Until the killing of Black men, Black
mothers’ sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the
killing of a White mother’s son—we who believe in freedom cannot rest
until this happens.
--Ella Baker
--Ella Baker
During this last week of Women’s
History Month, I wanted you to learn about Ella Baker, a transforming
but too-little-known woman and overpowering justice warrior for my
generation of civil rights activists. The quote above is from Ella Baker
50 years ago, and like so much about this visionary civil rights leader
it is still just as relevant today. She was talking about the murders
of civil rights movement workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and
Michael Schwerner, who disappeared together in Mississippi in June 1964,
and reacting to the fact that searchers sent to comb local rivers and
swamps to find the bodies of Chaney, who was Black, and Goodman and
Schwerner, who were White, also found the bodies of other missing Black
men for whom authorities had not bothered to search. Ella Baker was an
outspoken warrior against injustice and inequality her entire life, and
always, always unwilling to rest. Her words continue to be a rallying
cry for all of us who believe our nation still does not see and value
Black and White children’s lives the same way.
Sweet Honey in the Rock’s Bernice
Johnson Reagon featured these words in the stirring “Ella’s Song.” She
was one of hundreds of young people Ella Baker mentored during the civil
rights movement. I was one of them who first met Mrs. Baker during my
senior year at Spelman College in Atlanta. She was a staff member of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and was often a
powerful behind-the-scenes advisor to close colleagues like Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. Ella Baker believed in servant leadership and shared
leadership rather than charismatic leadership and encouraged young
people like me to find and lift our own voices and join them with
others. She was instrumental in founding the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and fought to make sure we retained our
own independent organization as students rather than simply becoming the
youth arm of the Dr. King-led SCLC. Julian Bond, Diane Nash, Bob Moses,
and many other fellow student activists and young activists were all
influenced by her example, counsel and convening and share a special
debt of reverence and gratitude. Ella Baker was tough and disciplined
and demanded the best of the young and older adults around her. She
understood that movement building was about more than protests and
meetings and speeches—it was hard, daily, persistent, and sacrificial
behind-the-scenes work. She was an institution builder and stressed the
importance of strong institutions that could last over time rather than
reliance on a single strong leader.
Ella Baker was born in 1903 in Norfolk,
Virginia. She had a strict mother, a warm and caring father, and a
large extended family of grandparents, uncles, and aunts who shared what
they had with the poor. She was a fighter and as a child beat up White
children who called her names. Since there was no schooling for Black
children beyond elementary years in her area, she went off to boarding
school at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, and was
valedictorian of her high school and college graduating classes. She
moved to Harlem, got caught up in its excitement, and went everywhere to
hear lectures and speeches and read in libraries to learn everything
she could. After working as a domestic and as a waitress, she got a job
with the Negro National News published by George Schuyler who
later recommended her for a job at the NAACP. She rapidly rose through
NAACP ranks. “Wherever she went,” her biographer and friend Joanne Grant
wrote in Ella Baker: Freedom Bound, “she created a whirlwind,
leaving a scatter of papers, notes, leaflets, church programs, and phone
numbers in her wake. . . She never let up her struggle to increase the
role of the rank and file.”
Ella Baker pushed for organizational
structure and rules in the NAACP just as she did later at SCLC and SNCC.
Ella Baker was the one who sat down with Bayard Rustin and Stanley
Levinson to discuss how to create a continuing movement out of the
Montgomery bus boycott, which led to SCLC’s formation. As the first
staff member hired for SCLC, it was Ella Baker who tried to put the new
organization in operating order so that Dr. King was not just a leader
who reacted to and jumped from one event to the next. She worked to give
SCLC the capacity to plan and implement action. And Ella Baker
convinced Dr. King to bring me and about 200 other Black college
students who had been arrested for engaging in sit-in protests to open
up lunch counters around the South to a meeting at her alma mater, Shaw
University. My first plane ride ever was from Atlanta to Raleigh for
that meeting. SNCC was the meeting’s result.
Ella Baker was fully aware of but
unintimidated by the men she worked with who devalued the advice of
women and sometimes resented her forcefulness, prodding, and
“mothering.” She made no special effort to be ingratiating. She labored
at SCLC as she had at the NAACP to raise money, conduct voter
registration drives, speak to citizens groups (sometimes ten times a
day), and travel to community after community to help people help
themselves. She warned against SCLC becoming “a cult of personality” for
Dr. King rather than a means of empowering others, and she eventually
left SCLC after deciding that movement building was more important than
the specific organization and personalities involved—another of her
lessons that is so relevant today.
At a gathering celebrating Ella Baker’s
75th birthday, Bob Moses called her the “Fundi,” the person in the
community who masters a craft with the help of the community and teaches
it to other people. Fundi became the title of a film on her
extraordinary life and work. Ella Baker died in 1986 on her 83rd
birthday. I remember her counsel as I think about sustaining and
strengthening the Children's Defense Fund’s mission today and future
tomorrow for the long haul struggle to create and maintain a level
playing field for every child. I learned from her the crucial importance
of training a successor generation of young servant-leaders
which has been a strong priority of CDF’s since its inception. Policies
are no better than the people who are implementing them and their
commitment to just treatment of children and the poor. I am so
proud that over 13,000 college students have gone through training at
CDF’s Ella Baker Child Policy Institute at the former Alex Haley Farm,
that more than 113,000 children have gone through the CDF Freedom
Schools® program with a sense of commitment to something beyond
themselves, and that many CDF alumni are doing wonderful public service
across the country. This is one way CDF honors her legacy along with
other great unsung women justice warriors like Fannie Lou Hamer, Unita
Blackwell, and Septima Clark who too few ever hear of but we all owe a
great debt of gratitude.
We also all honor Ella Baker by keeping her belief in freedom and equality alive until it becomes reality for every
mother’s child. In a nation where Black children are more than three
times as likely to be poor as White children; where Black babies are
more than twice as likely as White babies to die before their first
birthdays and Black children are twice as likely to die before their
18th birthdays as White children; where more than 80 percent of fourth
and eighth grade Black public school students cannot read or compute at
grade level and Black children are more than twice as likely to drop out
as White children; where gun violence is the leading cause of death
among Black children ages 1-19 and Black children and teens are nearly
five times more likely to die from gun violence than White children and
teens; and where Black mothers’ sons can be seen and treated as lethal
threats for wearing hoodies in the rain or refusing to turn their car
radios down, we who believe in freedom still cannot rest.