Lighting the Fires of Freedom by Janet Dewart Bell

Author:Janet Dewart Bell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620973363
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2018-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

Ella Baker’s Influence

Ella Baker was amazing. I’ll say to teachers, “You may never know the impact you’re making on some of your students.” Because for me, Ms. Baker was that influential teacher. I watched how Ms. Baker moved, and first of all, she always wanted to know, “Who are your people?” I saw her do that in meetings. Part of that was she wanted to know what connections you had. What is your community? How were you raised? So when she does this to someone like Ruth Howard Chambers, she finds out that Ruth Howard’s people were from Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Ruth may have grown up in Washington, D.C., but she spent her summers with relatives in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. And that’s where Miss Baker grew up, in that same area. So she said, “Oh, who’s your—” and they connect that way. So, it was always, “Who are your people” when she meets you.

The kind of history that she transfers and translates to us—the contacts she gives us as we’re doing our work—was key. The reason Bob Moses goes to Amzie Moore in McComb, Mississippi, is because Ms. Baker says, “You need to go to Amzie if this is what you’re looking for.” Then Amzie says, “I’m not ready for you here, you need to go to southwest Mississippi. C. C. Bryant is ready for you.” It’s this passing on of the knowledge but also the contacts that come, particularly with the black World War II vets.

Ms. Baker was kind of a behind-the-scenes leader, unless she saw things going wrong, in which case she would come to the floor. In one meeting that I took minutes for, she’s asking the director of SNCC’s northern support office in the Atlanta office about saying Dick Gregory had said that he would do fundraising for us, but he needed to be paid. Now, Harry Belafonte gave us five parties. He said he would ask for no money and go to five parties on Long Island. My sister, Carita, as a matter of fact, coordinated those parties out of SNCC’s New York office. But Belafonte didn’t charge. Dick Gregory though, at the beginning of ’64, is saying he’ll give us that, but he wants $10,000. It could have been for his transportation and all that, but the problem that Ms. Baker then raises is, “Well, if we do this, what kind of precedent does it set? Because other people are doing pro bono work. There are a lot of folks who are just giving this to us. So what does that mean?”*

She also steps in and speaks to the SNCC people who are working with high school kids through the Atlanta Project. She asked, “Do the parents always know when their kids are going to jail? You have got to make sure that you contact the parents so they have a relationship with you.”

So she’s stepping in at these places. She’s talking to SNCC people who are organizing the Atlanta University Center,

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