Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement by Barbara Ransby

Author:Barbara Ransby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2010-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

SETTING THE STAGE AND PLANTING THE SEEDS

The atmosphere on Shaw's campus that weekend was electric. The discussions were lively, and the mood was optimistic. For many of the students, it was not until the gathering in Raleigh that they fully appreciated the national significance of their local activities. They felt honored by the presence of Dr. King, whom they had watched on television or read about in the black and mainstream press. He was a hero for most black people in 1960, and his presence gave the neophyte activists a clear sense of their own contribution to the growing civil rights movement. Baker was content to use King's celebrity to attract young people to the meeting, but she was determined that they take away something more substantial. Most of the student activists had never heard of Ella Baker before they arrived. Yet she, more than King, became the decisive force in their collective political future. It was Baker, not King, who nurtured the student movement and helped to launch a new organization. It was Baker, not King, who offered the sit-in leaders a model of organizing and an approach to politics that they found consistent with their own experience and would find invaluable in the months and years to come.

Baker's imprint was all over the Raleigh meeting. She did not make any unilateral decisions, but she handled virtually all of the logistical details.5 She understood how important details were in shaping the character of an event like this, and she gave every task her utmost attention. She collected news clippings about sit-in protests in various cities and made profiles of the organizations and individuals involved for her own knowledge and for publicity purposes. The group that gathered at Shaw was an amorphous body that, at the outset, had the potential to take any number of political paths. Baker structured the meeting so that those who were politically engaged rather than those who claimed the label of “expert” would be at the center of the deliberations.

The first goal was to provide those who had been directly involved in the protests the opportunity to confer, compare notes, and brainstorm about future possibilities in private. Baker urged those in attendance to give southern students, who were disproportionately black and less politically experienced, the time and space to meet separately, setting the stage for them to be the principal framers of whatever organization might emerge. “The leadership for the South had to be a southern leadership,” Baker insisted. In her view, the sit-in leaders were on the front lines. They had taken the initiative and endured the violence. Therefore, they should retain the prerogative to structure and direct whatever organization emerged from the conference. It was a matter of self-determination, defined broadly. Ella Baker was wary of experienced leaders' tendency to move in and take control of locally initiated struggles because they saw themselves as more capable than the local folk. She had seen such dynamics again and again within the NAACP and SCLC. Baker was determined not to let this happen to the nascent sit-in movement.

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