Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement

"Barbara Ransby's great book on Ella Baker is a grand example of that."

"There are so many great biographies in Black women’s history; this is one of the best. Barbara Ransby really excavates the life of Ella Baker, who was instrumental to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which was one of the most important civil rights organizations of the 1960s. SNCC was an interracial organization run by young activists, many of whom were Black. Barbara Ransby is a gifted writer. She teases through the many complexities of Ella Baker’s life to help the reader see someone who was carefully thinking about how to improve the conditions of Black people, someone who had respect for younger activists and who pushed group-centered leadership. It’s a powerful story about how Ella Baker became a mentor for these students. Barbara Ransby shows that she inspired them, she listened to them and she supported them, but she never tried to control what they did. She played the nurturing and respectful role of a mentor and thereby catapulted a movement that played a key role in passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In a nutshell, what I think is so great about this particular book is that it provides context for understanding the Black Lives Matter movement. The Black Lives Matter movement adopts a model of group-centered leadership, which comes out of Ella Baker’s teaching. So, we see the influence of this historical figure, long after her death."

"My focus when thinking about these books was teaching in the undergraduate classroom and what I would want my undergraduate students to come out of the class with. My interest sits primarily at the intersection of religion and the civil rights movement, which heavily influenced my choice of books. This book on Ella Baker is important because it allows students and readers to understand the Black freedom struggle and the civil rights movement, and it’s shot through the life of a phenomenal human being, who really was an important person. At every single significant struggle for Black freedom and civil rights in this country, Ella Baker was there. So it gives students an opportunity to read a book about a woman, and how she understood the struggle for equal rights, and how her gender shaped her experience. It’s important because what Ella Baker does, and what the book helps us to understand, is the organizing tradition within the civil rights movement. The focus is often on the mobilizing tradition, because of people like Martin Luther King and the massively important marches and mobilizing campaigns that he led. But Ella Baker was committed to the organizing tradition, organizing local communities and helping them to achieve leadership and work on their own problems, which they understood better than anybody else, and to developing sustainable solutions. “My focus when thinking about these books was teaching in the undergraduate classroom” So I really enjoy that book for teaching because it illustrates this organizing tradition. There’s a phenomenal chapter in the book that shows what happened when the organizing tradition and commitments of Ella Baker came up against the mobilizing tradition and ideas of Martin Luther King. That gives you a chance to show students what happens when these different ideas of leadership and different strategies of social change come head to head, in turn allowing students to think about their contemporary moment and contemporary efforts to engineer social change and to think about which strategies in terms of organizing or mobilizing would best fit their concerns today. Yes, she was the Interim Executive Director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. But she was an interim director. Despite her credentials and abilities and gifts, she was never given the title of full-time executive director, primarily because she was a woman, and most of the male clergy within the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were uncomfortable with a woman having the title of executive director and having a woman in leadership. She tried to push Martin Luther King to think more about organizing local communities to make sure that people didn’t look for a savior, but recognized that they themselves had the ability to organize locally for change. When the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was being formed, she was there and she encouraged them not to join the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They were going to become an auxiliary organization to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but she really pushed them not to do that, to be independent and more concerned with local organizing. If you talk to individuals like John Lewis and others who were part of SNCC, in the early days they all confess their indebtedness to Ella Baker, and the way that she helped them to think about social change and local organizing. I think the moment that most of us think about in this regard is 1964, Freedom Summer, when SNCC went to the South and Mississippi and organized people locally to vote and to work on their conditions in Mississippi. That’s one of the most outstanding local organizing campaigns that we know about in the civil rights movement."