African-American activist, Ella Baker (1903 – 1986) fought for civil rights and human rights for more than five decades. A supporter of collective action and the involvement of those concerned in the struggle, she is one of the most important women in the civil rights movement.
Descendant of slaves
Daughter of Georgiana and Blake Baker, Ella Josephine Baker was born on December 13, 1903 in Norfolk, Virginia, on the east coast of the United States. His father, working on a line of steamers, is often absent and it is his mother who raises him, with his older brother Blake Curtis and his younger sister Maggie. In a country in the throes of racial segregation, the three children grow up with their mother and their maternal grandmother, Josephine Elizabeth Ross, nicknamed Bet, who testifies to them of her life as a slave, daughter of the master of the plantation and exploited in the fields. Born into slavery, Ella's four grandparents suffered from it until its abolition in 1865, barely 38 years before the girl's birth.
Following the Civil War and Reconstruction, the period of racial segregation began in the United States, with laws aimed at hindering access to civil rights for African Americans and at segregating places and spaces as much as possible. public, public transport, schools, restaurants, hospitals, churches, performance halls and others. Ella and her companions grow up in this divided America, plagued by violence and discrimination. In 1910, during a riot, whites attacked black shipyard workers in Norfolk. Following this episode, Georgiana Baker decides to take her children to her hometown, near Littleton, North Carolina.
Ella attends segregated schools, including Shaw University in Raleigh. Not content to shine in her studies, she already reveals an assertive character and a thirst for justice and equality. She does not hesitate to stand up against school regulations that seem unfair to her, in particular its conservative dress code or the racism of its president. After graduating with flying colors in 1927, she moved to New York.
The beginnings of a militant commitment
In New York, Ella Baker continued this militant and political commitment that would run through her entire life. She first worked as an editorial assistant for the Negro National News . In 1931, she joined the Young Negroes Cooperative Leave founded by his friend George Schuyler and aimed at developing cooperative networks to support the economic development of African Americans; she will take over the management thereafter.
As part of the Worker's Education Project of the Works Progress Administration , a federal agency created during the New Deal, Ella teaches courses in particular on labor history and African history. In New York, she immersed herself in the intellectual, artistic, political and militant effervescence of the Harlem Renaissance. In contact with activists who for many will become her friends, she structures her political thought. For her, the struggle must emanate from the victims of oppression, be popular, collective, local and generalized at the same time.
Around this time, Ella married T. J. Roberts, whom she had met in college. She takes care to separate her private life and her militant action, to be considered as a full-fledged individual within the civil rights movement; she will not take her husband's name. The two will divorce in 1958.
With the NAACP
In 1938, Ella joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), one of the most influential African American civil rights organizations in the United States. In 1940, she became secretary of the association and traveled across the country to recruit new members, raise funds and set up local branches. She thus meets thousands of people, to whom she knows how to speak with sincerity and respect, and forms a large network of activists, particularly in the southern states. Her efficiency earned her the leadership of branches of the NAACP in 1943, becoming the most senior woman in the organization.
However, it is not the honors that interest Ella. Always convinced that the fight must come from below and that it is the shadow activists who make the strength of an organization, more than charismatic leaders, she pushes the leadership of the NAACP to decentralize its hierarchy, to to make more democratic and to leave more places to the militants. She insists, in particular, on the important place of young people and women within the organization. The latter, for being little or not represented within the management bodies, are often in the front line when it comes to organizing local actions. Later, she will testify:“You didn’t see me on television, you didn’t see news stories about me. The kind of role that I tried to play was to pick up pieces or put together pieces out of which I hoped organization might come. My theory is, strong people don't need strong leaders (You didn't see me on TV, you didn't hear stories about me. The role I was trying to play was to put pieces together to come out of organization. My theory, it's that strong people don't need strong leaders).
In 1946, Ella took time off from her responsibilities within the NAACP, to welcome her niece Jackie, whose mother could not take care of her; she remains a volunteer with the organization. However, the natural returns at a gallop:joining the New York branch of the NAACP, Ella campaigns for the desegregation of local schools and fights against police violence; in 1952, she became branch president. In parallel with the actions carried out, it works to make the hierarchy of the organization more flexible and to restore more power of action to local leaders and activists in the field.
