Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement
A Radical Democratic Vision
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Narrated by:
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Lisa Reneé Pitts
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By:
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Barbara Ransby
About this listen
One of the most important African-American leaders of the 20th century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement, Ella Baker (1903-1986) was an activist whose remarkable career spanned 50 years and touched thousands of lives.
A gifted grassroots organizer, Baker shunned the spotlight in favor of vital behind-the-scenes work that helped power the Black freedom struggle. She was a national officer and key figure in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and a prime mover in the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Baker made a place for herself in predominantly male political circles that included W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, and Martin Luther King Jr., all the while maintaining relationships with a vibrant group of women, students, and activists both black and white.
In this deeply researched biography, Barbara Ransby chronicles Baker's long and rich political career as an organizer, an intellectual, and a teacher. Beyond documenting an extraordinary life, the book paints a vivid picture of the African-American fight for justice and its intersections with other progressive struggles worldwide across the 20th century.
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A sharecropper, a warrior, and a truth-telling prophet, Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) stands as a powerful symbol not only of the 1960s Black freedom movement, but also of the enduring human struggle against oppression. This is a rhetorical biography that tells the story of Hamer's life by focusing on how she employed symbols - images, words, and even material objects such as the ballot, food, and clothing - to construct persuasive public personae, to influence audiences, and to effect social change.
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A rhetorical biography of Fannie Lou Hamer.
- By Adam Shields on 04-27-23
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Rise Up
- Confronting a Country at the Crossroads
- By: Al Sharpton
- Narrated by: Al Sharpton, Leon Nixon
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Beginning with a foreword by Michael Eric Dyson, Rise Up is a rousing call to action for our nation, drawing on lessons learned from Reverend Al Sharpton’s unique experience as a politician, television and radio host, and civil rights leader.
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Inspired and inspiring
- By Jessica S on 10-13-20
By: Al Sharpton
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Why They Marched
- Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote
- By: Susan Ware
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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For far too long, the history of how American women won the right to vote has been told as the tale of a few iconic leaders, all white and native-born. But Susan Ware uncovered a much broader and more diverse story waiting to be told. Why They Marched is a tribute to the many women who worked tirelessly in communities across the nation, out of the spotlight, protesting, petitioning, and insisting on their right to full citizenship.
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a needed history lesson
- By Jerseycookie on 05-14-22
By: Susan Ware
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Mothers of Massive Resistance
- White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy
- By: Elizabeth Gillespie McRae
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 11 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Examining racial segregation from 1920s to the 1970s, Mothers of Massive Resistance explores the grassroots workers who maintained the system of racial segregation and Jim Crow. For decades in rural communities, in university towns, and in New South cities, white women performed myriad duties that upheld white over black: censoring textbooks, denying marriage certificates, deciding on the racial identity of their neighbors, celebrating school choice, canvassing communities for votes, and lobbying elected officials.
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commendable topic....
- By CB on 10-25-19
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A Nation of Nations
- A Story of America After the 1965 Immigration Law
- By: Tom Gjelten
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 12 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1950, Fairfax County, Virginia, was 90 percent white, 10 percent African American, with a little more than 100 families who were "other". Currently the African American percentage of the population is about the same, but the Anglo white population is less than 50 percent, and there are families of Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and Latin American origin living all over the county. A Nation of Nations follows the lives of a few immigrants to Fairfax County over recent decades as they gradually "Americanize".
By: Tom Gjelten
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Ida B. the Queen
- By: Michelle Duster
- Narrated by: Michelle Duster
- Length: 3 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Ida B. Wells committed herself to the needs of those who did not have power. In the eyes of the FBI, this made her a “dangerous negro agitator”. In the annals of history, it makes her an icon. Ida B. the Queen tells the awe-inspiring story of a pioneering woman who was often overlooked and underestimated - a woman who refused to exit a train car meant for White passengers; a woman brought to light the horrors of lynching in America; a woman who cofounded the NAACP.
