Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (review)

Ella Baker remains a compelling figure because of her confidence in the capacities of ordinary citizens, because of her persistence, her rejection of dogmas and of hierarchies of race, class, education, and gender, because of her passionate commitment to developing leadership in others, because of her willingness to sublimate her ego to her politics, because of her limitless confidence in young people, because of her insistence on principled and supportive human relationships—in short, because of the clarity of her commitment to democracy as both means and end. (Although to speak of radical democracy, as historian Larry Goodwyn points out, is to say one thing twice.) Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement is a most welcome addition to the resources available for learning about her and the tradition of social critique she exemplifies.

Ella Baker is an icon to many who were in the movements of the 1960s, especially to young people, anathema to a few of her colleagues in the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference ( SCLC), but largely unknown to the broader public. Until now we have had Joanne Grant's wonderful documentary, Fundi, as well as Grant's book, Freedom Bound, a personal memoir with the advantages and limitations that implies. Barbara Ransby gives us the first full-bore scholarly investigation of Miss Baker's life, based on meticulous combing of church records, oral histories, the FBI files on Miss Baker (dating back to the 1940s), the papers of several activist organizations, and Miss Baker's own papers.

I used to give a speech which began by claiming that Ella Baker invented the 1960s. That's not as crazy as it sounds. It was Baker who responded to the energy of the sit-ins by calling the meeting out of which grew the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ( SNCC), it was she who helped develop its distinctive democratic and antihierarchical ethos, its emphasis on community organizing and the development of local leadership. SNCC, to a degree that is still not widely appreciated, went on to shape the very idea of activism not only in the black struggle but in the other struggles that define that decade.

Simply listing the younger activists who say that working with Ella Baker was a formative experience would take a long time. That she had so much to give them was undoubtedly a function of the fact that she had managed to keep herself near the cutting edge of struggles for justice for half a century. Although Baker is best known for her work with the NAACP, SCLC, and SNCC, Ransby notes that she contributed to over three dozen organizations, including Harlem's Own Cooperative in the thirties, the American League Against War and Fascism and the American Labor Party, the National Committee to Abolish HUAC in the fifties, In Friendship, an organization that supported southern blacks fighting for the right to vote, also in the fifties, and the Puerto Rican Solidarity Committee and the Angela Davis Defense Committee in the seventies. It is a record of a socialist, of an internationalist, of a southern black woman who never lost touch with the practical concerns of everyday people. "Fundi," the title bestowed on her by Bob Moses, is Swahili for something like "the person who passes the best collective knowledge from one generation to the next," a bridge, a connector of persons, a role Miss Baker was well-suited to play and a role in which she delighted.

One of the great pleasures of reading this book is that Ransby has unearthed numerous previously unknown documents and speeches that give us more examples of Miss Baker's distinctive eloquence (about which she was quite ambivalent, as Ransby explains). Even so, Ransby doesn't rely on that voice as much as she might, sometimes paraphrasing material that would be more forceful...