Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement

Baker believed in a politics of the ordinary person. She believed in centering the stories and lives of the average citizen, the poor, the working class. Ransby repeatedly returns to Baker’s formation of a political philosophy that uplifted the poor and working-class blacks and gave them a substantial voice in the movement. By connecting with local leaders, empowering rural blacks to speak for themselves, Baker helped turn the Black Freedom Movement into a movement of all peoples, strengthening its base across the South.

In Harlem, Baker met working-class and poor black people for what was likely the first time in her fairly middle-class life. Such encounters had an immense impact on Baker, as she learned about their struggles and experienced them herself as the Great Depression hit the country. She observed how economic situations were placing black people in much the same position as slaves—this was the inspiration for her article, “The Bronx Slave Market.”

As Ransby puts it:

“The economic rigors of the depression had intensified all forms of oppression, pushing many black women from the lower rungs of the wage labor force back to day work and even into occasional prostitution. When Baker and Cooke wrote their article, the modern concept of feminism was still a foreign notion to most Americans, black and white. Yet the black feminist notion of intersecting systems of oppression as a cornerstone of black women’s collective experience was an observable reality, and in their article Cooke and Baker came close to articulating it as a theory” (77).

Later on, as she traveled through the South organizing different campaigns, and working with celebrity leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., Baker saw the importance of listening to the ordinary folks in their own communities. Helping to empower people to speak on their own behalf solidified Baker’s belief that citizens acting within their community are far more powerful than any charismatic speaker flying in from elsewhere. Ransby’s book offers a different narrative of the civil rights moment than what appears in high school history books: It was a movement of ordinary people, leading ordinary lives, doing extraordinary things.

Of Baker’s philosophy, Ransby writes: “activists had to form relationships, build trust, and engage in a democratic process of decision making together with community members. The goal was to politicize the community and empower ordinary people” (270). The direct contrast between Baker and King defined the central conflicts between civil rights groups for decades, drawing a fixed line between SNCC’s philosophy of organization and SCLC’s focus on motivation through celebrity.