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I was expecting something different
- By L on 02-01-21
By: Michelle Duster
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Why Young Men
- The Dangerous Allure of Violent Movements and What We Can Do About It
- By: Jamil Jivani
- Narrated by: JD Jackson
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Jamil Jivani recounts his experiences working as a youth activist throughout North America and the Middle East, drawing striking parallels between ISIS recruits, gangbangers, and Neo-Nazis in the West. Having narrowly escaped a descent into crime and gang violence in his native Toronto, Jivani has devoted his life to helping other at-risk youths avoid this fate in cities across North America. After the Paris terrorist attacks of 2016, he traveled to Europe and the Middle East to assist Muslim community outreach groups focused on deterring ISIS recruitment.
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More of a memoir than a sociological tretise
- By Josh on 07-02-19
By: Jamil Jivani
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The Fire Is upon Us
- James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America
- By: Nicholas Buccola
- Narrated by: Prentice Onayemi
- Length: 14 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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On February 18, 1965, an overflowing crowd packed the Cambridge Union in Cambridge, England, to witness a historic televised debate between James Baldwin, the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, and William F. Buckley Jr., a fierce critic of the movement and America's most influential conservative intellectual. The topic was "the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro", and no one who has seen the debate can soon forget it. Nicholas Buccola's The Fire Is upon Us is the first book to tell the full story of the event.
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Sadly, the story is timeless.
- By Edward P. Cerne on 01-17-20
By: Nicholas Buccola
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The Third Reconstruction
- America's Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century
- By: Peniel E. Joseph
- Narrated by: Peniel E. Joseph
- Length: 7 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Distinguished historian Peniel E. Joseph offers a powerful and personal new interpretation of recent history. The racial reckoning that unfolded in 2020, he argues, marked the climax of a Third Reconstruction: a new struggle for citizenship and dignity for Black Americans, just as momentous as the movements that arose after the Civil War and during the civil rights era. Joseph draws revealing connections and insights across centuries as he traces this Third Reconstruction from the election of Barack Obama to the rise of Black Lives Matter to the failed assault on the Capitol.
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Revealing & powerful.
- By Terry Carmon on 02-08-24
By: Peniel E. Joseph
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White Feminism
- From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind
- By: Koa Beck
- Narrated by: Koa Beck
- Length: 11 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Addressing today’s conversation about race, empowerment, and inclusion in America, Koa Beck, writer and former editor-in-chief of Jezebel, boldly examines the history of feminism, from the true mission of the suffragists to the rise of corporate feminism with clear-eyed scrutiny and meticulous detail. She also examines overlooked communities - including Native American, Muslim, transgender, and more - and their ongoing struggles for social change.
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Visionary!
- By J. F. Beck on 01-06-21
By: Koa Beck
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Unholy
- Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump
- By: Sarah Posner
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 12 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In this taut inquiry, Posner digs deep into the radical history of the religious right to reveal how issues of race and xenophobia have always been at the movement’s core, and how religion often cloaked anxieties about perceived threats to a white, Christian America. Fueled by an antidemocratic impulse, and united by this narrative of reverse victimization, the religious right and the alt-right support a common agenda.
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How We Got Here
- By D. Sooley on 06-16-20
By: Sarah Posner
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The New Negro
- The Life of Alain Locke
- By: Jeffrey C. Stewart
- Narrated by: Bill Andrew Quinn
- Length: 45 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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In The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar, earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, and his long career as a professor at Howard University. And yet he became most closely associated with the flowering of Black culture in Jazz Age America.
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Let me guess? Locke was a gay black man?
- By Porter on 01-21-20
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Walk with Me
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She was born the 20th child in a family that had lived in the Mississippi Delta for generations, first as enslaved people and then as sharecroppers. She left school at 12 to pick cotton, as those before her had done, in a world in which white supremacy was an unassailable citadel. She was subjected without her consent to an operation that deprived her of children. And she was denied the most basic of all rights in America—the right to cast a ballot—in a state in which Blacks constituted nearly half the population. And so Fannie Lou Hamer lifted up her voice.
