segregation. The philosophical differences came to a head in Albany, GA, where all three major organizations—NAACP, SCLC, and SNCC—were working. Because of infighting, miscommunication, and differing organizing strategies, some direct action and movements were scuttled. Baker, however, never deviated from her belief that ordinary people must be invested in the fight for the fight to be successful.

One thing Baker’s philosophy emphasized was that this was as much the fight of black women as of men. Black women in the movement ignored traditional gender norms to get down and dirty in the fight alongside their male colleagues. The unsung work of women throughout the freedom movement helped create an equal and inclusive organizing philosophy, allowing local leaders to galvanize their own ordinary citizens into the fight.

By the mid-1960s it became clear that Mississippi was ground zero for the fight. The movement there centered around voting rights and held up black women as part of that pillar. Fannie Lou Hamer, a black woman from Ruleville, MS, had tried to register to vote and was shot at by a white segregationist determined to keep blacks from voting.

Despite all the violence blacks faced, a common narrative among the elite was not that black people wanted to vote and were prevented from doing so, but that working-class and poor blacks were simply too apathetic. This narrative asserted that black voter registration was low not because of segregationist violence but because blacks simply weren’t registering. In response, a large mock election was held in 1963, organized very much like a regular election, to prove that if black people did not face barriers, they would absolutely vote. The mock election was a huge success throughout Mississippi and proved that the problem was white violence, not apathy.

1963 was also an especially violent year for the movement, peaking in the bombing of Birmingham Baptist Church, which killed four young girls there for Sunday service. In response, SNCC met for a weeklong conference at the end of December to discuss plans for the future and develop the concept of Freedom Summer. The goal was a large voter registration drive and organizing of black activists. It also sought to draw northern whites into the struggle, making the movement interracial, with solidarity across the divide. Because activists would be going into the heart of Mississippi, SNCC had to develop a stance on the issue of self-defense—they were, after all, an organization with nonviolence right in their name. They officially banned their organizers from carrying weapons, but many still did so to ensure their own safety. Even with many organizers carrying weapons, three activists went missing and were found murdered during Freedom Summer.

Another Freedom Summer project was the establishment of Freedom Schools, where local activists were trained on tactics, responding without violence, and developing organizations. Baker shaped much of the curriculum taught in these Freedom Schools, disseminating her philosophy of upholding the ordinary person throughout the South.

Chapter 11 picks up with the development of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in 1964. The party formed in response to segregationist policies from the Democratic National Convention (DNC) and sought to have a voice within the party system. Baker took on the role of director of the party in Washington, working to organize the delegates for the national conference to be held in Atlantic City, NJ, that summer. Fannie Lou Hamer, the woman who was shot at while registering to vote, was scheduled to speak at their nominating convention, which was to be broadcast nationally. To prevent this, President Johnson called a press conference that took over the feeds.

The DNC and MFDP engaged in lengthy and confused negotiations throughout the convention; at one point, a compromise that no one had actually agreed to was announced as having been reached. The compromise would allow the MFDP delegation just two seats on the floor of the convention, rather than the requested 80-odd seats. After several setbacks like this, many in the movement became disillusioned with the idea that they could persuade white people at all.

At this same time, the black separatist movement was gaining speed. Black Power was the word of the day, and the Black Panthers were rising to prominence. In 1965, a few months after the failed movements at the DNC, Martin Luther King Jr. led a large crowd of protesters across the Edmund Pettius Bridge in Selma, AL. As they reached the other side of the bridge, they met a crowd of Alabama State Troopers, who ordered them to disperse. The crowd instead stopped to pray. They were then violently attacked by the troopers, who wielded batons and tear gas indiscriminately. SNCC Chairman John Lewis was in attendance, and his skull was fractured in the violence. Before being taken to the hospital, he appeared on camera, asking President Johnson to intervene.

The increasing violence across the South led some to reconsider nonviolence as a tactic. This led to a fracturing of the movement as the Black Panthers peeled off more militant black supporters, and white allies left SNCC in droves, fearing that the movement was moving toward more militant violence and danger. At this point Baker began distancing herself from SNCC, though she did not leave the movement behind. Now an elderly woman, she became involved with the campaign to free Angela Davis, a Black Panther who was imprisoned when a gun registered to her turned up at the scene of a jailbreak. Baker also joined the Mass Party Organizing Committee to explore the formation of a third party that served the interests of black Americans.

Ransby finishes recounting Baker’s life in Chapter 12. Though Baker never wanted to be a formal teacher, as she saw formal education as a mechanism for conformity, she nonetheless was a teacher of the movement. Her approach and method of teaching were practically Socratic—she would listen to a chaotic and argumentative meeting, then calmly ask just the right questions to guide the discussion and help her pupils lean upon their own knowledge and intuition. She always believed in doing work with people rather than for them.

Likewise, she was a radical model of black womanhood—one who kept her maiden name upon marriage, who refused to take sexist treatment lying down, and who projected such an image that no man would dare find her meek or mild. Ransby proposes that Baker was an outside within, someone who always kept herself in the background because she knew exactly when to deploy her formidable skill and intellect. She was the mortar between the bricks, holding different portions of the movement together. For that reason, she deserves a place among John Lewis and Martin Luther King Jr. as an important leader in the civil rights moment.