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference
In 1957, after the Montgomery bus boycott campaign, Ella Baker traveled to Atlanta to discuss with leaders of the civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King Jr., the question of creating a local organization for continue on this path. From this momentum was born, in February, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference , the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, bringing together pastors and religious leaders around the founding principle of fighting for civil rights through nonviolent action.
Ella gets involved in the first events and actions of the brand new organization, demonstrating not only her organizational skills but also her ability to unite activists and earn their respect. Between 1958 and 1960, she served as acting executive director of the SCLC, waiting for the Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker to take over.
Her work within the SCLC will prove to be above all a source of frustration for Ella. Deprived of allies within an organization that leaves little room for women, she criticizes Martin Luther King for a certain distance with the field and with the people; she does not find there the democracy and the collective and participative action that are so dear to her. Of her experience with the SCLC, she will say:“There would never have been a place for me in the decision-making bodies of SCLC. Why ? First, I am a woman. Besides, I'm not a pastor” .
The student movement
Disagreeing with the model of organizing the struggle around charismatic figures and with little power in the hands of activists on the ground, Ella Baker sees in the student organizers Greensboro sit-ins, intended to desegregate the restaurants of the city. , an opportunity to question this model. The leaders of this association are indeed young, dynamic, little known. She convinces Martin Luther King to fund a conference to bring them together. While the latter would like them to found a student wing of the SCLC, Ella encourages them on the contrary to take matters into their own hands, to found their own association and to set up a participative democracy while being careful not to an activism that is too centered on leaders. Thus was born the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee .
The SNCC becomes an important organization in the Southern states, and Ella moves away from the SCLC to become one of their main advisors; she will notably be known by the nickname of “godmother of the SNCC”. Under the mentorship of Ella and others, the student organization SNCC reaches out to black sharecroppers and farmers who work in sometimes slave-like conditions. For Ella, everyone must be involved in the struggle, and especially those who are hardest hit by exploitation:according to her, the most oppressed "should be the ones who decide on the actions that they lead to free themselves from their oppression” .
Within the SNCC, Ella met and inspired many young people who later became important leaders of the civil rights movement, such as Diane Nash, Bernice Johnson Reagon and Stokely Carmichael. His advocacy for movements organized in participatory democracy extended, in the 1960s and 1970s, to other organizations and action groups. In the mid-1960s, members of the SNCC, faced with the violence sometimes encountered by its peaceful actions and police violence in general, turned to armed self-defense and more radical strategies. Ella, who says she herself cannot turn the other cheek, believes that the Black Power movement adopted by the SNCC is a reaction to the principles and modes of action of the major pacifist civil rights organizations, which it considers obsolete.
Multiple commitments
From 1962 to 1967, Ella Baker worked for the Southern Conference Educational Fund , an organization that promotes social justice, desegregation, and civil rights for African Americans, including through collaborative work between white and black activists. The organization works to educate white people in southern states about racism. Within the SCEF, Ella works in particular with Anne Braden, a white activist accused of being a communist. A socialist herself, she distrusts communism but is even more suspicious of accusations of communism, used to divide or discredit political opponents.
Ella will thus also support the activist Angela Davis, watched because of her membership of the American Communist Party, accused of having taken part in a hostage-taking and imprisoned; in 1972, she toured the country in support of the "Free Angela" campaign. The activist will finally be acquitted.
Beyond the United States, Ella is interested in issues of equality and decolonialism on a global scale. As early as the 1930s, she had thus opposed the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. She also supports the movement for the independence of Puerto Rico, and is committed against apartheid in South Africa. She is active in several women's associations for the defense of equality, peace and justice. The Third World Women’s Alliance , in particular, defends racialized women with an intersectional approach:against racism, sexism and classism.
Ella Baker died at the age of 83, in 1986, after more than fifty years of activism. She remains a major figure in the civil rights movement in the United States.