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Amazing woman during very difficult times
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Hammer and Hoe
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The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate Black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of Whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, Robin D. G. Kelley reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture.
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I should like this book more
- By bkpiper on 11-17-21
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The New Negro
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In The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar, earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, and his long career as a professor at Howard University. And yet he became most closely associated with the flowering of Black culture in Jazz Age America.
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Let me guess? Locke was a gay black man?
- By Porter on 01-21-20
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At the Dark End of the Street
- Black Women, Rape, and Resistance - A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
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In this groundbreaking and important book, Danielle McGuire writes about the rape in 1944 of a 24-year-old mother and sharecropper, Recy Taylor, who strolled toward home after an evening of singing and praying at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Seven white men, armed with knives and shotguns, ordered the young woman into their green Chevrolet, raped her, and left her for dead. The president of the local NAACP branch office sent his best investigator and organizer to Abbeville. Her name was Rosa Parks.
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Difficult topic, trigger warnings apply
- By Adam Shields on 08-03-22
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If They Come in the Morning...
- Voices of Resistance
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One of America's most historic political trials is undoubtedly that of Angela Davis. Opening with a letter from James Baldwin to Davis, and including contributions from numerous radicals such as Black Panthers George Jackson, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and Erica Huggins, this book is not only an account of Davis's incarceration and the struggles surrounding it, but also perhaps the most comprehensive and thorough analysis of the prison system of the United States.
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National Treasure!
- By Rayanna Walker on 09-18-21
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The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935
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James Anderson critically reinterprets the history of southern Black education from Reconstruction to the Great Depression. By placing Black schooling within a political, cultural, and economic context, he offers fresh insights into Black commitment to education, the peculiar significance of Tuskegee Institute, and the conflicting goals of various philanthropic groups, among other matters.
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Against all Odds
- By tubby on 10-21-22
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Walk with Me
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She was born the 20th child in a family that had lived in the Mississippi Delta for generations, first as enslaved people and then as sharecroppers. She left school at 12 to pick cotton, as those before her had done, in a world in which white supremacy was an unassailable citadel. She was subjected without her consent to an operation that deprived her of children. And she was denied the most basic of all rights in America—the right to cast a ballot—in a state in which Blacks constituted nearly half the population. And so Fannie Lou Hamer lifted up her voice.
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Amazing woman during very difficult times
- By Tenzin Dawa on 09-21-24
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Hammer and Hoe
- Alabama Communists During the Great Depression
- By: Robin D. G. Kelley
- Narrated by: David Sadzin
- Length: 13 hrs and 40 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate Black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of Whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, Robin D. G. Kelley reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture.
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I should like this book more
- By bkpiper on 11-17-21
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The New Negro
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-
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In The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar, earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, and his long career as a professor at Howard University. And yet he became most closely associated with the flowering of Black culture in Jazz Age America.
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Let me guess? Locke was a gay black man?
- By Porter on 01-21-20
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At the Dark End of the Street
- Black Women, Rape, and Resistance - A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
- By: Danielle L. McGuire
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
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In this groundbreaking and important book, Danielle McGuire writes about the rape in 1944 of a 24-year-old mother and sharecropper, Recy Taylor, who strolled toward home after an evening of singing and praying at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Seven white men, armed with knives and shotguns, ordered the young woman into their green Chevrolet, raped her, and left her for dead. The president of the local NAACP branch office sent his best investigator and organizer to Abbeville. Her name was Rosa Parks.
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Difficult topic, trigger warnings apply
- By Adam Shields on 08-03-22
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If They Come in the Morning...
- Voices of Resistance
- By: Angela Davis - editor
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards, David Sadzin
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One of America's most historic political trials is undoubtedly that of Angela Davis. Opening with a letter from James Baldwin to Davis, and including contributions from numerous radicals such as Black Panthers George Jackson, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and Erica Huggins, this book is not only an account of Davis's incarceration and the struggles surrounding it, but also perhaps the most comprehensive and thorough analysis of the prison system of the United States.
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National Treasure!
- By Rayanna Walker on 09-18-21
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James Anderson critically reinterprets the history of southern Black education from Reconstruction to the Great Depression. By placing Black schooling within a political, cultural, and economic context, he offers fresh insights into Black commitment to education, the peculiar significance of Tuskegee Institute, and the conflicting goals of various philanthropic groups, among other matters.
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Against all Odds
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What listeners say about Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- James Young
- 07-20-22
Love Her
I Love Her, she was an amazing woman. A strategist, a visionary, a true leader. A key player in civil rights.
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- TonyaA6
- 12-18-23
Biography of a great woman
I enjoyed learning more about Ms. Ella Baker and the impact she had on others in the civil rights movement. My interest about her was peaked some years ago when I watched a program about the women of the movement who were given very little acknowledgement, but performed so much of the work. (Of course).
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- Nana
- 02-14-22
lengthy but Relevant
just outside the inner circle is where so many intellectual Black women live; especially the outspoken questioning ones who don't succumbe to leader or status worship. The insights and revelations are very interesting. it isvrefreshing to read about historical figures without the the God veil. A honest depiction of real people in relevant times ďealing with relevant problems. Dr. Ransby did justice to she who believed in freedom and spent her life of integrity working for the people and living her convictions.
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- Marcia Baynes
- 05-14-23
Life illuminating and inspiring
I so appreciate and have much respect for the life of a woman who was an example of how to use one’s emotional intelligence and love of humanity to quietly and forcefully effect radical civil, social and political changes during her amazing life. I thank the author for all she has done to illuminate for me and others Ella Baker’s life work. I feel so blessed to have had the opportunity to listen and grow as I suspect that Ella Baker would humbly love.
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- Adam Shields
- 01-26-23
An excellent Civil Rights Biography
I want to mention Alissa Wilkerson’s book Salty, which finally got me to reading Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement. Salty was framed as mini-biographies of women that Wilkerson would like to have around a dinner table for the most fabulous dinner party ever. I was vaguely aware of Ella Baker but did not know the extent of her involvement in all aspects of the civil rights era.
One of the points of The Dark End of the Street was that organizers started the work of what we think of as the civil rights era in the 1930s, which were motivated by organizational movements at the turn of the 20th century, which was a response to the end of the Reconstruction Era, and so on. All movements have historical antecedents that tend to be forgotten as we tell their story. Ella Baker is a generation older than most well-known figures in the Civil Rights era. She is in the same generation as Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King Sr.
Born in 1903, Baker grew up in Norfolk, VA, until 7. In 1910, there was a white race riot in Norfolk, and Baker’s mother moved herself and the children back to her parent’s home in Littleton, NC. Her father continued to work out of Norfolk on steamships. In addition, her grandfather had died, and her mother moved home to help care for her mother and the land. Both sets of Ella Baker’s grandparents were born into slavery. Baker’s father’s parents were sharecroppers, but her mother’s parents were literate landowners. And her grandfather was a pastor as well as a farmer. Ella Baker’s parents completed high school, and her mother worked as a teacher before she was married and then again as a teacher after her husband died.
Ella Baker started Shaw’s high school boarding school at 15 and continued until she graduated college in 1927. That college education was a sign of her middle-class background. Although it was also a sign of her educational aptitude. Her sister did not complete high school, and her brother did not enter college. After college, she moved to New York City, where she started a series of short-term jobs that would characterize her work for the rest of her life. She worked as a journalist and then for the Young Negroes Cooperative League as an organizer of buying cooperatives for local black-owned stores around the country. The funding for many of the organizing jobs that she would have for the rest of her life was tenuous, and she often worked without pay as an organizer and supplemented her income through other jobs. Over the next several years, she worked for the New York Public library, organizing lectures and adult education, the YWCA, and a worker’s education project for the Works Progress Administration.
In 1938 she started volunteering for the NAACP. Hired as a secretary in 1940, she quickly became a field secretary. By 1943 she was the national coordinator for organizing and had the title of Director of Branches. This was the highest-ranking job by a woman up until this point in the NAACP. In 1946 she resigned partly due to conflicts with the autocratic Executive Director of the NAACP, Walter White, and her need to stop traveling as frequently because she effectively adopted her niece. Baker then took on the volunteer role of president of the NYC chapter of the NAACP and took on school desegregation and police brutality as a local organizer. She ran for city council in 1953 but was unsuccessful.
From NYC, she was connected to many radical movements and well-connected within the Harlem Renaissance arts and political scene. Because of her work with the NAACP, she was well-connected throughout the south and maintained many of those relationships after leaving her national role. She helped to form an organization to funnel money to Montgomery and other nascent civil rights protest movements and was involved in the conference that eventually became the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Pastors primarily led the SCLC, and there was a level of sexism within the group. Ella Baker became the Assistant Executive Director; it’s only full-time staff. Her organizing abilities were the root of much of the early success of the SCLC. She worked for over a year as the interim executive director but was never given the title. After Wyatt Walker was officially named the new Executive Director of the SCLC, Baker started to move out of her work with the SCLC and helped to organize SNCC (Student Non-violent Coordinating Campaign.
By 1960, Baker was in her late 50s and had decades of community organizing experience, contacts around the nation, and had held senior-level positions in many high-profile organizations. But she was frequently frustrated with sexism and the authoritarian methodology of organizations like the NAACP and the SCLC. As she helped organize SNCC and mentored its leadership, she instilled a much more egalitarian and grassroots style into the organization’s culture. SNCC focused less on high-profile leaders and more on local organizing over time instead of short-term projects. SNCC concentrated on voting rights and direct action for public access (the sit-in movement). Baker also was significantly involved in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the alternative to the Mississippi Democratic Party. Before MFDP, the Mississippi Democratic Party held segregated primaries that only allowed white voters to choose candidates. The MFDP went to the national Democratic convention in 1964 to protest its segregation and sought to deny recognition of the Mississippi Democratic Party delegates until it desegregated. The MFDP was not successful at unseating the Mississippi delegates but did result in a rule change that eventually was effective and was a significant contributor to party realignment.
By 1967, Ella Baker mainly had moved back to NYC and organized from there. Her health slowed her, but she was still an activist, maybe even more radical than earlier. She was involved in the Free Angela Davis movement, the Puerto Rican Independence movement, and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. She never traveled outside the US, but she was involved in many global movements in her later years.
Ella Baker is arguably one of the most important figures of the 20th century. She was involved in the senior leadership of most prominent civil rights organizations at one point or another and pushed them toward more egalitarian (both in gender and class) positions. Her vision for local organizing as the root of national change was less successful than she had hoped, but much of the strength of the civil rights era was built on her work of empowering local movements. Rosa Parks’ first trip outside of the Montgomery area was to a training conference in Atlanta organized by Ella Baker. Ella Baker identified, trained, and supported many of the relatively unknown leaders that work to build local movements. Baker’s decentralized approach has influenced the ideological rooting of the modern civil rights movement.
This is not a short book. The main text is nearly 400 pages, and the audiobook is almost 22 hours. But in many ways, I wanted more detail and more context.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Paul
- 04-18-23
Stirring Herstory
Ella Baker seems to have been left out of most of the accounts of the Civil Rights struggle and the Black Freedom Movements before and after it. But she was centrally there, just ignored or marginalized. Not here. This is where her contributions are collected and shared. Thank you, Barbara Ransby and also to Lisa Reneé Pitts for your impassioned narration.
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